Distracted by your phone? Putting it out of reach may not help

Do you find yourself distracted at work, turning to your smartphone for a bit of mindless scrolling? One solution is to put your phone out of reach – but unfortunately, it seems this may not work.

“People turn their phone upside down, hide it under a notebook, sometimes you see the slightly fatalistic ‘throw it over my shoulders behind me’,” says Maxi Heitmayer at the London School of Economics and Political Science in London. He has previously studied phone use and found that people interact with their devices about every 5 minutes.

To see if this distraction can be avoided, Heitmayer and his colleagues recorded 22 university students and office workers, aged between 22 and 31, working as usual on their laptops on a desk in a private room. On one day, the participants kept their phones within arm’s reach. On a second, they kept their phone on a second desk 1.5 metres away, meaning they had to stand up to check it.

The researchers found that the volunteers spent an average of 23 minutes carrying out leisure activities on their phone on the first day, but spent 16 minutes when their devices were further away. Yet they didn’t work for any longer on the second day – instead, the participants simply spent more time carrying out leisurely activities on their laptop, mostly on social media. “You can use the phone less, but this whole scrolling on social media for longer than you intended just migrates to the laptop,” says Heitmayer.

“This shows that what’s distracting is not the device in itself, but more the underlying activity, so maybe social media or gambling or whatever people do online,” says Daantje Derks at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

However, she points out that larger studies tracking people in their normal working environment are needed to verify these initial results. “It’s an experimental lab study – people usually have other people around them, and their lives are much more dynamic than this setup, so this could change how they work,” says Derks.