Sleeping with Your Smart Phone Lib/E: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work

by Leslie A. Perlow

Does it have to be this way?

Can’t resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the office—but 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 team—working together and making small, doable changes.

What started as an experiment with a six-person team at The Boston Consulting Group—one of the world’s elite management consulting firms—triggered 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 benefited—often 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 team—by establishing a collective goal, encouraging open dialogue, ensuring leadership support—and 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 disconnect—and start reading.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Productivity, Self Help, Technology, Sociology, Management

Audio CD

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Britany · Rating 1 out of 5]

When the head of your division at work hands you a book, you read it.

I do actually sleep with my smartphone (Is there something wrong with that? It sleeps on my passenger side under a pillow facedown on silent) so I was interested in learning some helpful tips or life lessons from this title. However, this entire book was about a study that Harvard Business conducted with the Boston Consulting Group. They wanted to prove by taking PTO (Predictive Time Off) one night a week, would improve better work/life balance and create a better loyalty to the company.

I think this premise works with the right group and the right company, but certainly will not accomplish the same results for everyone. It was interesting to read about, but I was hoping for so much more. I think this book should be re-titled as the title suggests something something completely different than what I took away after finishing it.

[Charlice · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book is misleading, which I believe has contributed to its lackluster ratings here. This is not a book about breaking your own smartphone habit. I can only imagine that the publisher thought it would be more marketable that way. Certainly, it will make people pick up the book, but what they will find is that the book is about a change initiative at Boston Consulting Group that was initiated by the author, a professor at Harvard Business School. For those of us interested in work-life issues, gender, and organizational change, the research is fascinating and inspiring. I'd recommend the book to academics and to practitioners who do work in these areas. "Regular" people might find some good ideas in here as well, but only if they have the clout and/or courage to start asking for this kind of change in their own organizations. These are not tactics that can be implemented by isolated individuals.

[eva]

These are for my class look away

[Heidi Wiechert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perlow worked with a large consulting business in Boston to improve the work/life balance of their employees with great success. I understand the benefits of reducing the stress and improving the work quality of these overworked consultants, but my thoughts for pretty much the whole book ran like- why did folks consent to work 65-70 hour weeks in the first place? Perlow does a good job of explaining the reasons, but I still felt badly for the whole system rather than applauding the small changes. I feel like there needs to be a cultural change so that these types of work expectations are not even occurring in the first place and not just in one business- more like across the board.

I have a friend who lives in Europe who said that he was talking to an executive about European work habits. The executive said that if he was struggling so badly at work that he needed to work weekends just to keep up, that that would be a cause of embarrassment for him, not bragging rights. It feels like things are backwards in the United States.

So, Sleeping with Your Smartphone does address some of these issues, but I don't feel like it gets to the heart of the problem.

[Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is not very good for two reasons: first, it is dated (not the author’s fault) and second, it is poorly organized.

The author runs a study in the early 2010’s trying to get members of the Boston Consulting Group to disconnect from their devices and reconnect with their lives, and they find that this made them happier or something. That is implied, but I did not but 12% of the way because the book is poorly organized.

This is just a scientific study and would have warranted an interesting magazine article. But because the author wanted to sell it as a short book, they kept front-loading other stuff, the way they started the study, the resistance to them carrying out the study. None of that was all that interesting, and it detracted from the book.

The author is not an interesting writer, and it felt like I was reading a dull case study churned out by yet another dull MBA, which I was. This is one of those books where you lose nothing by reading the synopsis.

[Jaci · Rating 2 out of 5]

In an English course we talked about the effects of smartphones usage, so this book was mentioned by the readings we went through. Of course it caught my attention and I wanted to read it immediately.
Overall, the book provides good information about how using a cellphone too much can affect your daily activities. If you want to change the bad habit of scrolling, taping, and even sleeping with your phone, this book might help you.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audio book and while it was different than what I expected I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was expecting a humorous book about how people really do sleep with their smart phones and how to regain control of your life. Instead this book is about a long-term study of PTO which means Predictable Time Off rather than Paid Time Off at one of the best known consulting groups, BCG, Boston Consulting Group which has a reputation (as do the other consulting agencies) of burning through associates and employees, even partners, due to the work hours and being always on.

I like the idea of Predictable Time Off and may try to implement it with my own team because we get involved with projects that devour our time and we are also "always on" to serve our clients.

To summarize the book, Predictable Time Off involves one night off per week where other team mates cover or answer client requests and also comes with feedback which helps improve work life balance and client deliverables which did not suffer during this project. Implementing PTO requires the involvement of each team member and a facilitator and requires honest and open feed back.

