Putting the phone aside did not help participants to better focus on their work – they simply switched to other distractions. The corresponding study was published in the journal Frontiers in Computer Science.
The researchers wanted to see if smartphone distance would help improve concentration at work. To do this, they conducted an experiment in which 22 students and young office workers worked on a laptop in the lab for two days. On one day their phones were next to each other and on the other day their phones were on a desk a metre and a half away from them.
The results showed that when the phone was further away, the participants actually used it less – an average of 16 minutes instead of 23. but the total time spent on work tasks did not increase. Instead of the smartphone, people were distracted by extraneous activity on the laptop.
This suggests that the problem of low productivity is not the phones themselves, but the general tendency of people to switch to other things. More often than not, they weren’t distracted by the alerts, but were consciously looking for a way to rest.
So instead of tackling the gadgets themselves, it’s worth paying more attention to the specific factors that distract – like social media or the habit of switching between tasks.