Silence your phone: a week of alerts raised inattention
In a within-person experiment, people reported more inattention during a week with phone alerts on than during a week with them off — and inattention predicted lower productivity.
The short version
When the same people spent one week with phone alerts on and their phone within reach, and another week with alerts off and the phone put away, they reported more inattention and hyperactivity during the alerts-on week. People who felt more inattentive in turn felt less productive and reported lower psychological well-being. The fix the authors point to is simple: change your notification settings.
What the researchers did
The study recruited 221 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia from the general student pool — not people diagnosed with ADHD. At the start, everyone reported how often their phone interrupted them during 14 everyday activities, along with their levels of inattention and hyperactivity (using 18 items based on ADHD diagnostic criteria), productivity and several aspects of well-being.
Then came a two-week experiment in which each person experienced both conditions, in counterbalanced order:
- Interrupt week: alerts on (sound, vibration or lights) and the phone kept within sight or reach.
- Do-not-interrupt week: Do Not Disturb on, and the phone kept out of sight, for example in a bag.
Participants filled in short daily surveys and a longer survey at the end of each week.
What they found
- At baseline, people who felt more often interrupted by their phone also reported more inattention and hyperactivity.
- In the experiment, participants reported higher inattention and higher hyperactivity in the alerts-on week than the alerts-off week. The authors describe both effects as medium-sized (d = 0.44 and 0.45).
- The manipulation did not directly change productivity or well-being within a week. But to the extent people felt more inattentive in the alerts-on week, they also felt less productive, less socially connected, less in control of their environment and found less meaning in daily life.
Limits and caveats
All measures were self-reported, and participants knew which week they were in, so their expectations about phones could have colored their answers — although the baseline correlations, collected before any assignment, pointed the same way. The participants were mostly young students. The authors also tested many outcomes in an exploratory way and call the work groundwork for confirmatory research. Finally, they note that switching alerts off can make some people anxious about missing messages and lead them to check more, not less.
What it means for how you work
For focused work, turning alerts off and putting the phone out of reach is a low-cost change with experimental support behind it. Because going fully silent can backfire for some people, a middle path — receiving notifications in a few scheduled batches — may be easier to sustain (Fitz et al., 2019). Note that this study combined alerts and physical distance; the evidence that a phone's mere presence harms thinking is much weaker (Hartanto et al., 2024).