Keep the smartphone out of the bedroom for a good day’s work

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Study shows using smart- phones for work-related activities in the evening leaves you tired the next day

Hoping for a productive day at work tomorrow? Then be sure to switch your smartphone off at 9pm. A new study indicates that using a smartphone for work-related activities in the late evening can leave people tired the next morning, and have a significant impact on a person’s productivity on the job.

Smartphone use strongly correlated to poorer quality sleep, and lower engagement at work the next day, even when directly compared to the use of other screen technologies during the evening, such as television, laptops, and tablets.

“Despite the fact that smart phones were not used as much, the smartphone had at least double the effect the next morning,” says Dr Russell Johnson, assistant professor of management at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the study.

On average, participants in the study spent only five to 10 minutes on their smartphones after 9pm, compared to 45 to 50 minutes watching TV, and 20 minutes on computers. But even that brief period of use was more detrimental to workers. “Only smart phones impacted a person’s engagement at work. As smart phone use went up, you could clearly identify that engagement went down. That’s the finding that surprised me most,” he told The Irish Times this week.

The paper, to be published in the research journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , is based on two studies undertaken by the group, the first of 82 middle- to high-level managers, who completed morning and evening surveys every day for two weeks. The second survey, of 161 employees engaged in a variety of occupations, also included their use of other screen technologies.

Why do the study? “There’s been a lot of speculation about this, and a lot of anecdotal evidence, but really no rigorous scientific investigation of these possibilities,” Johnson says. It also seems that being a Digital Native from a more youthful, digitally adept generation, confers no benefits. Johnson says there was no evidence that younger workers who had grown up with computers, email and the internet coped better.

It also didn’t matter where people featured in the company – whether they were high-level managers or in service work. Whatever their role, smartphones had a negative impact on work productivity the next day. “With these studies, you can look at whether gender affects the results, or age. We didn’t really find anything consistent,” he says.

The only slight moderating factor was how much job autonomy an individual had. People with more autonomy – who would be considered people with more self-control – seemed to be able to re-focus better than those who are in less autonomous jobs.

The studies were set up so that participants had their own smartphone usage compared over time. This would mitigate for potential influencing factors such as whether someone had had a bad night’s sleep the previous night, or had worked late on a given day, or had a particularly challenging work day.

“We wondered, does smartphone use vary more between people, or for one person over time,” says Johnson. “For all of those using smartphones, there was more fluctuation across the days for a single individual, then between people.”

Participants were questioned early in the morning about their device usage and the quality of their night’s sleep, and then again in the late afternoon, to assess how they had functioned at work that day, and how depleted they felt, says Johnson. Participants were only assessed on the basis of their usage of their smartphones for work purposes, not for casual leisure use in the evenings.