GeneralSmartphone notifications are killing your concentration

Smartphone notifications are killing your concentration

Smartphone notifications are among the worst enemies of modern technology that your concentration has to keep fighting against. So turn off those alerts right now, if you’re trying to boost your productivity and find your mind wandering around ever so often. Honestly, all those forwards you get on WhatsApp are not worth the struggle to finish your mountain of work for the day; you could savor them later or during break time.

If you think it’s alright to leave your smartphone notifications on as long as you don’t keep checking the incoming messages, think again. Researchers from the Florida State University say they make our minds wander even if we don’t look at them. So when you hear your handset beep and resist the temptation to pick it up, your brain still wonders what the alert might be about and how you would respond to it.

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Just the fact that notifications induce thoughts which are not relevant to the task at hand should be enough to convince you to switch them off. They are seen to wreak havoc on task performance and can be as distracting as sending a message or making a call. They may possibly have a big effect on attention-demanding jobs like driving a vehicle too. But of course, authorities are never going to ban having alerts turned on while drivers are on the road.

Published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance under the title The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification, the paper says interacting with a smartphone is proven to be associated with poorer performance on concurrently executed tasks. This is because one’s attention must be shared between them. A lot of people boast about being great at multi-tasking.

But several studies have found multi-tasking to be blamed for our dipping levels of concentration. What’s more, such lifestyles tend to distract us even when we’re not interacting with a computer or smartphone. Even the quality of work produced while multi-tasking suffers. So switch off your notifications, and watch your productivity increase.

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