Tillmann Prüfer is a member of the editor-in-chief of “Zeit-Magazin”.
In the past, managers always liked to talk about how little sleep they needed, in fact that they were never actually in the land of dreams, but always in full business.
I once met a top manager who told me how he came up with his recipe for success. A consultant gave him the tip for life: just get up an hour earlier every day. With an hour early in the office, he is an hour ahead of the competition. Do that for almost a whole working day in the week ahead of the competition. In the year you are a good month ahead of the competition. And if you keep up with that, after twelve years you will have a whole year ahead of the competition. Because the competition falls asleep, and when they wake up, they can only watch all the innovations that have been put together.
Of course, the whole thing only works if the competition goes to bed early – and you don’t go to sleep in front of the competition.
So that means that in total you worked an hour longer and slept an hour less. In today’s management circles, you wouldn’t get very far with this theory, because today managers like to emphasize that they absolutely need their sleep. Because if you haven’t slept enough, then you can’t make good decisions, you are nervous and fall out earlier, it is emphasized.
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In “Wirtschaftswoche” I read about Angela Merkel’s negotiating strategy, who also does not seem to be a friend of excessive sleep. She used to simply negotiate her opponent into unconsciousness. At the end of 2020, she is said to have been negotiating for 21 hours at a time in Brussels about stricter climate targets and the Corona aid fund. While it was still fully there, the negotiating partners collapsed at some point.
Stay awake with lots of adrenaline in your blood
The sleep doctor Ingo Fietze recommended in the article that this should not be copied. One is still reasonably ready to perform until two or three o’clock in the morning, but after that there is a “shift in the shaft”. Staying awake for a long time only works with a correspondingly high amount of adrenaline in the blood. So you need a very exciting life all the time, then you can make it with little sleep. Otherwise it takes six hours, at least.
Doctors advise taking a power nap more often. When you feel tired, you close your eyes for a moment and put your head on the table top. A few minutes are apparently enough to be fit again.
Unfortunately, power napping is culturally not particularly popular in Germany. It is not intended that people feel tired in the middle of the working day. In our open-plan office landscape there are no places to take a nap.
So only adrenaline helps. Maybe from the shock when you discover that the competition has another innovation at the start.
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