You Need More Sleep. What Should You Do If You Can’t Get It?

We all know we need to be sleeping more, for the sake of our health and our effectiveness at work. But for those inevitable times when you can’t get enough sleep, you need to have a few tricks up your sleeve to mitigate the risks involved in working while sleepy. For example, you can strategize which tasks you will engage in while sleep-deprived. Tasks that are routine and require no creativity are less vulnerable to the harmful effects of sleep deprivation. Also look for ways to rely more heavily on other people. This may mean delegating more when you are sleep-deprived or relying more heavily on the advice of colleagues, mentors, or subject matter experts. If there’s no way to lean more heavily on others in the moment, solicit informal audits of your work after-the-fact to at least try to catch any mistakes you made before they snowball into major problems. Managing these risks is far better than the alternative of mindlessly stumbling through the minefield of working while sleep-deprived.