There have been a couple of interesting things out this week about sleep and personal energy. Tony Schwartz writes in his HBR blog that all leaders should be taking powernaps and urging their people to do likewise. And on TED, there is a new video from Jessa Gamble on our natural body clocks – it’s only a few minutes long and it’s worth watching just to hear what she says about what happens to crabs when you take them to a different time zone…

I can’t think of any aspect of the world of work where the science and what we actually do are further apart. Some great articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review from the likes of Charles Czeisler and Robert Stickgold on the value of sleep for our health, productivity, cognitive ability and effectiveness. And yet so much of what we do diminishes the amount and quality of sleep.

I am forever coming across people who admit to checking their BlackBerry when it buzzes in the middle of the night. But rather than stigmatise people that don’t get enough sleep, we do the opposite and celebrate people who work to the point of exhaustion. I recently met Marcus de Guingand of Metronaps and he tells me that in Japan, there is a concept called inemuri (literally translated as “sleeping while present”) which high-powered executives feign in meetings to show that they are so hard-working that they can’t help nodding off.

Tony Schwartz commends Google for putting a few pods in their office (supplied by Metronaps, I believe) but we are years away, I fear, from looking dispassionately at the science and re-thinking the way we work.