FINITE ATTENTION

Bla bla bla your phone’s addictive and bad. Documenting the impact of smartphones on productivity is akin to mentioning the underwhelming British summer: trite and obvious.

This musing’s surprise comes from underlining research that shows even when you’re not using your phone, its mere presence negatively impacts your cognition and, ultimately, your performance.

We know that multitasking impairs memory and performance generally. When your phone’s in sight, due to the cornucopia of hormones and opportunities it releases and contains, “suppressing this automatic attentiveness requires notable self-control.” Research has found the mere presence of a phone increases cognitive load, as well as impacts learning and memory [1/2].

In the above-mentioned study, researchers asked participants to complete a series of tasks. During them, some had phones visible on their desk, others out of sight but nearby and a third group placed their phone in another room. The tasks focused on memory, problem-solving and focusing. 

Individuals performed far better when their phones were in another room rather than nearby, whether “visible, powered on or not.” 

The researchers deduced that even when we aren’t using our devices, we subconsciously think about them. The consensus is that we have a finite amount of attentive capacity, so even the prospect of action on our phone is enough to impact our performance.

Maybe it’s just me (it isn’t) but if I post on socials or send an important email that requires a response, there follows a pecking feeling in the back of my head, nudging me to just check the phone. Something about the unfathomable potential squeezed behind the black screen offers the possibility of so much colour. Almost invariably, the outcome is never what I anticipate. “It’s a vicious circle,” writes journalist Amanda Ruggeri, “the more useful our phones become, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more we lay neural pathways in our brains that lead to pick up our phones for whatever task is at hand – and the more we feel an urge to check our phone even when we don't have to.”

The no-armed bandit of endorphins that unlocks by simply plonking our face in front of our phone is a self-sufficient beast. On the odd occasion we get a meme, dividend, update, message, or dating match, we massage our synapses and remind our non-thinking self that there’s potential reward on the other side of the screen. 

This speaks to our emotional response to phones. In almost half of cases, as per one study, our usage “conflicts with important goals such as efficient time use or educational achievement.” We know using the phone is antithetical to progressing towards our goals. Yet we’re ineluctably drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

The dopamine release from our devices conditions us so that, “like lab rats trained to press a lever to get food, we click or tap on anything that promises to deliver [a dopamine hit], regardless of whether it has importance or value to us.”

Research suggests 89% of us experience phantom vibrations “about once every two weeks.” Ergo, we’re lab rats who’ve drunk so much of the Kool-Aid that we regularly find ourselves trying to press a lever that doesn’t even exist. 

The illusion of connectivity and the instant release valve of attention and awkwardness proffered by the phone replaces the frustration, boredom, and struggle that’s part and parcel of impulsive, creative and productive performance.

And so we sleep with it in the bed. Experience “significantly fewer smiles of any kind,” as we wait around. Encounter nomophobia on the ghastly occasions we go without. Then justify our digital symbiosis by conjuring visions of disconnection and career sabotage if we were to stop entirely.

Ultimately, though the knowledge that just seeing our phone is enough to, ostensibly, make us dumber, it’s doubtful there’s any research potent enough to justify a mass boycott of smartphones.

So if omission for the sake of performance is unlikely, then we need to pivot.

Just as setting out your gym kit before you sleep makes training more likely, conversely the decision to remove things in your periphery that make things more difficult is equally beneficial.

Use your phone for a (below-average) two hours per day and, by the end of the year, you’ll have spent a full month on your phone.

The world will keep revolving if you don’t respond in the group chat for an hour. The memes aren’t going anywhere.

It’s the attention economy after all and business is booming.  

Even when you’re not getting notifications, you’re imagining you are. Even when you’re not using it, you’re thinking about it. 

There are more hands after our attention than ever before.

Use the two you’ve got to create an environment that nurtures your individual performance.

Nothing is inconsequential.