Improve sleep to generate better business ideas, research reveals

The time is now to do away with the common myth of sleepless business founders. The well-known perception is that business owners must lose sleep over managing business. The belief is that you have to outwork yourself and skip rest and sleep for your business to remain on the path of success.

This article looks at building successful business from another perspective. The new proposition is to improve sleep to generate better ideas for your business

 Improve sleep to analyse business opportunities

A recent study by business strategists from the Harvard Business School suggest that exhausted entrepreneurs are disadvantaged in several ways. It says that taking a nap when necessary is an effective means to nurture business ventures.

There are key functions that successful entrepreneur hopefuls must perform at the early stages of a business venture. This includes generating ideas for the new business, and establishing facts about the new venture’s potential. However, entrepreneurs who forgo sleep have a poor approach to analyzing business opportunities than well rested counterparts, and even than their well-rested selves. Consequently they are unable to properly analyse opportunities and establish an identity for their business. 

An additional finding from the research concludes that entrepreneurs who sleep less are more likely to give higher credence to poor business ideas than counterparts who have enough rest/sleep. Also, entrepreneurs who are short on sleep depend more on shallow indicators when forming initial opinion about new venture ideas. Hence, the suggestion to improve sleep to generate better business ideas.

Do we want more potent and authentic assessment on business ideas? The answer is to get sufficient sleep. Avoid denying yourself of rest with the thinking that you have too much to do. A point to further stress on the need to get adequate sleep to generate better ideas for business

Improve sleep to evaluate subtle business ideas

The research further examined 101 practicing entrepreneurs over a two week period. The entrepreneurs were spoken to twice each day; once each morning to ask about previous night sleep, and again in the afternoon to ask them to score a new business venture. It states that when the entrepreneurs had less sleep, they made error in assessment of not so obvious business ideas. Hence, fatigue impedes an entrepreneurs’s ability to assess discreet factors  linked to a business idea.

An important aspect of the research results compares an entrepreneur to themselves in different settings. Consequently the finding states that even for entrepreneurs who normally don’t sleep as much as everyone else, they tend to struggle with evaluation when they get less time of sleep than what is normal to them.

Lack of Sleep Obstructs competence of entrepreneurs

The research further conducted a sleep deprivation test to establish sleep as the fundamental factor influencing behaviours of entrepreneurs under the different settings. The study concludes that lack of sleep obstructs competence of entrepreneurs. Entrpreneurs who work with less sleep struggle to make sense of multifaceted relationships in business. Such relationships however, are the important attributes to the success of a business.

Ideas and prospects to do with business comes in countless forms. Analyzing such prospects is a careful painstaking process. The success of any business venture hinges on entrepreneurs ability to decipher great ideas from others. However, entrepreneurs cannot run through such processes successfully when they have less sleep.

A good sleep is not sign of idleness or laziness. It provides a means to properly evaluate the seemingly countless business opportunities to pursue. Sleep at the right time; especially the night before final idea prospecting day or business pitching opportunity is always best.