Getting Disconnected…is sleep really important?

WORDS: Chris Nyst www.nystlegal.com.au/blog PHOTOGRAPHY Lifestyle Image: Ron Lach @pexels.com, Portrait Photography - Brian Usher - [email protected]

Some of history’s most successful people reportedly worked almost around-the-clock, getting very little after-hours “me time” and, some would say, nowhere near enough actual sleep. The great Italian Renaissance polymath, Leonardo Da Vinci is said to have toiled night and day with no more than a quick cat nap, here and there, to keep his creative juices flowing. Napoleon Bonaparte conquered the armies of Europe with no more than four hours kip a night, and America’s great Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, not only wrote the whole US Declaration of Independence, but even invented such essentials as the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and the glass harmonica, all on no more than a few hours’ sleep. According to The New York Times, the celebrated American inventor and businessman, Thomas Edison, who got about three hours shut-eye a night, thought sleeping was “a heritage from our cave days,” and dismissed it as a complete waste of his time.

Maybe he was right. According to historical records, one man managed to live half his life without any sleep at all. In 1915, Paul Kern, a Hungarian soldier in World War 1, was shot in the head by a Russian soldier. The bullet removed part of his brain, but it didn’t kill him. But after waking up in a Spanish hospital, although he went on to live for another 28 years, Kern never again slept a single wink. The curious case still baffles medical experts, who emphatically contend sleep is essential to life.  Who knows? Certainly, at the moment the whole Internet is awash with photos of the buff body of the superfit, 40-year-old Japanese entrepreneur, Daisuke Hori, an irritatingly svelte-looking chap who insists he has slept only half an hour every day for the past 12 years. Mr Hori, who founded the Japan Short Sleepers Training Association in 2016, has taught thousands of students how to sleep less and work more efficiently.

To each his own, I guess. But it’s not my go.

Unlike the unfortunate Paul Kern, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Emperor Napoleon, I need my beauty sleep. A full, uninterrupted, eight hours a night of it, absolute minimum. Even as a young university student, cramming for end-of-year exams in the Law Library, I would often line up a row of chairs, stack a few volumes of leather-bound law reports at one end for a pillow, and then stretch out for a comfortable nap, just to ensure I was getting my full daily quota of zeds.

A few years later, as a fledgling lawyer plying my profession in the criminal courts, I was convinced the whole Queensland Police Force was assiduously conspiring to deny me the sleep I needed and so richly deserved. In those more robust times, it seemed like every police operation got wrapped up outside normal office hours, either late at night or in the wee, wee hours of the morning. So, when desperate clients found themselves in need of urgent help, it was rarely between nine and five. In those days, if you wanted to work in that space, you were on call 24-hours a day.

The Australian Government’s latest flagship in workplace reform is the brand-new concept known as the Right to Disconnect. It means that when the boss dials your number any time outside of working hours, there’s no need to take the call. In fact, the boss themself could land in hot water just for trying it on. From 26 August 2024, workers at businesses with more than 15 employees don’t have to monitor, read or respond to any attempted contact from their employer, or a third party, outside of business hours, unless their failure to do so is clearly unreasonable, as in the case of a work-related emergency. If they ignore the boss’s call after hours, not only can’t they be sacked or reprimanded for doing so, but their boss could face a fine of up to $18,000 for making the call in the first place. And the same right to disconnect will apply to smaller businesses from 22 August next year.

“Just as people don’t get paid 24 hours a day,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced, in ushering in the new rules, “They don’t have to work for 24 hours a day.” Perhaps predictably, some US critics didn’t think much of the idea. Shark tank millionaire Kevin O’Leary slammed the right to disconnect as “so dumb,” adding rhetorically “Who dreams up this crap?” But Australians have a long and proud history of innovative workplace reform.

Ours was the first country in the world to get an 8-hour working day, way back in 1855. Before then, most Australian workers toiled up to 14 hours a day, with no sick leave or holiday entitlements, and could be sacked without notice or cause. But against the backdrop of the building boom that followed the Australian gold rushes, the Victorian Operative Stonemasons Society won their workers a then virtually unheard-of 8-hour day in a 48-hour working week, setting a new benchmark for the rest of the world. And yet, nearly 170 years later, experts say digital innovation and flexible working practices have now created a culture in Australia where it is the norm to be constantly contactable, and workers are putting in “extreme and excessive” working hours, increasingly unable to switch off. Enter the Right to Disconnect.

How will it all work out? Only time will tell.

But there’s a curious footnote to the Stonemasons’ victory in 1855. Several years later, when their fellow workers, the shop assistants, sought to follow suit by cutting their standard 12-hour day back to 8, the trailblazing stonemasons opposed the move as entirely unwarranted. The main reason seemed to be that the stonemasons still wanted the shops open when their own 8-hour working day came to quitting time.

I guess when there’s work to be done, someone’s got to do it. Like Bob Dylan says, “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody”

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