Yet another study on the negative consequences of sleeping with your cellphone, keeping your devices in bed with you, and  staying up late answering email:

Reading work-related emails in bed at night makes you less engaged and creative at work the following day.

That’s the conclusion of a new thesis from Roskilde University, in which two graduate students studied what effect a disrupted night’s sleep had on employees’ ability to be innovative.

The study’s conclusions revealed a scary trend.

“We could see that employees who lay in bed in the evening with laptops and phones answering emails had a much less restful night, often waking up,” says co-author Claes Ziehm Mortensen. “It was obvious that people who had spent their evenings responding to work-related emails in bed were less alert at work the following day. People who tended to take their computer to bed with them also reported not feeling so good and less able to engage in innovative processes.”…

According to Mortensen, using a computer and dealing with work-related email at night ruins your following day at work is due to the light emitted by electronic devices — cheating the brain so that it doesn’t know whether it is night or day.

This makes for poor unrestful sleep and more unperceived wakening.

The following day, employees who answered their mail the previous evening are less alert, they have less energy and have poorer collaborative skills, which affects their creativity and innovative abilities.

On the other hand, employees who follow their natural circadian rhythm get a much better night’s sleep, have more energy at work and are much better able to deliver the innovation companies often rely on to stay ahead.

The thesis argues that it’s the blue light from screens that messes you up, so really all screen use in bed should be eliminated: that means Netflix as well as Outlook.

Mortensen goes on to suggest, “Perhaps companies should even think in terms of it being a good idea for staff not to feel an obligation to deal with email late in the evening because doing so will impact on their work the following day.” I’m afraid, though, that from what I can tell most companies are perfectly happy to take the immediate “productivity” of more email sent tonight over greater productivity tomorrow.