《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

Let's be clear up front: today's story is a satirical piece, but quite a lot of what it pokes fun at is real.

Britain's Economist has a workplace column called Bartleby that chronicles the many torments of office life.

This week's column took the form of a fictional internal company email, titled "Sleep like a pro".

It's written in the voice of an earnest, slightly overconfident manager reporting to colleagues on the results of a sleep project.

The background: a senior executive named Stew is passionate about his own sleep routine and is always telling people how important rest is.

On top of that, research from other industries has long shown that lack of sleep has many negative effects.

So the company rolled out a series of pilot projects for its team in Canada and its global legal function, aiming to leave every colleague energized.

The first project, called "Waking Hours", had volunteers try pre-industrial sleep patterns.

They got up at two in the morning, worked for two hours, then went back for a second sleep.

This premise wasn't invented out of thin air.

Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekirch found more than five hundred references in diaries, court records and medical texts.

These records show that before industrialization, people often slept a "first sleep", woke for about an hour in the middle of the night to pray, chat or do some chores, then slept a "second sleep".

He argues that as home and street lighting spread, this segmented sleep gradually disappeared, and by the 1920s almost nobody mentioned it any more.

But at the company in the column, history was far less romantic.

Some employees adapted to the new rhythm; others could never get back to sleep and were so exhausted their brains stopped working.

One salesperson began his second sleep halfway through a client meeting, and a big order was lost just like that.

Even more unexpected was the chain reaction.

Senior people started sending emails and work messages at 3am, so younger employees who weren't in the trial began getting up earlier to reply promptly.

They got busy before dawn, which in turn pushed even more colleagues to start work early.

Once that cascade effect is taken into account, sleep quality across the company went down, not up.

The idea was to help everyone sleep more; instead, everyone slept less.

The second project sent participants all kinds of sleep trackers: rings, wristbands, watches — you name it.

One-fifth of colleagues couldn't get the devices to work at all; the email said this showed a worrying level of tech skills, and the company is launching a separate training course to fix it.

The real problem was the data.

Many people felt perfectly rested — until their device told them last night had been terrible.

Others were told they'd slept like a baby, when in fact they'd lain awake all night worrying about the quality of their sleep.

This part, too, has a basis in reality.

In 2017, sleep researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago described several patients in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

They were so fixated on the scores from their trackers that the anxiety kept them awake, and they even distrusted normal results from hospital sleep studies.

The researchers gave the condition a name, which in Chinese you could render as "perfect-sleep anxiety disorder".

Back to the column.

The data also showed that many employees were sleeping during the day, and that the entire senior leadership team seemed to have nodded off together in a recent meeting.

The email's only comment: of course that cannot be true.

Other small interventions had mixed results.

Several colleagues wearing eye masks woke in the night thinking they had been kidnapped, and got a terrible fright.

One petite colleague was pinned under a weighted blanket, couldn't crawl out, and in the end had to be freed by the fire brigade.

The magnesium trial went worse: due to an error, people were told to take far more than the recommended dose, and since magnesium works as a laxative, the trial had to be voided.

People found lavender spray and herbal tea pleasant enough, but they didn't noticeably help sleep.

A colleague in the legal team accidentally sprayed lavender in his own face and went to hospital for a check-up; related litigation is ongoing.

So the email solemnly recommends: never again use lawyers as guinea pigs in any pilot project.

The sleep tips colleagues shared on their own, however, were very practical — like listening to audio versions of World Bank publications, athletes' post-match interviews, and every investor conference call ever recorded.

Finally, the conclusion.

Don't force people to take part in this kind of thing; provide sleep aids to whoever needs them, and letting colleagues swap sleep advice informally is a good idea too.

But tracking employees' behavior in the dead of night invades their privacy, and imposing a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone doesn't work.

As for rolling it out across the company, the email's final line is: this is something we should definitely sleep on first.

Once you've stopped laughing, think about it: if your company started caring about your sleep, would you be glad, or nervous?