People who are constantly distracted by their phones at work will just find other ways to procrastinate if it isn’t handy

Putting your smartphone away at work may not be a good enough strategy to stop procrastinating, researchers said this week.

While limited smartphone access led to reduced use, participants of a recent study were found to have just shifted their focus to a different device.

“The study shows that putting the smartphone away may not be sufficient to reduce disruption and procrastination, or increase focus,” Dr. Maxi Heitmayer, a researcher at the London School of Economics, said in a statement. “The problem is not rooted within the device itself, but in the habits and routines that we have developed with our devices.”

Heitmayer is the author of the study, which was published in the journal Frontiers in Computer Science.

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The small experiment included 22 participants who lived and worked or studied in London. The majority identified as female and were between the ages of 22 and 31.

They were asked to work for two days in a private, soundproof room and bring along devices they normally have with them for work. Notably, they did not make any changes to their notification settings.

In one test, the phones were placed directly on the participants’ desks. In another, the phone was placed on a separate desk just around five feet away. When the phone was further away, researchers found it was used less, but the attention just shifted to the closer laptop.

“It’s your connection with loved ones and with work. It’s your navigation system, alarm clock, music player, and source of information. Unsurprisingly, people turn to the tool that does everything,” Heitmayer noted. “Even if you have no clear purpose, you know it has your socials and can provide entertainment.”

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There are things people can do to fight the disruptions. They can set their notifications to arrive at certain times. They can silence their phones.

But, the pull is pretty strong – especially with the allure of social media apps. More than 40 percent of Americans admit being addicted to their phones, according a 2023 study from Reviews.org.

“There is a very unequal battle fought out every single day by each and every one of us when we use our phones,” Heitmayer explained.

“The things inside phones that are the biggest attention sinks are developed by large corporations who greatly profit from our failure to resist the temptation to use them; all of this is literally by design,” he said.