It almost became one of the posters of the “Tl;dr and Walk Away” category, but one of the extremely enthusiastic co-creators of it roped me in.
The title:“How Your Phone is Ruining Your Study Habits”
The gist:The poster creators did a correlational study between phone/laptop/phone & laptop use and procrastination.
The methods:This is the best part. These two guys just creeped on and stared at people in the City College library for hours, noting if the selected targets were phone only, laptop only, or phone & laptop users, and counted the amount of times they deviated from assignment-looking type things. Facebook? Strike one. Text messages? Strike two. Tinder? Dear Lord, strike three, and they were out.
The conclusions:Turns out, our worst fears are confirmed. Phone only, laptop only, and phone & laptop use all proved to have strong correlations with procrastination and distraction from work.
Great poster, but…
Looks like the nomophobes will have to give the phones a rest. As for those Macaulay laptops, maybe a little Self Control will suffice.
Nah, Leslie. We’ll siriously be alright.
Sorry to Candy Crush your dreams,
Alex
I adore your puns!
I think it is hysterical and also creepy that they stared at people and watched their every move. I actually discussed this somewhat with a friend and we realized that we are the laptop kind of people. Yes, I procrastinate with texting but the texting is done on my computer! With Macaulay and Apple’s combined effort, I can procrastinate completely with just my laptop without losing out on anything on my phone… it’s all on the computer. I’m just glad that those guys didn’t get a chance to look at me go on all the messaging apps, social media sites, and Netflix instead of doing work. This is definitely something that I think everyone relates to on some level.
Yes, I’m guilty as well. I also appreciate the links you embed in your post. I did not know what TL;DR meant. And there is no way I’m installing Self Control on my Mac.
First off, I like what you wrote, but also how you wrote it 🙂 I second Chris’s adoration of your puns!
The poster you commented on actually reminded me of a study I read for my psych statistics class, called “The attentional cost of receiving a cellphone notification”. Although it was probably less fun than stalking strangers at the library, they actually set up a controlled experiment to see if phone calls and text message notifications hindered attention-demanding tasks, and found that it did. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
“We found that cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task. The magnitude of observed distraction effects was comparable in magnitude to those seen when users actively used a mobile phone, either for voice calls or text messaging.”
Pretty cool that both experiments came to the same conclusion, it really drives the point home.