Napping at work. A company that gets it. | Hacker News Reader

Napping at work. A company that gets it.

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79 pointsaspirant35 comments

I work at Tencent in China and here more than half of the people take a nap in the midday. We have a lunchbreak from 12 to 14h and around 13h the lights get turned off and lots of people get their foldable beds out (others just use q cushion and sleep in their chair) and sleep for 30 minutes to 1 hour in their cubicle. Personally I still don't take a nap, probably still my western inhibitions :)

I hope you don't mind if I ask you a few questions about work in China as it may be relevant to me in the future:

1) I've heard China often has 6-day workweeks as a norm, is this true? And likewise that official time off (vacation time for instance) is hard to come by? 2) Do you work on the technical side of things? If so how did you get the position? (I work in consulting and right now we don't actually have any clients in China).

1) as far as I know, 5-day workweeks are the norm. I don't know companies that require you to work 6 days. The boss of course doesn't mind if you come in the weekend, but it's not required.

2) we have quite a lot of holidays. Everyone has the national days off + some annual holidays that you can use whenever you want.

I'm a programmer yes. I took part in an innovation contest, got the job that way. Was lucky :) Working in a Chinese company is not easy, it's better if you first learn at least some Chinese.

Couches are awesome, but I think beds send the wrong message of "you should always be at work". We have a mattress laying around that I'm considering moving to the GazeHawk office (when we find one), mostly as a joke, but nothing says "creepy" quite like a bed in the corner of an office.

Seems like a hammock might be a good alternative.

Ah, what happened to curling up under your desk to catch a few winks?

My uncle has worked for the Swedish patent office for his entire life. He has a mattress under his desk and takes a nap every afternoon.

I'll tell you what happened: Open plan offices.

I would rather work for a company who's philosophy was to work really hard for 8 hours then go home. Having worked on video games for 15 years, I strongly believe that somebody working 12 hours a day is no more productive that a solid 8 hours.

When you are in the office 12 hours a day you just start goofing off, your personal email breaks become longer, you chit chat around the water cooler longer, you might even feel the need to take a nap.

Work hard, work fast, then go home to your family and loved ones to rest and enjoy the rest of your day.

Google seems to attack this problem from a variety of expensive angles [1], [2]. But in the end, the simplest thing sounds best to me [3].

[1] http://glassbox-design.com/2009/google-goes-aquatic-photos-i...

[2] http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/17/another-reason-to-want-a-...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/6ceia/google_naps_phot...

The problem with napping at work is that a lot of people don't know how to nap properly (how long to sleep? when to nap? etc) so it might actually cause people to feel worse, more tired, or groggy.

How long is enough? About 30 minutes is considered sufficient, according to a recent NASA study that assumes most Americans miss a little more of an hour of sleep every night.

In my experience, just starting to doze off is enough for a refresher. This may take all of 20-30 minutes in itself, I can often go to sleep at night faster than I can fall asleep during the day. Salvatore Dali was famously said to have held a spoon in his hand suspended above a metal pan and when he fell asleep the spoon would drop and wake him with its sound. Just lying down for a period with eyes shut and little external stimulus is a great refresher for me. Finding the time/place to do this is the hardest part.

I totally agree with this. I had to make a three hour drive last night, and just a half hour into it I was feeling very tired. I pulled off at the first rest stop, put the seat back, and just laid there relaxing for about ten minutes. I didn't even fall asleep. I then got out of the car, moved around a bit to get the blood pumping, and made the rest of the drive without feeling tired at all.

I feel that some absolute time limits for napping is a no no for me. I grab my keys to my other hand and I extend that hand over the bed. It takes some time to get used to the idea of having the keys on your hand while trying to nap, but soon enough you'll forget you're holding the keys on your hand. Eventually you'll drop the keys at the exact moment you doze off and that's a clear sign from yourself that you've hit the time limit of a nap. There's no need to set your alarm clock for a 20-30min nap.

The alarm will inevitably go off during the wrong moment.

If you try to keep something in your hands (which will make a sound once fallen) you'll get the alarm at the exact moment you strive for.

I take a 20 minute nap almost every day, and I'm quite sure that I'm much more productive because of it!

