Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work

Does it have to be this way? Can't resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the office-but at what cost? In "Sleeping with Your Smartphone," Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work. The good news is that this doesn't require a grand organizational makeover or buy-in from the CEO. All it takes is collaboration between you and your team-working together and making small, doable changes. What started as an experiment with a six-person team at The Boston Consulting Group-one of the world's elite management consulting firms-triggered a global initiative that eventually spanned more than nine hundred BCG teams in thirty countries across five continents. These teams confronted their nonstop workweeks and changed the way they worked, becoming more efficient and effective. The result? Employees were more satisfied with their work-life balance and with their work in general. And the firm was better able to recruit and retain employees. Clients also benefited-often in unexpected ways. In this engaging book, Perlow takes you inside BCG to witness the challenges and benefits of disconnecting. She provides a step-by-step guide to introducing change on your team-by establishing a collective goal, encouraging open dialogue, ensuring leadership support-and then spreading change to the rest of your firm. If you and your colleagues are grappling with the "always on" problem, it's time to disconnect-and start reading.

About The Author
Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School. She currently teaches in the Program for Leadership Development and runs a seminar on qualitative, inductive research.

Professor Perlow's research focuses on the micro-dynamics of work. She seeks to understand what really happens at work i.e., what do people do all day, how do they spend their time, with whom do they interact and with what consequences for organizations and individuals. Through her work, she identifies ways organizations can change their practices to the benefit of both the organization's productivity and the individuals' personal lives. She also engages with organizations trying to make these changes and studies the change process itself.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Perlow was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Business School. She received her B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from MIT. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a management consultant.

She is the author of the books Finding Time (Cornell University Press, 1997) and When You Say No But Mean Yes (Crown, 2003).