SMARTPHONE SPECIAL..... Be smart with your phone usage

Be smart with your phone usage

You may be hampering your productivity unknowingly with these damaging smartphone habits

It’s hard to imagine a time where our phones weren’t permanently attached to our hands. Many of us take these miniature computers pretty much everywhere and rely heavily on them for day-to-day tasks. But with so much opportunity to explore the internet and stay connected to loved ones 24/7, it’s easy to get distracted, resulting in a loss of productivity.

“Productivity is often at its apex during a flow state, when a person is fully immersed in an activity”, NYC-based psychotherapist Jordana Jacobs says. According to Jacobs, while phones are great for the technology they provide, they also feed into our natural distracted state. The first step to being more productive is identifying all the ways our phones keep us from staying focused. Jacobs breaks down the phone habits that are ruining our productivity:

Reading, answering, and deleting emails

Smartphones take us out of being in the present. When we’re constantly checking those work and personal emails, Jacobs said it puts us in the mindset of, “I’m doing this rather than just being where I am now.” Mindlessly checking email can easily take us out of the flow state productivity requires.

Checking social media

Social media can feed our obsession with other people’s lives, but it’s also a platform for us to brag to our followers about what we are doing or have done. By constantly checking social media, we become obsessed with what everyone else is doing and with showing everyone else what we are doing at the expense of the actual task in front of us.

Having our phones with us always

Jacobs believes that we have lost the capacity to be alone. “We now think of the phone as our primary attachment figure; all of the people we know, and love live in the phone, that’s how we talk to them,” she said. We never actually have space by ourselves to contemplate, reflect, or gain insight into the self, in the way we used to be able to. Knowing and growing ourselves is some of the most productive work we can do, and our phones can get in the way of it.

Downloading productivity apps

There are some productivity apps that can be helpful but relying solely on them or downloading the wrong one can do the opposite. The best way to stay productive is to have the right mindset. How someone thinks can significantly impact their behaviours, drive, and ultimately their output. People should feel encouraged that developing a go-getter mindset is possible.

Falling for distractions

With apps, the internet, and other features of smartphones, you can easily find yourself going down a deep rabbit hole of distraction. Rarely do people go online or on their phones and stick to the intended reason for checking their phones. If they’re checking weather, that might then lead to checking email, messages, or reading a news story — all this serves as a gross distraction and impacts productivity.

Taking pictures

One of the perks of today’s smartphones is that they double as high-quality cameras. It’s great to want to take a picture here and there to have a keepsake of a particular moment but playing paparazzi in our own lives is another way of taking us from living in the now.

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