Read Our Blog

If You Need To Focus, Try Turning Your Phone Off

If you are lucky enough to have high working memory capacity, then you should have no problem ignoring distractions and staying focused on tasks. But for the rest of us, tuning out background distractions can be challenging.

Evidence suggests that taking a break from the following distractions could enhance your ability to concentrate.

Take a vacation from email, cell phone notifications, and social media to boost concentration.

Controlling the times you log in to email — work or personal — and batching messages, among other strategies, could help to boost on-the-job productivity.

A study found that people who read emails throughout the day switched screen twice as often and were in an ongoing state of high alert with a constant heart rate. When email was removed from these people for 5 days, their heart rate returned to a natural, variable one.

The authors concluded that taking an email vacation significantly decreases stress and improves concentration and focus.

Whether you are alerted to text or an incoming call by an alarm, vibration, or trendy ringtone, a cell phone notification can distract you enough to impair your ability to concentrate on a task.

In fact, the distraction caused by a notification is just as off-putting as using your cell phone to make calls or send a text message, according to research. A team discovered that while notifications are short in duration, they tend to trigger task-irrelevant thoughts or mind wandering that damages task performance.

The team explained that task performance takes a hit because humans have a limited capacity for attention that needs to be split between tasks. The researchers also emphasized that just being aware of a missed text or call can have the same effect.

If you need to stay on track and focused, it might be worth either turning off your cell phone, setting it to silent, or putting it away somewhere that you cannot see it.

The curiosity of checking personal social media accounts can often be overwhelming, but research indicates that there are negative consequences when using social media during office hours.

Approximately 2.8 billion people worldwide use social media, and many of those use social media for personal purpose while at work. Using social media during working hours has been revealed to have an adverse effect on self-reported work performance and concentration, and the well-being of the organization.

Fighting the urge to use social media while you need to concentrate may help to improve your productivity and concentration.

Other research demonstrates how to take the best type of break to boost energy, motivation, and concentration. Researchers recommend taking:

• a mid-morning break to replenish concentration
• better breaks by doing something you enjoy, which should make your break more restful, provide better recovery, and help you to come back to worked focused
• frequent short breaks to facilitate recovery

Taking breaks earlier in the day and doing preferred activities lead to better health, job satisfaction, and revival of energy, motivation, and concentration. Workers also experienced fewer headaches, eyestrain, and lower back pain after their break.