For a class assignment this week we were asked to keep track of our media use, and record observations about our digital consumption for an entire day.  My results were rather disturbing, at least to me.  I was working from home on this particular day, so I was already guaranteed to spend eight hours or more on my laptop consuming and regurgitating email with occasional “breaks” for meetings via conference calls.  Indeed, I was on my laptop most of my day, and even when I was on conference calls, I was simultaneously typing meeting minutes if I was running the meeting or trying to sneak in snatches of other work if I was listening to a call that someone else was leading.  In spite of the many studies showing that multitasking is not possible, I still have a difficult time fighting the illusion that I’m being more productive by attempting two or more things at once.  So while I’m creating a document on my computer and concurrently taking a conference call, my computer or phone may beep with an instant message, text, or another phone call that suddenly demands my attention as well.  By the end of a day like this, I often feel like I have a bad case of ADHD.  I have difficulty concentrating on a single task for long and I feel physically and emotionally exhausted even though I haven’t moved from my chair for much of the day.

Another thing that I noticed was how often I became distracted by my smartphone.  When I would complete a task, my tendency was to reward myself by checking the news, my investments, or my email on my smartphone.  Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there.  Usually, as I was rewarding myself with one of these, I would find myself drawn into something else.  For example, a quick glance at my stock market app would show that the market was declining.  Then, I’d want to know why it was declining, so I’d open my Wall Street Journal app to find an article explaining the current direction of the market.  Then I’d be distracted by a second article or by a new notification pinging my phone and I’d be off on a completely different tangent.  At one point, a two second glance at my stock market app turned into a 15 minute time wasting odyssey.

Since the day that I recorded my digital consumption habits, I have thought about what steps I could take to overcome some of these habits that were decreasing my productivity.  I have found that I can avoid a lot of wasted time just by keeping my smartphone out of sight and further than an arm’s length away.  When I don’t have it in my line of sight or if I have to get up and walk across the room to access it, I am much less likely to be drawn into a pattern of mindlessly skipping from app to app searching for fresh content as a reward.  I haven’t found a way to eliminate multi-tasking completely, because assigning someone else to take meeting minutes for me still feels like doling out cruel and unusual punishment.  Nevertheless, by restricting myself to a single screen at a time, I have found that I can reduce my stress level and most likely improve my productivity at the same time.