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The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

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251–260 of 379 posts

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#251
This is reinforcing my theory that the ideal mobility solution is a limited-feature cell phone primarily used for messaging and calls, and a full-featured tablet that you have to keep in a bag, plus a bunch of accessories that tie everything together.

Smartphones are inconvenient in size and don't fit in pockets. There's no great solution for running with a phone. They're fragile and heavy making them easy to break when dropped. They act as a constant attention drain alerting you to every tiny thing that happens. They have terrible battery life.

You could go back to having a flip/candybar/slider phone with multiple days of battery life on a single charge that can use all of your messaging services and make calls. Add a few Uber shortcuts, a media controller, and a nice camera and you have the perfect pocket companion.

You could have a nice tablet for everything else like social media, multimedia, games, and streaming, - even one that is functionally a laptop if you're going to need a bag for it. Let it run in a low power mode so that it can drive streaming music to your bluetooth headset and you can use your cell phone as a basic media remote.

Basically run the iPhone/Apple Watch model, but with more devices with strict (but customizable) limitations.

If you go jogging, let the cell phone consume more power to stream music so you don't have to carry any other heavy gadgets to stream to your headphones. If you have a smart watch, let it stream cached songs and make calls in case of an emergency and ditch the phone altogether.

And you could even have a regular smart phone in the mix if that format is the best for the situation, but I really hate constantly needing my giant phone when I go anywhere.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#253

New hot take: I'm addicted to my laptop. The phone barely registers in terms of interest because I work on my laptop anyway, which is less cumbersome to navigate. Notwithstanding the need to separate work from leisure life, much of leisure is just attached to this device. Even the less consumptive activities, like writing or playing music, benefit from it. And anything to do with innovation or research is absolutely…

I've met a lot of people over the years who have computing of some kind as their job and had hobbies which are a complete contrast - blacksmithing, gardening, cabinet making. Anecdotally I do see fewer and fewer of these kinds of mixes. In general it feels healthier to have a hobby that drags your attention back into the physical world, but having said that there's something so wonderful about exploring all the knowl…

I’m stuck in a big city where those real world hobbies you mentioned are prohibitively expensive. I remember it was about 5 years ago when I realized activities I did offline started to feel like like self indulgent frivolity and anything that mattered long term mostly happened or started in front of a computer (or phone/computer combo). This is an insane shift to me from even 10-15 years ago where the physical world still felt real and the internet was more a fun diversion.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#254
Isn't this true for any source of distraction? What about a baseball or a book or a dvd or anything?

The presence of a distraction reduces cognitive capacity? Other than superficially padding their "researchers'" resume, what is gained by this "study"?

We've know this for years. It's why teachers insist kids put away their smartphones, etc.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it weird that I was doing that as I read your comment?

and you replied, so eew, your keyboard ...

Naaah, I keep tissues nearby. Gotta maintain a clean nose at all times.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#256
I made my largest gains in programming competence almost 10 years ago when working on a system with no connection to the internet and no cell phone at hand. I was working a development assignment on an air-gapped network. Not being able to search google every time I got stuck forced me to actually read the documentation, man pages, and reference books and think through what was going on and come up with solutions. The internet terminal was a 10 minute walk away so I treated it like a trip to the library for research only after I had spent time working on the problem myself.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#257

New hot take: I'm addicted to my laptop. The phone barely registers in terms of interest because I work on my laptop anyway, which is less cumbersome to navigate. Notwithstanding the need to separate work from leisure life, much of leisure is just attached to this device. Even the less consumptive activities, like writing or playing music, benefit from it. And anything to do with innovation or research is absolutely…

I've had success whitelisting sites using the Chrome Block Site extension[1], and I'm considering just switching to whitelisted sites-only full-time. (Right now, I have it scheduled for the morning hours so I can get things done.)

At that point the laptop becomes more of a single-purpose "get things done" machine rather than a general purpose device I can waste hours clicking around on. :) Consumption-wise, it's led to me watching more films and TV shows rather than a string of 5-15 minute YouTube videos. I'm still spending 2-3 hours a day watching "video," but now it's (IMO) meaningful content instead of glorified clickbait.

I've also been selectively disabling JavaScript more and more, and might switch to disabling by default (and then re-enabling on useful sites that need it.)

All of this, plus leaving Facebook and Twitter, has done wonders to make me far more productive over this summer. Can't speak for everyone but I highly recommend taking the steps above.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site-website...

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#259
post #182

New hot take: I'm addicted to my laptop. The phone barely registers in terms of interest because I work on my laptop anyway, which is less cumbersome to navigate. Notwithstanding the need to separate work from leisure life, much of leisure is just attached to this device. Even the less consumptive activities, like writing or playing music, benefit from it. And anything to do with innovation or research is absolutely…

Buy books and print research papers? Personally, I don't view a black/white Kindle as the same as other screens, so a bike ride to a park where I might read a research paper or book I've put on my Kindle.

I've come back around to single-purpose devices.

Kindle: read books

Nintendo Switch: play games

TV: watch films and shows

Getting into the "mental mode" to do one of those things requires using the device built for it, and putting away my general-purpose phone/laptop. The great thing about focused single-purpose devices is it's impossible to get "lost" clicking around and wasting time.

If I'm on my Kindle, I'm not scrolling through the news. If I'm on my TV, I'm not getting lost down some YouTube recommendation rabbit hole.

The more I started turning my laptop into single-use (cutting out social media, focusing on productivity), the more "bored" I was at first, but then I realized that's actually a good thing. In addition to all the above I have my piano I can practice on, too.

Being bored is good. The modern web and especially social media vehemently disagree, and so our incentives have diverged.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#260
I wrote 5 simple things you can do to improve calm, productivity and focus using your phone:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-simple-immediate-hacks-impr...

My favorite personal tip is to turn off colors on the phone and run in pure black and white mode :) I've done this for about 2 years now and I loove it!

IF you try any tricks to reduce reliance, stimulation and/or distraction on your phone, go into Screen Time (or Android equivalent) and take a screenshot of how much you've picked up your phone in the last 7 days (because Screen Time doesn't maintain history) so you can compare later on to see if you've improved!

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