A former co-worker used to appear and ask if she could offload her phone. There were some days when she didn’t want to have it anywhere near her. If she wanted to really focus, it wasn’t enough to put it in a drawer or shove it in a bag. She wanted it gone. So she’d walk across the office and drop it off, where it would remain several rows of cubicles away from her for the next few hours.
Like this friend of mine, you know your phone’s distracting. When you see a notification light up on the screen or hear the telltale buzz, your attention’s drawn toward the tiny device that carries outsize importance. But what you may not have realized is that even without any notifications, your phone could be sapping your ability to focus on other tasks, according to researchfrom the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
“It’s not that participants were distracted because they were getting notifications on their phones,” Adrian Ward, a professor at McCombs, is quoted as saying in a university news post. “The mere presence of their smartphone was enough to reduce their cognitive capacity.”
That’s right, that phone hanging out face down on your desk right now? Not as harmless as you thought.
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