When to Sleep On It

This is just a brilliant article — one of those that deeply resonated with me from the moment I read it and it goes well with that brilliant management/productivity tool so abhorred by corporations — “napping.”

Apparently, recent research is showing that sleeping on a problem is better than trying to consciously solve it.

In other words, when faced with a complex issue, if time allows, the best method to use is to spend a night to sleep on it, and then make a decision the following day.

Why does this work?

Apparently, the processes that the conscious mind uses are quite limited, and likely to introduce irrelevant information that produces poor decision-making. The unconscious mind, however, is a much better instrument and if given the chance, will do a better job.

According to the author, Ap Dijksterhuis, “The moral? Use your unconscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision — but don’t try to analyze the information. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it for a day or two. Whatever your intuitions then tell you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.”

As someone who majored in Operations Research (and got 2 degrees in the subject) it seems to throw a huge spanner in the works of the profession… after all, we studied things like “decision theory” and “non-linear optimization” in order to bring more rational, WIDE -AWAKE thinking into the process.

I cannot remember a single thing from any of those hi-falutin’ courses.

I think it’s just much easier to sleep on it, and maybe while I’m sleeping my subconscious mind can run around and access the algorithms and heuristics I spent years mastering… that way, perhaps I can justify the thousands of dollars spent on an Ivy-League education, while still making good decisions.

I just might not make a good corporate employee, however, given the high importance I appear to give to sleeping (see my prior post on Nigger-itis.)

The relevant article from the Harvard Business Review List of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 can be found here (as Idea #9).

Harvard Business Review (ed)


Is it just me, or has the shine paled on the institution that the Harvard Business Review once was?

It used to be that the articles were weighty, and almost all were worth reading, if only to broaden one’s understanding. I vividly recall reading it from cover to cover, learning about obscure ideas in unfamiliar industries that just might apply to my own. It seemed to regularly give me food for thought, and pointers to great books with powerful ideas that I could use.

Since it moved to a monthly format, however, things changed to my mind.

More lightweight stuff-started to make its way in, and in my field there is a lot of it, consisting of little more than re-treaded ideas said just a little differently. I have found the good articles to be more rare, and the best reading to come from the short “forethought” articles that track new trends, and new ideas. I used to think that the articles were the place to find new ideas, but not so anymore…

Of course, could just be that I am a bit older than when I first started reading the journal in my early twenties. Being forty does change a few things, and it might be that I have been around the block a bit, and heard some of the same ideas over and over.

Maybe it is just a bit of both.