Smartphones offer the kind of stimuli our brain is automatically wired to pay attention to. They’re one of the easiest sources of dopamine hits, always within our reach. Every notification, like, or new post from our favorite influencer gives us a pleasant dopamine hit that we easily get addicted to.
59% of the world’s population uses social media, with the average daily usage being 2 hours and 31 minutes globally. American consumers spend around eight hours of their day with digital media. Multitasking with multiple devices and screens is the biggest problem, but browsing social media when we should be focusing on something else also decreases our productivity.
Research shows that people touch their smartphones on average over 2,600 times a day, with heavy users exceeding 5,000 times a day. With such high usage rates, it’s no wonder smartphones are affecting our productivity.
According to research, 77% of workers use social media at work, with only 2% needing it for work tasks. The average employee spends 12% of their working hours using unproductive social media applications.
Is smartphone addiction so common that we’re completely blind to how much this device affects our lives? Are smartphones a modern-day accepted addiction? We accept it in ourselves and other people, without questioning the constant fiddling with smartphones at all. At the same time, it must be admitted that we can’t do our jobs or live our everyday lives without a smartphone. At least running errands and managing our social life would become very complicated.
Attention is a valuable resource to us as individuals and businesses. In the attention economy, attention isn’t only a resource but a currency: users pay for a service with their attention. There are no free apps, really. We just change the currency from euros or dollars to our attention. All the social media apps, and also some mobile games, news apps, and similar “free services”, are competing for our attention.
Social media steals our attention and causes addiction very effectively. They’re designed to cause FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. FOMO correlates with lower mood and life satisfaction and is linked to problematic social media usage.
To combat smartphone addiction and regain focus:
- Before starting to work on a task, write “WHY” on a Post-it.
- Put the Post-it on your smartphone.
- Every time your hand grabs a phone, ask yourself: WHY am I checking the phone right now? Do I really need anything from the phone? Does the use of the phone heighten or impair my performance and productivity with the task I’m working on?
Remember, being offline is freedom! Try it out.
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