Sleeping with Your Smartphone

Book excerpt: 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.