Is your phone causing distractions? Keeping it out of reach may not solve the problem

Can you scroll through at work and take a little care about your smartphone? One solution is to keep your phone out of reach, but unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work.

“People flip the phone over and hide it under the notebook. Sometimes you see a slightly fatal “throwing it over my shoulder” thing.” Maxi Heitmayer At the London School of Economics and Political Science in London. He previously studied phone use and found that people interact with their devices About every 5 minutes.

To see if this distraction could be avoided, Heitmayer and his colleagues recorded 22 college students and office workers, ages 22 to 31. One day, participants kept their phones within reach of their phones. Soon they kept their phones on a second desk, 1.5 metres away. In other words, I had to stand up to check it out.

Researchers found that volunteers spent an average of 23 minutes doing leisure activities over the phone on their first day, but 16 minutes, when the devices were even further apart. However, they were no longer working on the second day. Instead, participants spent more time running their activities slowly on their laptops, mainly on social media. “We use less mobile phones, but the whole thing that’s scrolling on social media is scrolling longer than we intended to move to a laptop,” says Heitmayer.

“This shows that distractions are not itself the device, but the underlying activity. daantje derks At Rotterdam, the University of Erasmus, Netherlands.

However, she points out that large-scale studies tracking people in a normal working environment are needed to verify these initial results. “This is an experimental lab study. People usually have others around and their lives are much more dynamic than this setup.