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Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

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Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#151

Post by billti »

dmingod666 wrote: post #108
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #8

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. T…

Not disagreeing with you entirely, but deep work can be done in office hours as well. Nice noise cancelling headphones, schedule a chunk of 1-1.5 hours, go "do not disturb" in chat and don't check mail during this time. You can get decent amount of work done in one block. Try to get 2-3 of these blocks during the day, that would be pretty decent. You could use a Pomodoro timer app if you want to track the blocks. Man…

I agree with this. As a manager I have a lot of meetings and few long stretches for 'deep work' in my day. Yet when I take on some work that truly absorbs me, I find the time for it. Non-essential meetings get postponed, email/Teams can survive an hour or two without a response, HackerNews will still be there at the end of the day ;-) , etc.

I do feel like a lot "distractions" in work hours are avoidable. Some of them are just habit or a dopamine fix or procrastination - kind of like checking Facebook or Twitter on your phone when something else isn't focusing your attention fully.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#152

Post by devtul »

Swizec wrote: post #12
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #8

> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. T…

> Do you spend your time marketing your self to others and letting people know your accomplishments, or do you spend the time doing work that will benefit others? I like the luck surface area analogy for this. Take a rectangle. Side A is "Quality of work". Side B is "How many people know about it". The surface area – A*B – is your luck and opportunity. If you do amazing work and nobody knows about it, your luck is ze…

A friend told me a new hire spent weeks drawing diagrams on the board and explaining to coworkers how X feature should work, after two months of zero commits he was let go.

A perfect example of a -2 X 5, zero work done but great presentation, now the guy is infamous in our circle and no one would recommend him to be hired anywhere.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#153

Post by occz »

rib3ye wrote: post #2

Yet no mention of car center console UI.

I find them particularly strange from a design perspective. If anyone here does design on car interfaces, please let me know why this is the direction you're taking, because I'm stumped.

Car interfaces seem like something you would want to optimize for being able to be easily controlled without taking neither eyes nor focus off the road. This, to me, means physical interface elements with good built-in feedback (clicky buttons, notched knobs etc.). Instead, we appear to be going down a dangerous path of having everything be in a screen.

How come?

Sidenote: I'm generally not a big fan of voice-interfaces due to their general inferiority to 'hand-interfaces' (no muscle memory, large latency, high rate of error etc.), but as an interface in a car I think they do make some sense, given the obvious design constraint that you want the driver to focus on the road. They can't replace all functions though due to the aforementioned constraints, but other than that, this is a very fitting niche for the technology.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#154

Post by occz »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #42

I've been experiencing Phantom Vibration all morning. Talk about distracting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome

I used to experience that, but it's gone away since I moved to never having vibrations on my phone. Highly recommended!

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#155

Post by kfrane »

I've found a very interesting result in one of the papers[1] they linked in the article. The group of people with the highest phone dependence have the highest available cognitive capacity score when they leave their phone in another room (see Figure 3. Experiment 2).

Somewhat absurdly, this would suggest that the best strategy would be to get hooked on notifications and then consciously leaving your phone in another room when you need to work/focus.

[1] https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/64...

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#156

Post by annoyingnoob »

occz wrote: post #154
annoyingnoob wrote: post #42

I've been experiencing Phantom Vibration all morning. Talk about distracting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome

I used to experience that, but it's gone away since I moved to never having vibrations on my phone. Highly recommended!

I took my phone out of my pocket for hours this morning, the feeling kept going. Not sure what I'm expecting.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#158

Post by SilverRed »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #90
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #39

I'm constantly amazed at how the mainstream population uses phones. Most people tend to have phone with alarming-notifications, so they get informed that they have a message, or email or whatever. The phone interrupts them and directs their attention. They train themselves to be controlled by their phones. I'd go crazy trying to live like that. I have no audible notifications, and vibration only for actual calls. Eve…

For me vibration is very intrusive notification, if the phone is on the table, the table all but explodes, a melody without vibration is a much softer notification.

I find the Apple watch to be the least intrusive notification method. Its just a light tap on the wrist. And it uses different taps for different things. Receiving a text message is different to a call and different to the message telling me to stand up for a minute.

It also doesn't make any sound so its not distracting others in the office and it can always be felt while vibrations in my pocket are not always noticeable.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#159

Post by SilverRed »

83457 wrote: post #134
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me vibration is very intrusive notification, if the phone is on the table, the table all but explodes, a melody without vibration is a much softer notification.

I hate the sound of my wife's iphone on vibrate. She has it on silent but then I hear this annoying sound from across the room. I would definitely be a fan of some nice sound instead of vibrate or the common ping sounds.

The default iphone notification sound is so incredibly loud. Especially when someone sends multiple messages its like its striking a bell inside my head.

Re: Phones and apps reduce your ability to focus even when they don’t distract you

#160

Post by gfxgirl »

brohoolio wrote: post #45
_xnmw wrote: post #22

I doubt the mere presence of the phone itself is distracting, but rather it's the fact that putting it somewhere far (or allowing it to be taken from you) requires a conscious intention and is sufficiently absurd that it triggers the novelty feeling, which helps your focus. I just put my phone away in the closet. Perhaps this will become part of my new "focus" ritual.

I find that the mere presence of the phone is distracting. It's subtle and I didn't notice it until I physically started putting it in another room. I don't mindlessly pick it up and opening an app.

what part do you find distracting? Does it go off with sound or vibrations?

I set my phone on the table/desk and completely forget about it. 4hrs later I see I missed 6 messages, a few I would have prefer to respond to when they arrived.

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