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.

Comments

Executive functions

[bluefoxlucid]

I have ADD and had childhood ADHD. They put me on methylphenidate as a kid; I went with Modafinil recently. My psychiatrist didn't have a problem with this because modafinil is safe (my backup would be Vyvanse) to such a ridiculous degree that the DEA appears to not care if you get several years's worth illegally (I still got a Rx).

Amphetamines and methylphenidate (cocaine-like) will get you kind of high. Even phenylpiracetam at alzheimers doses (100mg) will make you feel like a freaking super hero. You feel great; you feel excited; you feel like you could climb a mountain. You want to do something. Clean your house, study a new language, run a mile--running when on phenotropil feels really fucking great, by the way, even after the drug has worn off and only like 6mg is still in your blood. This is why people kill themselves on meth (amphetamines at higher doses cause muscular breakdown--your body rots out from around you).

I'm not saying adderall isn't a great drug for ADHD, and of course Vyvanse is an excellent option because it's slow to metabolize and thus more-difficult to overdose on (get high, poison yourself); I'm just saying these are dangerous drugs, and they get you *way* motivated in safe, clinical doses.

Modafinil doesn't do that.

If I sit down to work on something, I can't stop thinking about other crap. I go do that other crap because I'm useless: trying to study on Duolingo involves staring at Duolingo while thinking about checking Fark. I struggle through. It sucks.

If I sit down to work on something on a Modafinil dose, my attention stays where I put it. I can break away--I'm not hyperfocusing--and I make continuous decisions on if I should attend a distraction or set it aside for later. The drug lets me actually work, study, and generally get things done.

Modafinil doesn't make me particularly want to work. I have to decide to do something. I have to decide to clean my house, or to study, or to attend to my job function. It's annoying, it's effort, and it's just plain dull. I can do it, but I'm not thrilled about it. For some people--and at higher doses--Modafinil makes them hate anything inefficient and want to get on with work and get their shit done; at lower doses, and at the dose I'm currently experimenting with (because my psychiatrist said to experiment with the dosing, since it won't fuck you up like Adderall if you take too much), it's an enabler instead of a motivator.

For ADD and ADHD, drug therapy works great; and cognitive behavioral therapy improves on that. CBT helps on and off the drug, and the drug often enables you to establish a CBT behavior which you wouldn't otherwise stick with. When you're not on the drug, you perform worse than when on the drug; if you've had CBT, that baseline "worse" performance is improved, so it's not as bad.

CBT includes executive function training, which encompasses things like scheduling.

Scheduling is a developed, habitual behavior in which you set aside time to attend to particular tasks. Rather than filling your time continuously, you plan out what to do with your time. You attend to certain types of work in some half-hour or hour-long block, other types of work in some other block. You break your schedule when needed, and adhere when the task at hand is not de-prioritized by other things. For the sake of mental and social health, you can reschedule things so you can hang out with your friends, so long as you then attend to those things at the new time; flexibility in scheduling comes with the habit of developing and adhering to a schedule, as changing a schedule is just creating a new schedule--something you learn to do over time.

I would suggest that this phenomena of removing access to smart phones reflects the impact of executive functions such as focus, response-inhibition, self-activation, prioritization, time management, planning, and organization. If you plan, prioritize, and retain focus on a task, then you won't constantly poke a few thing