Turn off nonessential notifications, and keep your phone out of sight while you work
- High value
- Evidence B
- Saves time
- Free
- Takes minutes
- No willpower
In plain words
When your phone buzzes, even if you don't look at it or touch it, your score on attention tasks drops. The drop is about the same as when you actually take a call or send a text. There is another case: if the phone is just sitting on the desk and you resist looking at it, the mental capacity you have free still shrinks. The more dependent you are on your phone, the bigger the drop.
- Cost
-
Free. A few minutes to change the settings, and it takes almost no willpower.
- What you get
-
Just receiving a notification, without looking or touching, made performance on attention tasks clearly worse. The drop was comparable to actually making or taking a call or sending a text. This was done in a lab, with college students as subjects. Two other experiments showed that even when people successfully held back from checking, having their own phone nearby reduced the mental capacity they had free. People who depend most on their phones dropped the most.
- Notes
-
These are all single tasks in a lab. What happens when it builds up day after day has not been measured. For jobs that really require being reachable at any moment, you can keep notifications on for just a few contacts.
- Evidence grade
- B : Supported by research but without a precise number, or based on small or single studies.
- Sources
-
- Stothart, Mitchum & Yehnert (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100
- Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos (2017). Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462
Mentioned in
Translated from the Chinese original. Original book, section 3, tip 1. Content may be out of date and rules differ by place. When you actually deal with an agency, a doctor or a court, follow what local officials, doctors and lawyers tell you. Disclaimer