Americans are working harder on less sleep: poll

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Steve Nichols, a middle manager at a technology company in Ohio, gets home late from work and spends most evenings sending work-related e-mails.

Like many other Americans he is working more and sleeping less which could have an impact on their professional and personal lives.

A new survey by the National Sleep Foundation shows people are spending an average of 4.5 hours each week doing additional work from home, on top of a 9.5 hour average work day.

While 28 percent of people questioned in the survey said their daytime sleepiness interferes with their daily activities at least a few days a month, 63 percent said they are likely to accept their sleepiness and keep going.

"There's enough data now to clearly show that if you're not sleeping enough, that's going to dramatically affect your performance and productivity," said Mark Rosekind, a former director of the Center for Human Sleep Research at the Stanford University Sleep Center who helped design the poll.

"People think if I can jam more hours in the day I'll get more done. That's not true," he added in an interview.

Although Nichols, 35, said he hasn't noticed any negative effects, his wife says he looks beat up and run down. The only time he catches up on his sleep is when he takes a vacation where his BlackBerry doesn't work.

"That removes the temptation," he said.

Nearly one third of the 1,000 people who took part in the telephone poll late last year said they fell asleep or were tired on the job in the past month, and 12 percent reported being late to work.