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Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work Hardcover – May 8, 2012
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Can’t resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the officebut at what cost?
In Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work.
The good news is that this doesn’t require a grand organizational makeover or buy-in from the CEO. All it takes is collaboration between you and your teamworking together and making small, doable changes.
What started as an experiment with a six-person team at The Boston Consulting Groupone of the world’s elite management consulting firmstriggered a global initiative that eventually spanned more than nine hundred BCG teams in thirty countries across five continents. These teams confronted their nonstop workweeks and changed the way they worked, becoming more efficient and effective.
The result? Employees were more satisfied with their work-life balance and with their work in general. And the firm was better able to recruit and retain employees. Clients also benefitedoften in unexpected ways.
In this engaging book, Perlow takes you inside BCG to witness the challenges and benefits of disconnecting. She provides a step-by-step guide to introducing change on your teamby establishing a collective goal, encouraging open dialogue, ensuring leadership supportand then spreading change to the rest of your firm.
If you and your colleagues are grappling with the always on” problem, it’s time to disconnectand start reading.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarvard Business Review Press
- Publication dateMay 8, 2012
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-109781422144046
- ISBN-13978-1422144046
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Editorial Reviews
Review
The great thing about Harvard Business School Professor Perlow's book is that she makes it clear that companies can actually change the way they work and break the 24/7 habit.” Huffington Post
Our refusal to break from work often actually reduces our effectiveness and can even lead to burnout. How can you learn to let go? In Sleeping with your Smartphone, Leslie Perlow suggests that part of a leader’s job is to teach his or her team to manage boundaries between work and private life. Disconnecting really is the solution: the workaholic consultants at Boston Consulting Group are proof. They made the decision to disconnect from work at given times, reviewed their work methods, and found ways to work and live better!” Business Digest (France)
"A well-presented book with lots of practical tips for the workaholics! Even if change cannot be achieved at the organisation level you still get the sense that by making some small changes to how you work you can achieve a better home-work life balance." BCS The Chartered Institute for IT
Perlow proves that we do not have to be hostages to our everyday devices - advice that is needed now more than ever.” Business Executive
So if you are looking for a way to be more effective as a manager, or team leader, turn off your phone and read Sleeping with Your Smartphone.” The Chronicle Herald
Sleeping with Your Smartphone, should be required reading for any senior executive concerned about the dysfunctionality of "always-on" connectivity.” The Observer (UK)
Sleeping with Your Smartphone provides excellent, proven principles for how to bring change into an existing corporate culture and how to empower employees to join in the fight to make the company better.” Examiner.com
If you’re looking for a book title that captures the frazzled, anxious life of executives who are too worried about work to ever unplug, you probably couldn’t do better than Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow’s new book, Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” The Globe and Mail
Leslie Perlow makes a strong case that you do not have to sleep with your smartphone, at least not every night.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Sleeping With Your Smartphone will enlighten any team trying to sync among themselves while questioning the worthwhile of on-demand accessibility.” Business Insider
ADVANCE PRAISE for Sleeping with Your Smartphone:
Professionals of all kinds complain about the difficulty of balancing life and work, but no one has had much insight about how to fix the problem until Leslie Perlow went out and did it. This book should be required reading for every consultant, manager, HR professional, and working parent with a demanding career.” Chip Heath, coauthor, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Leslie Perlow has given us a modern masterpiece, the only book that really shows how to harness those irresistible electronic intruders that now invade our lives. Sleeping with Your Smartphone is packed with evidence and specific, useful steps for building productive and creative workplaces that bolster rather than destroy our sanity and humanity.” Robert I. Sutton, professor, Stanford University; author, Good Boss, Bad Boss
Leslie Perlow, one of today’s leading experts in how organizations really function, has applied her prowess to a question that bedevils every professional: what impact does working harder and longer have on our achievements and our happiness? The answers in this marvelous book reveal that keeping our lives in balance is more important than we ever imaginedfor ourselves and our organizations.” Clayton M. Christensen, author, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Who doesn’t want to build more effective and engaged teams? Sleeping with Your Smartphone illustrates counterintuitive insights and practical actions to get it all done’ in our multitasking, hyperconnected world. The book shows how teams can improve work-life balance and increase company engagement while upping their outputall with a few small, doable steps.” Sara LaPorta, Senior Vice President, PepsiCo
Sleeping with Your Smartphone challenges the current belief that 24/7 is required for success and that we are hostages to our devices. Leslie Perlow’s strategy is brilliant because it proves that we can improve the way we live and work by disconnecting.” Kristin C. Peck, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Business Development & Innovation, Pfizer Inc.
Truly inspiring! Sleeping with Your Smartphone shows that even in the most high-pressure environments, it is possible to disconnect and become more productive as a result. I am looking forward to implementing the strategy with my own teams.” Deborah Ellinger, former President, Restoration Hardware
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 1422144046
- Publisher : Harvard Business Review Press; American First edition (May 8, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781422144046
- ISBN-13 : 978-1422144046
- Item Weight : 1.13 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,151,308 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,991 in Time Management (Books)
- #4,416 in Workplace Culture (Books)
- #5,228 in Human Resources & Personnel Management (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School. Her goal is to identify ways organizations can alter their work practices to benefit both productivity and employees’ well-being. She works closely with organizations to implement these changes – and study their impact. Trained as an ethnographer, she is a keen observer of the micro-dynamics of work – how people spend their time and with whom they interact – and the consequences for organizations and individuals.
