Your mother was wrong! That old statement our mothers told us about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is wrong. An ounce of prevention isn’t worth a pound of cure; an ounce of prevention is worth its weight in gold.
You perform preventive maintenance on your car why not on yourself? Athletes get this concept and the business world can stand to benefit by taking a page out of the athlete’s book. Athletes perform preventive maintenance or pre-hab as they call it (activities to aid in recovery and injury prevention). But you don’t have to be a sports athlete (or an Oldsmobile) to benefit from routine maintenance and pre-hab. If you are in the workforce” you’re an athlete. You are a corporate athlete. If you don’t think so you need to start considering yourself one.
Two major factors in performance are: sleep and recovery. These both encompass all 24 hours of your workday. As our to-do list items pile up and demands on us mount” we have a tendency to meet those demands by cutting back on sleep. Ironically loss of sleep decreases our performance power and increases the probability of mistakes and accidents.
In 2011, researchers at Stanford University performed a sleep study on the basketball team. They tested their shooting percentage and sprint times in the preseason under normal sleep conditions. Then at the midpoint of the season, the players were required to get a minimum of eight hours of sleep nightly. (There was no maximum limit, the players could sleep as much as they wanted as long as it was more than eight hours nightly.) At the study’s conclusion free-throw shooting accuracy improved by an average of nine percent, three-point field goal accuracy improved by an average of 9.5 percent, and their sprint times decreased by about five percent.
I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to basketball players, it relates to any of us. If you got more sleep your closing rate on sales or your accuracy in completing reports might nine percent. Your time spent finishing tasks would probably decrease by roughly that amount too.
DID YOU KNOW?
That sleep deprivation has been cited as a significant factor in virtually every major human disaster in the past few decades? Including the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986.
Investigators in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the Exxon Valdez oil tanker grounding cited sleep deprivation as a factor impacting the decision making of key people making the decisions on board both vessels.