International Law

Not Just Me Who?s Sleepy

By Stan

So now your average American is working expat hours. Nasty business, that. On the other hand, what’s wrong with sleeping at your desk, particularly after lunch? Seems to work well for my colleagues.

The sad thing is that the U.S. mentality of "work ’til you collapse" seems to be catching on all around the world, with only some moderate backlash in Latin America. I haven’t seen a Chinese colleague taking a post-lunch nap on his desk for years. More’s the pity - I think it actually helped productivity. Do you really want some sleepy lawyer drafting your Joint Venture Contract after she has ingested a huge meal and can barely stay awake?

I didn’t think so.

I feel like such a slacker these days.  A couple floors down from me is our award-winning DLA Piper Venture Capital team, which has trained itself through rigorous sleep deprivation to function adequately on 2 1/2 hours of sleep. Then one floor down from them, you’ve got McKinsey, which fires any employee who is caught sleeping at all (even at home - I hear that they have special monitoring technology or something.)

OK, I shouldn’t make fun of my colleagues. I am concerned, however, that all these hard-working folks are making the rest of us look bad and driving us to exhaustion. Good way to get clients, perhaps, but I’m not too keen on the impending heart attack.

Oh well, back to work.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on March 04, 2008 (boomark / email).