Sleeping with Your Smartphone

Ebook

How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work

If you"re like most of today"s busy professionals, then you"re always "on." You can"t go an hour without checking your Blackberry, iPhone, or the smart device of your choice. Surely this keeps you in tune with your team, but at what cost?

In Sleeping with Your Blackberry, Harvard Business School professor and ethnographer Leslie Perlow delves into the new connected world of work and challenges the notion that you must be constantly plugged in to be successful. Furthermore, her work and her research suggests, this 24/7 mentality is actually counterproductive.

Based on her latest research, the author recommends a radical yet simple idea: take "disconnected" time off and both individual and team members will benefit.

In Sleeping with your Blackberry, Perlow tells the story of how a simple experiment she initiated at Boston Consulting Group, an elite and competitive organization, gave way to a powerful yet manageable process that actually changed the status quo at the company. The benefits of this experiment on "disconnecting" were extensive and changed the micro-dynamics of the way people there worked. In the book, she lays out the process and offers instructions on how to replicate it within your own organization. Details range from identifying a collective goal to ensuring leadership support to dealing with resistance to the process to finally socializing your findings to the rest of the organization.

For anyone who works with people—team leaders, managers, senior leaders, HR professionals—and is anxiously awaiting a solution to the "always on" problem, look no further. Sleeping with your Blackberry reveals the power we all have to change the norms and expectations that guide behavior in the workplace.