(Photo: fuchsphoto)
In order to find out how smartphone notifications influence our productivity we asked a subject to accomplish a measurable task in the following situations:
Case A: Without notifications at all, just a simple phone.
Case B: With all notifications from his smartphone ON.(Facebook, personal email, work email, other social platforms, etc..)
The TASK was to introduce a printed list of 150 contacts details (Name, Surname, University, Unique serial number) in electronic format.
The subject was judged by the following criteria:
1. Time needed to finish the task
2. The number of mistakes made.
The RESULTS were surprising:
Case A: All Notifications OFF
-time to introduce contacts: 50 minutes.
-mistakes made: 10 and 2 contacts missed.
Case B: Notification ON (Facebook, Email, Foursquare and some news applications)
-time to introduce contacts: 75 minutes.
-mistakes made: 43 and 13 contacts missed.
Note: The subject mentioned that he didn’t felt aggressed by notifications but he felt the work difference in the two cases.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Our experiment pointed out that smartphone notifications increase the time to complete a task by 50% and drastically reduce the quality of your work. The number of mistakes with notifications ON is 5 times higher than the number with notifications OFF. This is a huge negative influence for the work quality.
We recommend checking your notifications and emails maximum 2 times a day, for example at 12:00 and 16:00. Tell everybody you adopted this method in order to increase work productivity, they will understand. Instruct them to call you only for urgent matters. It will visible increase your productivity and you still will not miss anything.
You can also save energy and make the planet a better place by using this GREEN method; your smartphone’s battery will last longer with data activated only two times a day, when you really need it. Just push a button and select data traffic OFF until you take a break and verify what your friends are doing.
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4 Responses to “Smartphone vs. Productivity Experiment”
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A sample size of one with a repetitive task is hardly an experiment let alone worthy of reporting anything on. Also, what does this even mean, “The subject mentioned that he didn’t felt aggressed by notifications[...]“?
We think there is a lot of truth in this experiment. We can repeat it in other conditions, please let us know your suggestions for the criteria we should follow.
I agree.
For one, there’s a huge difference between boring tasks like typing contacts and more engaging tasks such as designing, programming, writing and so on.
I would actually expect that the distraction factor would be larger in tasks that require a stronger focus. However, I can imagine that in a boring task you’ll be practically begging for a distraction.
If you’d really want to check this through – you need to follow standard practices: test a larger sample of persons (more than 1!), use separate groups for each task (not doing one alternative after the other, in which case the order of tasks will seriously affect performance), and checking this on different types of tasks and under different levels of notification pressure (not all of us get the same number of emails in a day).
However your bottom line is probably true. And why should you really do a formal experiment? Especially when there’s this new tweet, ha ha, let me send it to you… right after I’m done with this client email that just popped… yes I had it here in my Facebook page oh ha! look at that silly cat with whiskers and all. What was I saying?
This experiment shows that smartphone can be a huge distraction if you use social networks and mailing all day long. The percentage is not so important because we got huge difference in the two cases analysed.
By repeating the experiment we’ll just reduce the margin of error but the differences are clear. Smartphone, used improperly, drastically reduce your productivity. If you have something important to do, put it away until you finish your task.