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Now there’s a title that would have made zero sense a decade ago.
Smartphones are a mixed bag when it comes to productivity. It goes without saying that staying connected seems essential. But while staying connected may make you feel productive—because it makes your work that much more stimulating—multitasking has been shown to invariably make you less productive. It’s impossible to dive deep into your work when you spread your attention across many things at once. Smartphones can compromise your attention quite a bit.
For three months I conducted a productivity experiment to use my smartphone for just one hour a day. Since then, I’ve experimented with strategies that keep my smartphone from making its way too far back into my life—but while also keeping it around for when I need to connect.
Photo: Kaleb Fulgham, CC
I was half-temped to write a preachy article on the more obvious things you can do—like using your phone less, leaving it at home, and so on. But I resisted the urge. Instead, I looked at the habits I’ve developed since the experiment that still let me keep my phone close by. Here are a few of the best ways I’ve found to keep my smartphone from seeping into my life since the experiment!
1. Do a phone swap. My girlfriend and I have a simple ritual we do when we spend time together: we swap phones. This way, when we need to look something up, make a call, or take a picture, we have a phone to do it with—but it doesn’t suck us into a black hole of distraction. It’s a simple ritual, and I don’t do it with anyone else. We haven’t found anything that works better for letting us spend time and attention with each other (save for leaving our phones behind, of course, which isn’t always possible).
2. Strategic airplane mode. Whenever I grab dinner, coffee, or a drink with someone, I immediately switch my phone into airplane mode, so no new messages or distractions can come in. And every day, between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., I flip my phone into airplane mode, so I can recharge and disconnect before I fall asleep and after I wake up. Most nights I look forward to the ritual, because it always leaves me feeling refreshed. People can usually tell when you’re not only spending quality time with them, but quality attention as well.
3. Mind the gaps. It’s incredible how much value and meaning the small gaps in our day can give us. We can feel better when we disconnect while doing simple things like waiting in line at the grocery store, walking down the street to grab a coffee, and even using the bathroom. These small gaps help us reflect, recharge, think about what we should do next, and even let our mind wander so we can approach our work from a more creative angle. When we fill every gap in our day with our phone, we miss out on all of these benefits. There’s no doubt that mindlessly burning through some time on your phone is more stimulating and engaging than letting your mind rest, but the benefits of doing so, even if only for a couple minutes at a time, can be incredible.
4. Create a Mindless Folder. It’s almost impossible to use your smartphone intentionally, and not on mindless autopilot. This is why the Mindless Folder is so powerful. It’s simply a folder on your phone that houses of all of the apps you tend to use habitually, without much thought—apps like email, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. I personally don’t have an email app installed on my phone, and have deleted all of the social media apps that I waste time on (like Twitter and Facebook). But I still keep Goodreads, Instagram, and my website analytics app in my Mindless Folder. I find the folder serves as a good, honest cue that I should reconsider launching timewasting apps in the first place.
5. Shut off every single notification. Notifications are stimulating, and help you feel more connected to your work—but they often only create the illusion of productivity. Productivity isn’t about how busy you are—it’s about how much you accomplish. Chances are you accomplish less when your attention is constantly hijacked by pointless interruptions. Gloria Mark, an attention researcher at the University of California Irvine, has found that when we’re completely interrupted from our work, it can take as long as 25 minutes to completely recover from the interruption.1 Since my smartphone experiment, unless I receive a phone call, my phone never makes a peep—I value dedicating as much focus as I can to what’s in front of me more than staying constantly connected. And perhaps more importantly, most of the interruptions that come in aren’t worth losing 25 minutes of productivity over. (I catch up on them when I go to check the time on my phone.)
While your smartphone likely doesn’t eat up too much of your time, chances are it takes up a disproportionate amount of your attention. This can have huge productivity costs, because of how important attention is for your productivity.
Keeping your phone from seeping into your work and life is worth the effort a hundred times over.
