Insane Phone Hack to Increase Productivity

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the pod. I want to share with you this crazy thing I just learned, which came from a research article that came out a while back. I can’t remember who published the article, but this is mind blowing stuff. It’s all around productivity, around focus, about keeping your mind on the task in front of you. It is a simple hack that you can use, I guarantee, to improve your productivity. It’s kind of hard to wrap my mind around how these results. So what the research found is that you can improve your productivity simply by working with your phone in another room. And I know that sounds like really stupid, but here’s the corollary.

Here’s the flip side of how they found this out. What they first studied was, what is the effect of having your phone on your desk screen up facing the sky? And what they found is that just by having the phone on the screen, even if the phone is not turned on, it was still impacting people’s faces, focused in their productivity during that time for whatever reason. There’s this part of your brain that leaves this open cognitive loop when you have your phone sitting on the desk beside you. That’s what they found. And it’s remarkable the amount of an effect that this had on people’s ability to focus. And another aspect of this that they studied was just having your phone on the table when you’re sitting talking to somebody else. Now, we already know that, like sitting with your phone out, when you’re sitting at dinner with a loved one or at a business meeting, it’s kind of the wrong signal to send. It says, you’re not fully present.

You’re keeping your phone there because there might be a message that comes in that’s somehow more important than what you’re doing right now in this instant. That’s not necessarily the best message that you want to send to the other person that says, hey, you’re important to me, you mean something. So what you can do to often signal to somebody to really make them feel special is when you first sit down and you take out your phone and you make a show of saying, hey, just let me turn off my phone real quick so I want to be fully present for this conversation. Turn it off and then put it back away. That right there is actually a really hack for improving or increasing your, we’ll say, charisma, or the likability that you have with the other person, the feeling that you are giving them your undivided attention, that you’re making a show of saying, look, I’m going to give you everything that I have in these next hour time together. Right? That right there is really powerful. But the fact that this has a powerful effect even when you’re working on your own in, you know, your, your office, just by taking your phone and putting into the other room, you’re no longer wasting leaking mental bandwidth towards your phone. You’re no longer worrying is a message coming in.
You’re no longer tempted in that instant of boredom to reach over, grab your phone and double check something. I know I’m so guilty of this personally. So seeing this result kind of like exemplifies I’m, that I’m the poster child of this. If I’m working with my phone nearby, I’m constantly looking. I’m grabbing it instinctively. And so just by putting into another room, you can instantly improve your productivity and increase the quality of your focus, which we know quality of our results is dictated by the quality of our focus. So if we want better results, we need better focus. This is a very simple way of getting it.
So try it out. Take your phone when you’re going into your deep work sessions, put it into another room entirely. Don’t even be tempted. Don’t just turn it off and put it in the rooms. Like put it away, out of sight, out of mind. So often in my life, what I found really interesting is when I have forgotten where my phone is, sometimes I’ll wake up in the morning and I won’t grab my phone in the first hour. I try not to look at my phone in the first hour, but sometimes I won’t even like pick it up after that hour and do anything. I’ll just go straight into my deep work session and what can happen is like four or 5 hours goes by and I have no clue where my phone is.

And something magical happens where when you forget that your phone even exists, you can go into this incredible state of productivity, almost like the flow state, just simply because you’re not being distracted by this, this tool of mass distraction. So give this a shot. Play with it. Put your phone away. Use that little hack that I shared with you before about sitting down in meetings, sitting down with loved ones for dinner, whatever it is, make a show of saying, hey, I want to make sure I’ll give you my full undivided attention. Turn off your phone right in front of them. Put them away. Also, it’ll make them want to do the same and reciprocate.

So now they’re not getting distracted during the, the midst of your conversation. They can be fully present for you as well. So that is a very powerful trick that I’ve used to great effect over the years. So hope this brings you some value. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.