Smartphone & Productivity: Perfect Pair or Opposites?

Granted, if used wrong, the smartphone will always be a productivity killer. But we’re not talking about social media, addictive mobile games, or cat videos. No, we’re talking about the real productivity usage of a marvelous technological invention. Video conferencing, scheduling tools, scanning documents, reviewing tasks on the go.

But what about those loud notifications in the middle of a meeting? Or that email that just arrived, it could be important. Smartphones are distraction centers, some would say, and the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. It’s just not worth it. So we are at an impasse: smartphones are a good or a bad thing for your productivity?

The Opposites case

It’s a well-known thing that if you have a smartphone on your desk while you are working, your brain is still wasting energy paying attention to it. Even if it’s not doing anything. Even if the last notification was a few hours ago. People still want to go and check it out. Maybe there’s something new going on on social media. You pick it up, and next thing you know, the work is forgotten and you are watching funny meme videos.

Not only that, smartphones are not necessarily helping us sleep better, are they? Instead of a good night’s rest, we will be browsing and watching our way to a very tired morning the next day and killing our performance at work.

If you work from home, having your smartphone with you during work is even more brutal. It will break the flow of your work, and interrupt your concentration a lot more often. Also, no matter where you work, smartphones can be very stressful. That’s not what working people need, more stress that is. Just not worth it, they say.

The Perfect Pair case

There’s no point in denying that smartphones have changed the very way we do things, the way we think, and the way we organize ourselves in society. Smartphones are powerful computers, capable of doing anything that in previous times would take a lot of different gadgets to do. Someday, it may even replace the computer, but that remains to be seen. Smartphones are technological marvels designed to boost our productivity tenfold, some would say.

It doesn’t matter if you lost 10 minutes watching funny videos on social media, you gained one hour of work using an app to make a task automatically. You can set up schedules and meetings with minimal effort, save time communicating with clients, connect directly with suppliers at any time, and track shipments in real time. In the office, it’s a powerhouse: scanner, voice recorder, whiteboard.

Running a business using a smartphone is that much simpler. There are a lot of productivity apps, document signing apps, travel apps, and payment apps. The list goes on. The benefits of using a smartphone for productivity are much larger than the potential lost in productivity for a few minutes online, they would say.

So, what do you think?