Here are some interesting facts* about (lack of) sleep that you may not know:

• seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.
• a new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year.
• it’s impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it.

How does that affect you at work?  My mate Dave knew it affected him badly, so he came up with this visual hack to let people know how he was feeling.  He says:

“We’d just had Hamish, and were in the sleeplessness death zone a lot of the time. But at work we were in the crucial months of getting data ready for a new site, and I was the go-to guy for a whole bunch of content things. Some days I was capable of rational thought and decision-making; others, not so much. So this meter helped give people a kind of reliability quotient for anything I said that day.”

Thanks to David Burnett for this hack.

*Source: The National Sleep Research Project via abc.net.au