Can’t Fall Asleep? Do a Nighttime Audit
Almost half the people you’ll run into today are suffering from some level of sleep deprivation. This is largely because we don’t know when (or how) to call it a night. Tethered to our devices, work more often than not spills into the precious time that we need to decompress and prepare for a good night’s sleep.
Ron Friedman, author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace, suggests that we conduct a “nighttime audit” to better understand where we’re going wrong:
Do a nighttime audit of how you spend your time after work. For one or two evenings, don’t try to change anything—simply log everything that happens from the moment you arrive home until you go to bed. What you may discover is that instead of eliminating activities that you enjoy and are keeping you up late (say, watching television between 10:30 and 11:00), you can start doing them earlier by cutting back on something unproductive that’s eating up your time earlier on (like mindlessly scanning Facebook between 8:30 and 9:00).
It’s not a matter of giving things up, so much as simply rescheduling them. Avoid burnout by understanding how to set yourself up for the expert-recommended minimum 30 minutes that you need to wind down before attempting to sleep.
