However, making decisions while deprived of sleep hurts productivity. A National Sleep Foundation study found that people who work more than 60 hours a week make almost 10 percent more mistakes on the job than people who work less. Entrepreneurs Dan Harley and Carlton Smith learned this the hard way. They were putting together a startup business plan while working full-time jobs when their attorneys told them they needed to quickly come up with a name for their company and incorporate it.
"We stayed up all weekend long tossing out ideas and finally agreed on one just before midnight on Sunday," says Harley. After going through the incorporation process, registering the URL and ordering business cards and letterhead, they realized their new company name could easily be confused with a prominent media company. "We spent the next weekend doing the exact same thing, and finally came up with Focint," he says. "The second sleep-deprived decision wound up working out a lot better than the first."
A former employee of British e-commerce apparel company Boo.com blames sleep deprivation for one major crash during the site's testing period: "This database administrator had been working 17 hour days for over a month, and at 11 p.m. in London he erased the site's entire product database." The launch had already been delayed, and site testing screeched to a halt for one more day.
One's business plan and disposition aren't the only things that suffer when workers are sleep deprived. Andrew Brown, a former investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter found that working long hours affected his health. Brown, who now works as a VC for Austin Ventures (dossier) in Austin, Texas, says "My immune system was completely run down when I was there, so I was frequently sick. Others in my group were often just as fatigued. When one of us would catch a cold, it would usually spread like wildfire."
To workers intent on ignoring their exhaustion, Maas says, "make sure you finish all your projects now because you're not going to be alive very long." Maas cites a recent study from the University of Chicago in which researchers found that healthy young adult males getting four hours of sleep for six consecutive nights showed medical disorders similar to those of senior citizens. "We know that sleep deprivation does two things: It shortens your life and it slows you down mentally," says Maas. "Neither of those effects will be particularly helpful for business leaders."
Be that as it may, many tech companies won't be changing any time soon, says Green. "In any high-tech position, you're going to find the same sorts of demands for your time," he says. "Unless you change what you want to do professionally, you're going to find it's hard to make sleep a priority."
Jordan Matus is a New York-based writer.