Perlow is the author of two previous books, Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices (1997) and When You Say Yes But Mean No: How Silencing Conflict Wrecks Relationships and Companies… and What You Can Do about It (2003). She has also published numerous articles in journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science and the Harvard Business Review. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a management consultant with Corporate Decisions, Inc. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in economics and received her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from MIT. Perlow lives in Newton, Mass. with her husband and their three young daughters, who serve as a daily reminder of all that is involved in successfully integrating work and family.
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2012If you have long suspected that the inability to turn off is affecting our ability to turn on then this book will help you guide your team on a more productive path. Perlow draws out the actual small, practical steps you can take to enable your team to work better, not just more. And if you have ever woken up and actually found your phone in your hand--you had better find the time to read this right away.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2012The author is missing the point, the title is misleading. If you are looking to shift priorities and excel at work while still having happy, uninterrupted personal time on a daily basis, this book will not help you. This book is about giving people one 'night' (as in, you worked that day, but truly 'clock out' at 6pm) off per week, and it's something that must be done at the team or organizational level. One night per week is not enough for a real personal life, and, most workers who are sleeping with their smartphones don't have control of their team and/or organization. If you are an executive looking for a way to help your team to stop sleeping with their smart phones one day per week, this might be moderately useful for you. I found it to be highly disappointing and wish I could return a kindle book :(
- Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2015Interesting book and some valuable insights.....
- Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2013The author has written this with incredible depth and detail. A good perspective on how much work must have gone in to change the culture. To some extent its repetitive and could have been covered in half the content.
As for the actual content, the book gave me insight into a few areas:
1. Management consultants may on paper make a lot of money but divided up by the number of hours worked, time away from family, and interference with personal life on weekdays and weekends, its no better than any other white collar job.
2. It is common sense that the more distractions you have the less productive you are and less focus you have. Same reason you don't have TVs in a cockpit of a plane or inside an operating room. The book gives accurate empirical evidence to support this.
3. Most consulting firms work in the same manner as the one mentioned in the book: if this is how UN-smartly they work, with resulting type of moral problems, distractions, productivity to go with it, I am not sure I would want their perspective if my Fortune 100 company ever needed one.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2012Ignore the title of this book. It serves only the publisher's marketing purposes. Focus instead on the subtitle: "How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work." As is also true of most other business books, the subtitle is informative. It reveals why Leslie Perlow wrote the book. Clearly, she agrees with Charles Duhigg's observation in his book, The Power of Habit: ""We now know why habits emerge, how they change, and the science behind their mechanics. We know how to break them into parts and rebuild them to our specifications. We know how to make people eat less, exercise more, work more efficiently, and live healthier lives. Transforming a habit isn't necessarily easy or quick. It isn't always simple. But it is possible. And now we know why."
In Perlow's book, the smartphone is not the problem nor is [begin italics] how [end italics] the smartphone is used. Its use (actually abuse) is a symptom of the root problem: A mindset that ignores or under-appreciates the nature and extent of what can be controlled in terms of, for example, setting priorities, allocating resources, managing time, and renewing energy. Duhigg asserts - and I agree -- that we must create a better habit for changing habits just as Clay Christensen urges us to think more innovatively about innovation and Jon Katzenberg urges us to change how we think about change.
What Perlow offers in this book is a non-nonsense, practical, results-driven process by which to turn off electronically, while improving the work that is done. She calls the process PTO "because - at the core, when people work together to create `predictable time off' [PTO], people, teams, and ultimately the organization all stand to benefit" as do, I presume to add, an organization's past, current, and prospective customers. Also, establishing and then sustaining a PTO culture will make the organization significantly more attractive to the people it hopes to obtain in what is indeed a "war for talent."
The specifics of the PTO process are best revealed in context, within the narrative, with a real-world frame-of-reference that Perlow so carefully establishes for them. However, I do want to cite a few of the dozens of passages that caught my eye:
o "The [Initial] Transformation" (Pages 31-33)
o "Two Teams: A Study in Contrasts (54-58)
o "The Cycle of Transparency" (67-68)
o "The Benefits of Openness" (75-77)
o "Eliminating Bad Intensity" (95-96)
o "The Perils of Resistant Leaders" (117120)
o "Getting Started: Guidelines for Team Members" (156-158)
o "Diffusing Throughout our Organization (177-178)
o "Going Forward with Facilitation" and "Practices of effective Facilitation" (194-196)
o "Toward a More Humane Workplace" (204-205)
No brief commentary such as this could possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of the information, insights, and wisdom that Leslie Perlow shares in this volume. That said, I hasten to suggest that it would be a fool's errand for a reader to attempt to apply everything learned from the material provided. My suggestion is to re-read the book slowly and carefully (especially Chapters 10-12, Part IV), underlining the key passages you may have missed the first time, then draw up a list of 2-5 strategic objectives (no fewer than three, no more than five) that the PTO process can help your organization to achieve. Next, review the material in the book that is most relevant to what specifically must be done to achieve the objectives. Game on!
Top reviews from other countries
- IAN PRICEReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2013
4.0 out of 5 stars Sleeping with your Smartphone
I am still reading , having first read a few pages in a Barnes & Noble back in the summer and it will make a difference .