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Showing posts from March, 2017

Want to be more productive at work? Leave your smartphone at home

I never considered myself a smartphone addict, but it is true that I waste a lot of time checking my phone and responding to personal emails and messages. According to studies  [1]  and [2] , the average user checks the smartphone 80 times per day  for 2.42 hours  and touches the display 5427 times per day . These figures might seem very high, but I tracked my smartphone usage with BreakFree for one week and they are surprisingly accurate. A couple of years ago I started using the Pomodoro Technique  at work, which  blocks smartphone notifications and some websites during the work intervals (25 minutes) and allows you to check them during the scheduled breaks (5 minutes after each work interval). This really helped me be more productive but it requires self-discipline that sometimes I don't have. What if you really can't check your smartphone, personal email or social media because you don't have access to it? A few weeks ago I started the following experiment: