The mobile phone is seen as the main culprit by much of our distractions at work. But after all, the fault is not of this chronic suspect.
Usually distract yourself with the mobile phonewhile it is in work? A study this Friday in Frontiers in Computer Science He revealed that putting the device out of reach is no solution.
“People saw their legs from the air, hide it under a notebook, and sometimes we see the slightly fatalist gesture of throwing it behind the shoulders,” the study author tells the study author to the study. Maxi Heitmayer.
The investigator of London School of Economics and Political Sciencein London, previously studied the use of the mobile phone and found that the generality of people interact with their mobile phones every 5 minutes.
To see if this distraction can be avoided, the investigation team had recorded 22 university students and office workers, aged 22 to 31, to work normally with their laptops at a secretary in a private room.
On the first day, participants kept their mobile phones within reach. On the second day, they kept their mobile phones in a second secretary 1.5 meters away, which means they had to get up to check it.
As New Scientist details, the investigators found that on the first day the volunteers spent an average of 23 minutes to perform leisure activities on the mobile phone; On the second day, 16 minutes passed.
Reading the previous paragraph, there is the idea that participants worked more on the second day, when mobile phones were farther away. But no. And this is where The devices are unlawful of guilt.
After all, what “holds” people is the activity and not the mobile phone. This, because, on the second day, the participants started to do on work computers What they did on the mobile phone – namely access to social networks.
“We can use the mobile phone less, but the fact that we spent more time than we wanted in social networks ends up migrating to the laptop computer“Says Heitmayer.
“This study shows that what distracts is not the device itself, but the underlying activity. Perhaps social networks, games, or whatever people do online,” he told New Scientist, Daantje Derks from the University of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.