I highly recommend this book.

[Gulshan B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometime in 2019, I had read an article in The Atlantic, about what the ever increasing work schedules of our generation were doing to our quality of life and to work-life balance. It lamented the rise in working hours, without a comparable rise in a sense of achievement or fulfillment, that should (have) come with so much work.

It cited sources including the essential “On The Clock”, by the rather incomparable Emily Guendelsberger, and this book, the almost-seminal “Sleeping with Your Smartphone”, by the Harvard Business School Professor Leslie A. Perlow.

Like many other such works, this is a recapitulation of the work Perlow did with an entity from the non-academic world, in this case, BCG. There are few other names that command the respect and admiration that BCG does. The depiction of the near-absence of work-life balance that the book starts off with is as real and as authentic as it gets.

I’ve been in the industry for almost two decades, and I could identify with most of the consultants, team leaders and weekly travelers who Perlow is attempting to guide and lead to better shores. The struggle is real, and while there are obvious literary simplifications that the book ends up taking, the overall abject misery of their late nights and weekends is worth your empathy, more than your respect.

The book identifies and proposes PTO (not paid TO, but Predictable Time Off) as a starting point towards changing what she calls the BCG mindset. The best part of any such treatise is the real life examples and identifiable situations that are enumerated - and the text delivers on that aspect. In spades. There are examples on literally every single page. There are characters I (and anyone who has ever lived the Mon-Thur lifestyle, no matter how briefly) could easily relate to, or draw parallels with, in terms of someone I used to know, or can’t try hard enough to forget (!).

While I could empathize with the obvious portions that are simplified for the purposes of documentation, at times I felt as if there could have been a little more detail devoted, and depths ascribed to the struggles. No real outlier is ever identified. Anyone who opposes PTO is eventually shown as coming around, and while there’s resistance shown, reading this book you may be pardoned to come away believing that they saw the light fairly easily, if not quickly. It cannot always have been this easy, surely there must have been what is described in exactly one case as a blowup. Even in that case, the opposition sort of acquiesced.

To say the world of Management Consulting is extremely competitive would be an understatement. Tempers flare, decisions collide, while reputations are aggressively built and fiercely defended, over years and engagements. Change, irrespective of what benefits it brings, is never easily acceptable, and in a Partnership like BCG, it might have been realistically more plausible to see some outliers, through and through. None are shown. Not that that’s impossible, just makes for a breeze of a read, and one feels there was some clever editing at work in at least a few places.

The appendix and those detailed footnotes got back the half-star I’d docked for that slight oversight.

All minor gripes aside, the book is an obvious homage to the sheer persistence and tenacity of these consultants and their leaders, whose job is - quite literally - telling others how to do their jobs. Sure they live a high-flying life, and are highly paid, they also pay in terms of personal time, family time, weekends and holidays - all of which get martyred in the name of “that’s what it takes”, and “everyone is doing it”, both of which are addressed in the book, repeatedly from multiple directions and in many ways.

Eventually, the book, and indeed Ms Perlow, make a good case for bringing about a change to a mindset and a change in a way of living and working. While each adoption attempt of this methodology will obviously find their own set of unique problems and workarounds that this book can hardly predict, all those adopters will also find that PTO is actually symbolic of what it will take to make meaningful and lasting change, that’s going to end up driving not just employee morale but customer satisfaction.

I once read somewhere - if a company should have to choose between keeping its customers happy or keeping its employees happy, it should without doubt choose keeping its employees happy. Happy employees will naturally and obviously keep the customer happy. This book is another authentic evidence of that very maxim.

While its ironic that I’m feverishly typing this review on a weekend sitting by the pool as my kids splash around (!) in the water, I count this as a leisure activity, and so I guess I’m not breaking the PTO rule doing this!

[Nick]

This book is a well-written case study about what happened when a high-powered consulting firm (BCG) embraced the idea of working as a team to give people one-night-off-per-week. That's one night without the cell phone umbilical cord connection to the office and the work team. It seems incredible that we need a book to tell us how to do this, but Perlow has done the research and presented his case fairly and well.

But the problem now is not that people need one night off from work. It's that work and life have no separation, and the cell phone has become essential to both. So we can no longer tell the difference between the two. Work and life have merged into a composite beast, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, that isn't quite human and isn't very attractive.

Mr. Perlow, the new question for you is, how do we escape the trap we're in now?

[Vikas Pissay · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title is a misnomer. The book speaks about a concept called PTO (Predictable Time Off) that was experimented with a team in BCG. It is essentially a case study which outlines the success of the experiment. The concept and the content by no means is poor. But unless you are in a super high pressure work environment, you might find it hard to relate or even extract the hidden essence of the book. If you are interested to read something in lines of the title, try 'Deep Work', 'Digital Minimalism' and 'A World Without Email'.