I'm looking for a new gig in Paris now... my chances of getting hired would probably be infinitesimal if one of my interview questions was: Do you allow naps?

On the other hand if someone said yes, I'm petty sure I'd love the job!

Dali didn't do that to refresh himself. Rather he was seeking the brief moment of heightened creativity one gets immediately after waking up and feeling slightly disoriented. So I wouldn't recommend it if your goal is to straighten out your head :)

I appreciate the sentiment, and generally think it's a really great idea and gesture, but personally, when I nap, I end up feeling 10x worse when I wake up than when I started. I can rarely think of a time when I've taken a nap and not regretted it.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't encourage companies to do this.

Depends on when you wake. It is possible to nap and awaken feeling better than before, but you generally need a timer of some sort.

I agree for the most part. The main times that naps have been refreshing were when I was hungover and tired from the previous night's activities.

I find that 20-minute naps leave me feeling refreshed for another few hours. 1-hour naps leave me tired.

I've gotten to where I can even do a 20-minute nap while sort of aware of my environment. It's quite useful when you're in public (like on a train) and can't really sleep, but need some rest, or out with friends and not really ready to call it a night.

How old are you? I used to be unable to take short naps and would always feel terrible on waking. Sometime in my late 20s-early 30s this completely changed and I have since grown to love the 15-20 minute nap. Likely there was some kind of shift in brain chemistry; it would be interesting to know what it was.

I have had the same experience. When I was a teenager, my day would be ruined if I took a nap. I would feel really tired, and a bit nauseous. Nowadays a short nap is almost never wrong, but I can still feel a little bit off sometimes.

I'm 31, so I'm hoping that switch comes soon. I've always envied people who could nap. =)

As the author gets, this kind of napping isn't just about sleep or even rest. It's intimately related to creativity.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

(Gaston Bachelard)

I'd like to see a photo of the couch! Mainly to see where it is (noise wise), and whether you can close a door on a couch room and signal it as being occupied?

My employer allows napping, but it takes a bit of work to fit it into our agile development style. Obviously, it's poor form to nap during a scrum. You might miss something important, or you might awaken refreshed but with your name on all the crappy assignments. Most problematic is pair napping. What if they other guy/gal isn't sleepy? We try to pair based on skill level and circadian rhythm, but not all employers go to that length. When done correctly, pair napping is much more productive. The other day I was having a pre-nap daydream and my partner (I'll call her "Lisa" so you won't think it was a dude) suggested that I close my eyes. I did so, and I fell asleep a lot sooner. Sometimes a quick suggestion like that will spare you minutes or hours of wasted wakefulness.

That's funny--I always thought a company that "gets it" would tell you to go home and get some sleep for your own health and for the sake of the quality of the work you're doing.

I used to suffer from really bad headaches (which have since stopped since I've gone caffeine free), so having a bed at work was a job prerequisite. At big companies you had to check in with the nurse to use the bed. The startup I worked for put in a bed, so others used it for napping. It always seemed to make any general press article about the company, implying something about the dot-com mentaility...

I think it's awesome that they allow naps - I'd probably get 25-50% more done if I could take naps during the day.

But one thing I'm wondering about is, how do you manage expectations about how much is appropriate and create the culture that it's okay to sleep in the middle of the day? In a lot of places I imagine this could get out of hand where people who don't nap might think less of those that do.

Less than 25 minutes you should feel refreshed, more than that you may feel groggy. Even if you only go into "standby" mode and don't actually sleep, the downtime typically leaves you feeling refreshed.

I worked a show with 70+ hour weeks for several months & those 17 minute (best length for me for some reason) power naps were the only thing that kept me sane.

I tried to convince my boss of this a few years back... no dice yet.. ;)

In fact, we have a sign in the coffee lounge (diagrammed in art deco style with an idealized picture of a lady holding a coffee cup) that says, "Coffee! You can sleep when you're dead!"

Is this couch in a separate room somewhere? To me a couch is usually put in a communal area that is usually populated.

If thats the case it would be both hard to have a nap and also really quite creepy.

At my university's engineering building, people sleep on the lounge couches all the time.

My solution to sleep problems: http://itunes.apple.com/app/sleep-cycle-alarm-clock/id320606...

Really, it's nothing but a company who has hired employees who "get it".

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