WORK
Sleeping with Your Smartphone
Perlow's 2012 landmark — the book that introduced Predictable Time Off and codified the structural case against always-on culture.
Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) is the book through which Perlow introduced her BCG findings to the broader management audience and established the collective-intervention framework that has shaped organizational responses to connectivity for more than a decade. The title refers to the specific behavior Perlow found most diagnostic: the consultants who kept their phones on their nightstands, checking them before sleep and upon waking, had surrendered the final boundary that separated rest from work. The book traces the full BCG experiment from initial skepticism through iterative implementation to the surprising quantitative and qualitative results, making the case that structured disconnection is not a concession to worker wellbeing but a strategic enhancement of organizational performance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central argument is structural rather than therapeutic. Perlow is not writing a wellness manual or prescribing individual mindfulness. She is documenting an empirical finding about organizational performance: teams that implemented collective disconnection