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Not Using Smartphones Can Improve Productivity By 26%, Says Study (business-standard.com)
Smartphones do a plethora of things for us. But if you stopped using them, you might actually start seeing improvements in the work you do. From a Business-Standard report: The study, commissioned by Kaspersky Lab, showed that employees' performance improved 26 percent when their smartphones were taken away. The experiment tested the behaviour of 95 persons between 19 and 56 years of age in laboratories at the universities of Wurzburg and Nottingham-Trent. The experiment unearthed a correlation between productivity levels and the distance between participants and their smartphones. "Instead of expecting permanent access to their smartphones, employee productivity might be boosted if they have dedicated 'smartphone-free' time. One way of doing this is to enforce rules such as no phones in the normal work environment," says Altaf Halde, managing director, South Asia at Kaspersky Lab.
... that people who have smartphones are on them all the time? I have a few, but I am only on them when I'm talking or texting, and in restaurants or waiting rooms, playing games. When I'm at work, I do my work, and the phone is just there to make or receive calls related to my work.
Similarly, when I drive, the smartphone is on driver mode, just in case I receive calls. Other than that, I don't use the phone while driving. I do use it when I'm shopping - either check out the store's app (like Costco) or check out my shopping list or prices.
And at home, I use it to FaceTime or WhatsApp w/ family.
I worked at a company before the dot com bust where the managers installed desktop monitoring software. One day my manager ran into my cube to inform me that I shouldn't be browsing Amazon on company time. Only then did he realized that I was eating a breakfast burrito and browsing the Internet on my break, which is acceptable under company policy, and I told him to bugger off. Most of the employees figured out that the company next door had an open wireless access point. Just about everyone got a wireless PDA to browse the Internet.