《经济学人》的玩笑邮件：一家公司想让员工睡好觉，结果全乱套了

Today's story is a joke, but there are two true things inside it.

Britain's Economist magazine has a column that writes specifically about the workplace.

This week, the columnist wrote a fake internal company email.

The company is made up and so is the email, yet many office workers will find it strangely familiar.

The email opens by saying that a senior executive at the company takes sleep very seriously.

The company believes that when employees sleep well, they perform well.

So the company ran some sleep trials with its team in Canada and its legal department worldwide.

The first trial had volunteers sleep the way people did before the industrial age.

They had to get up at two in the morning, work for two hours, then go back for a second sleep.

It sounds strange, but the history behind it is real.

An American historian found through his research that many people used to sleep in two parts each night.

They'd sleep the first sleep until the middle of the night, wake for about an hour, do a few things, then have a second sleep.

In old diaries and books, he found more than five hundred such records.

Later, as lights in homes and on streets grew brighter, people went to bed later and later.

By about a hundred years ago, the idea of sleeping twice a night had all but disappeared.

Back to the fake company.

Some people adapted to this rhythm; others could never get back to sleep and were too exhausted to speak.

One salesperson slipped into his second sleep during a client meeting, and a big deal was lost just like that.

Even more troublesome was the chain reaction.

Senior managers began sending emails and messages at three a.m., so younger employees who weren't even in the trial had to get up early to reply.

Their early starts then pushed even more colleagues to start work early.

Once you add it all up, sleep quality across the whole company actually went down.

The second trial gave employees all kinds of sleep-tracking devices — rings, wristbands and watches.

One in five colleagues simply couldn't get the devices to work.

Those who could use them were under plenty of stress too.

Many people felt well rested — until the device told them they'd slept terribly the night before.

There's real research on this as well.

In 2017, American sleep doctors published a paper saying some of their patients were exactly like this.

They gave the problem a name, which translates roughly as "perfect-sleep anxiety".

It means that some people care so much about the numbers on their devices that the harder they try to sleep well, the worse they sleep.

In the fake company, the device data also showed the entire leadership team asleep in one meeting.

The company's position: of course that can't possibly be true.

The other small measures had mixed results.

Some people woke up in the night wearing eye masks and thought they'd been kidnapped.

One petite colleague was pinned under a heavy blanket and couldn't get out; in the end the fire brigade rescued her.

A colleague in legal accidentally sprayed himself in the face, went to hospital, and the matter is still in litigation.

So the email said: in future, don't use lawyers in trials.

At the end, the email made a few recommendations.

But before the recommendations, let's look back for a moment.

This email is a joke, but two things in it are true.

One is that people used to sleep twice a night.

The other is that caring too much about sleep numbers can make people sleep worse.

Right, now for the email's recommendations.

Don't force employees to take part in this kind of thing; whoever needs sleep aids can have them.

Tracking employees in the middle of the night is too much of an invasion of privacy.

Making everyone use the same method doesn't work either.

As for whether to roll it out across the whole company, the email's last line was: let's sleep on it.

Do you think a company should have a say in its employees' sleep?