In 2012 Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School published Sleeping with Your Smartphone. In her survey of about 1,600 managers and professionals, 70 percent checked their smartphone within an hour of getting up. “26 percent confessed to sleeping with their smartphones.”
“Our respondents were caught in what we have come to call the cycle of responsiveness.” Those who do not keep up “risk being branded as less committed to their work.”
At the Boston Consulting Group, Perlow tested planned, predictable time off for consultants. After four years more than nine hundred teams in thirty countries had taken part.