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title of this book is misleading. This book is the story of Boston Consulting Group and their efforts to use technology less and be less "on" all the time. Basically having work life balance. It started off ok, but the second half of the book was repeatitive and gained nothing new.

[James Marotta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is basically a research paper that is well adapted to a readable format about a concept of incorporating a priority of work-life balance to a corporation known for a 24/7 work mentality. It's worth reading for ideas about work culture and team building.

[Amoena · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here’s a summary of the book: take time off, have honest discussions regularly.

[Bill Wheeler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book but started to get a little repetitive towards the end.

[Cavendishmk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the BCG stories of how PTO was implemented and what was learned. harder to "see" tabulated results in an audiobook...

[Luigi Benetton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Key takeaway: by opening discussion on one work environment problem, like predictable time off, companies with retention issues may make work life better for employees thinking of quitting

[Victor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Should have let go of this book long before I finished it. It just revolves around the same 3 points regarding predictable time off. Also, it is quite dated and I doubt it applies to most other careers. But it's still good to know.

Ultimately the book is not what you think it is. It deals more with the overworking culture than the culture of going to bed while browsing social media. I was totally misled by the title, though it was not wrong.

[Mark Steed · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not about managing SmartPhone useage; it is about the steps that an organisation can take to improve the efficiency of how teams work, one by-product of which was that employees achieved a better work-life balance.
On one level it is the heart-warming story of how it took a Harvard Business School professor to get a group of highly paid workaholic consultants (Boston Consulting Group BCG) to turn their undoubted organisational talents inwards to achieve the simple goal of having one 'predictable night off' a week.
In essence there were two components to the 'Predictable Time Off' (PTO) project:
1) A collective goal of Predictable time off
2) Space for Structured Dialogue
Interestingly, the value of PTO project was not that the employees ended up with more quality free-time (although in most cases that did happen), rather that the process itself fostered a mindset that challenged the status quo - challenging long-established ways of doing things and exploring new ones. The PTO process was a vehicle to change the culture of the organisation by opening up new methods of communication within project teams. PTO was an indirect way "to get people to challenge their beliefs about what the work requires as well as to cause people to actually make changes to how they do their work." (p.129).
Reflecting on the four years of the project, the author writes,
"What we have done at BCG is break the cycle of responsiveness and create a new system where all the components are now congruent around a new culture focused on getting the work done in ways that minimise the bad intensity and maximize individual's control." p.203
As one BCG partner summed it up,
"The value of PTO is in fighting that assumption that work-life balance and effective case teams are mutually exclusive. Because they are not." p.205
The obvious problem with this research project is that it is based around an acknowledged extreme of organisational behaviour where working away from home four nights a week is their form of norm, so people working in gentler contexts will have to translate accordingly.
The book is in the overly repetitive style characteristic of many American business books, taking a simple message and story and milking it for all it's worth to the point that it justifies publication as a book, rather than as a pamphlet or magazine article.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a whim at the library. It had a silly title and cover, and yes, they totally worked to grab my attention.

This book is written mostly for a business audience, for those who use their smartphones continually for work and feel that they must continue to do so to stay ahead professionally. I thought there might be some interesting parallels between this and medical school, and hoped I might find some ideas for dealing with the constant pressure in med school to always be doing something and working.

The book's main idea is to describe an experiment done by a team from Harvard Business School at Boston Consulting Group. Employees at BCG were accustomed to working long days, often on the road, and being available essentially at all times via email/phone. The experiment was designed to give team members one night off per week and see if they could maintain their work level to the client's satisfaction. Rather than addressing things that individuals could do to take control of their schedules or "turn off" from their phones, it looked at changes that could be made in the corporate culture to facilitate people taking time off. So, there were a few ideas that I think I will find helpful, but otherwise this book is best geared toward people in management/leadership positions.

Personally, it made me think more about how I use my time and prioritize my activities. I tend to take a chunk of work that needs to be done and plow through it, hoping to finish it (which rarely happens). Taking a more proactive approach (which is explored in the book), I should rather plan the most important thing or two to get done, work on that, and try to fit the others in later if I can (and not worry if I can't).

The book focuses a lot on how a team can work together to achieve a common goal. In this case, it was that each team member have a night off each week, but the author spends a lot of time talking about the process by which they made that happen and the necessary elements for change in that setting. I think it would be a very good read for someone working with (or especially leading) a team that is having trouble with that, or who feels their team may benefit from having more open dialogue between members.

