Doubling the Chances of Being Excited Going into Work Tomorrow Morning

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Many of us have a love-hate rela­tion­ship with our Smartphone.

We love the fact that it makes us more effi­cient. We hate the extent to which it has con­trol over us.

But there’s a deeper, more fun­da­men­tal prob­lem at play here. There are grow­ing indi­ca­tions that for some peo­ple, Smartphone’s lead not only to dis­trac­tion but to burnout and reduced moti­va­tion. Ulti­mately, smart­phones can actu­ally reduce pro­duc­tiv­ity rather than increase it.

And it gets worse: A grow­ing num­ber of users’ rela­tion­ship with their smart­phone fits the clas­sic def­i­n­i­tion of addic­tion, caus­ing the same out­comes as addic­tion to alco­hol, drugs, gam­bling or food; obses­sive pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, con­tin­ued use despite neg­a­tive con­se­quences and denial. Extreme Smart­phone use meets another cri­te­rion for addic­tion; imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion and short-term rewards, cou­pled with delayed neg­a­tive effects and long-term costs.

Hap­pily, there is a solu­tion. Recent research has unveiled a sim­ple strat­egy that allows users to enjoy the ben­e­fits of Smartphone’s while sig­nif­i­cantly reduc­ing the neg­a­tive effects.

Address­ing always-on fatigue:

Har­vard Busi­ness School fac­ulty mem­ber Leslie Per­row has stud­ied this issue at length. And in her recent book “Sleep­ing with Your Smart­phone: How to Break the 24–7 Habit and Change the Way You Work,” she describes a suc­cess­ful exper­i­ment to address the men­tal fatigue that accom­pa­nies an always-on psyche.

The research was con­ducted with high-powered con­sul­tants at strat­egy firm Boston Con­sult­ing Group, imple­ment­ing some­thing called PTO; Pre­dictable Time Off. The essence of PTO is to agree to after­noons or evenings com­pletely cut off from work and wire­less devices; pre­de­ter­mined black­out peri­ods when emails are nei­ther sent nor read and unin­ter­rupted time peri­ods that allow for greater focus.

Four years later, what started off with one team had spread to 900 teams in 30 coun­tries. The rea­son, quite sim­ply, is because what hap­pened to key atti­tudes among par­tic­i­pants in the PTO experiment:

As you think about your own sit­u­a­tion and that of your team, con­sider whether pre­dictable time off could func­tion for you in the same way that it did for Boston Con­sult­ing Group, both at work and at home. By imple­ment­ing this one sim­ple strat­egy, you could become hap­pier and more effec­tive in both your busi­ness and your per­sonal life.

And there’s another ben­e­fit also, you could avoid being viewed as a “hap­less zom­bie.” A phrase used in a very funny April arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal on the impact of the no-smartphone rule at the US Mas­ters golf tour­na­ment. Here’s how the arti­cle began:

Nav­i­gat­ing a no-phone zone:

“Every­body knows that smart phones have inhaled civ­i­liza­tion; sure, there’s a cer­tain, breath­tak­ing level of con­ve­nience, and Bog­gle for the iPhone deserves a Nobel Prize, but it’s time to admit that we’re all incur­ably addicted, that we look like hap­less zom­bies peck­ing at them all day, and would prob­a­bly be at least 80% hap­pier if we drove to the near­est bridge and chucked it in the river. We’re los­ing our abil­ity to social­ize and even speak—phones ruin din­ners, meet­ings, wed­dings and even hon­ey­moons, to say noth­ing of the deadly cra­zies who break them out in the driver’s seat.”

“Phones have also sucked energy out of sport­ing events; you can’t go to a game with­out see­ing hun­dreds of fans with their faces buried in tiny screens, send­ing texts and Tweets and tak­ing hor­ri­ble pho­tos to prove on Face­book they’re actu­ally there.”

Here’s a link to the full Wall Street Jour­nal article:

http://​online​.wsj​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​S​B​1​0​0​0​1​4​2​4​0​5​2​7​0​2​3​0​3​3​0​2​5​0​4​5​7​7​3​2​5​8​1​2​1​4​2​6​5​2​9​9​8​.​h​tml

And click here for an arti­cle describ­ing the PTO research:

http://​blogs​.hbr​.org/​h​b​s​f​a​c​u​l​t​y​/​2​0​1​2​/​0​5​/​a​r​e​-​y​o​u​-​s​l​e​e​p​i​n​g​-​w​i​t​h​-​y​o​u​r​-​s​m​a​.​h​tml

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Tags: Afternoons, Alcohol Drugs, Blackout Periods, Boston Consulting Group, Burnout, Business School Faculty, Faculty Member, Fundamental Problem, Harvard Business School, Immediate Gratification, Mental Fatigue, Negative Consequences, Obsessive Preoccupation, Perrow, Smartphone, Strategy Firm, Term Rewards, Time Periods, Uninterrupted Time, Work Tomorrow
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