When one of the journalists I coach told me she slept under her desk on especially busy days, I tried to conceal how shocked I really was. She mentioned this as if it were common — just one part of a much bigger conversation about how difficult and time-consuming her job was, how understaffed the organization was, and how no one in leadership was doing much about it.
Mind you, she wasn’t finding a few hours of sleep because she was covering the latest climate crisis-assisted “natural disaster,” or a mass protest against police violence, or another event that demanded an all-hands-on-deck rapid response to breaking news. On regular working days she had so much to do that, sometimes, napping in the office, instead of going home for the night, ensured she could get back to insurmountable amounts of work as soon as possible.