[Amanda Whitfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. I like the idea behind this book, but unless you are working in this environment, it's not worth the read. Even if you aren't, this 24/7 culture is evident.

I don't think it was worth an entire book. A blog series, sure, but not a whole book. This change is not easy, but I think it's necessary because no one should be always "on". Doing good work doesn't equate to always working, it equates to working efficiently.

People part of this culture think, "They are going to promote the person who is cranking." "I would rather check my emails on my time off and know what is going on, than be caught off guard with an "Oh my god, Tad this is blowing up phone call."

I am always "on" and I found I am better focused when I am not always checking my e-mail—when I take the time to get ready in the morning without reading all of the problems of the day in between showering. I have worked for entrepreneurs directly and they are always working. Always. If they can't be reached, people will freak out and call three times. If not on one number, can they try an alternate number. People literally go crazy when someone cannot be reached for a few hours or an entire day. It's very strange. This is also true for dating. If you don't respond right away, people wonder. I hate that people think that you are always available. I feel that in order to do good work, you cannot always be available. You need to focus.

[Gemma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read, not only for anyone who feels the need to always be "on" at work, but anyone who manages people. The simple goal of having one predictable night off (PTO) for the consultants at Boston Consulting Group seemed impossible but its pursuit lead to a new way of thinking & working. It changed group dynamics & produced a more creative, cohesive & superior performing teams; with the added perk of giving people the opportunity to improve their work life balance the idea was embraced by those challenged with adopting the change. This books demonstrates that change is possible in any culture as long as there is committment to trying to make it happen and that everyone to feels secure in raising issues no matter what they are. This is, of course a lot easier said than done but this book shows how it happened in one organisation and charts both their successes and failures in their quest for change.

[Eileen Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an ok read. It was the description behind some research with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where a Harvard leadership group tried to assist tam members to be more productive yet to also take some time off. Each team member was was required to take one evening off and to leave the office by 5 and not do email or work. The team was to cover for each individual that took off. Of course they found more team community and a better quality if life and team members shared their personal stores more to create better team conditions. A bit technical but a good read. WIsh they had created more suggestions to put the research to use.

[Jorge Reyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Estupendo libro, sustentado en una rigurosa investigación de L. Perlow.
Perlow, desde su asignatura en la cátedra de Harvard ha demostrado gran intuición para la gestión operativa y del factor humano dentro de la empresa.
La presente investigación, redactada de una manera estructurada y "agradable", tiene un gran valor para el capital humano, gestión, comunicación y productividad, buscando que la empresa esté centrada en la persona.
Si acaso deja fuera algo tan importante como los motivos trascendentales, me parece que esta investigación es un excelente punto de partida.
Mi twitter es @emorar

[Latasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Title and book jacket are entirely misleading. This is an extended review of a "business model" experiment where they try to give employees one night off a week at a busy consulting firm. These people work 65+ hours a week, have no time for social lives, and are trying to find work-life balance. Doesn't have much to do with smart phones, aside from not allowing workers to do work on their nights off... That's about it. It's a great case study if you manage a group or business and have issues with work-life balance, but not if you're just interested in smart phone addiction.

[Allisonperkel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing wasn't the best however the ideas - whoa. Professor Perlow did some amazing research and BCG was willing to let her experiment on their staff. The results are impressive. Anyone who manages a team should read this book and the two main ideas: share a common stretch (non work) goal and have structured, open dialog around the team/work/life/goal make complete sense. This isn't a silver bullet and it will not be easy but it is another tool to help a manager grow and grow her team.

[Barbara Harris Marshall]

Don't let the title confuse you. A well-known consulting firm and a Harvard professor work together to assist the company and find out how to keep the best employees who had been fleeing the ship. The solutions seem very matter-of-fact, but in an industry that is pretty much cut throat, there are not that many who think working together will benefit each one. Perlow shows the ups and downs of the process that seems to work for large companies. I'm just grateful I'm in a small company.

[Ron Felder]

Started reading this book to help me deal with work/life balance issues at my previous job. After I decided to leave for another position, this was less of a problem. I have decided to pause reading this book for a while, so that I can catch on other books i need to read. the concept introduced is interesting ad the story is okay, so I will come back to this in a few months.

[Dan Tasse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought it would be about smartphones/technology more, but it was more about 24/7 work cultures, and how even having a little guaranteed time off is really beneficial to people's quality of life. (and doesn't hurt work either.) Simple message, well presented.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good read for consultants, but may have a limited audience.

[Tahnee Lacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read as I work at BCG and enjoy psychology, but overly repetitive.