Is your Smartphone decreasing your productivity?

The excerpt below breaks down nicely how smartphones have become a disruptive technology in the workplace.  Employer provided smartphones are assumed by the employer to increase productivity.  Although, that doesn’t seem to be the case.   The amount of time to create a response to an email on a smartphone is significantly higher than creating that same email on a computer.  The benefit of having the smartphone is lost by the lower output of productivity.  Employee’s that have access to their emails also feel a sense of urgency to respond to every email that is delivered.   It may be helpful to be able to instantly answer an email but more complex topics, that require further research, are not always efficient to respond to on a smarthphone.  Complex topics often take a thorough analysis of data before responding.  A pc would be a better platform to analyze data before responding and reduce response times.   

 

BlackBerry (and its competitors) have made a fortune off the myth of efficiency. The reason BlackBerry is so popular with corporations is the idea that now people can be working while waiting in lines at the airport.* (Judging from the ads, this is the core use case.) That time is now money, at least according to the efficiency theory. But what are people doing? They are clearing out emails. If there is any benefit to anyone, it is that they will spend a little less time in the evening clearing out emails on their computers; but they won’t be doing any other work, because the length of their workday isn’t set by a clock, but by their sense of when they’ve done enough for the day. (For a lot of people, their willingness to knock off at the end of the day is related to the amount of email left in their inboxes.)

In addition, a lot of the supposed BlackBerry benefit is destroyed by four factors. First, working on a BlackBerry is less efficient than working on a computer (it takes more time to get the same stuff done), so some of your benefit (time waiting in line) is wasted in lower productivity. Second, checking your email constantly causes you to respond to emails and deal with issues that you could have simply ignored had you waited until you got home or to your hotel (since questions or issues posed in email often resolve themselves if you simply wait a few hours). Third, having a BlackBerry causes you to spend more time on email than you need to, because you can. Fourth, the quality of work you do on a BlackBerry is lower than on a computer. For example, with a computer, you can answer a question by finding a specific data source and actually finding the answer; with a BlackBerry, you are more likely to give an unhelpful answer like “try looking at source X,” which you may have misidentified, and which is less helpful to the person asking the question. But people lobby their companies to pay for their BlackBerrys because they want them, and companies often agree because they think they’re getting a more efficient workforce.

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/02/11/the-myth-of-efficiency/