2 BZ 2 FNSH: Is Smartphone Use Wasting Time?

How much time do you think you spend on your smartphone each day? Your answer will be different depending on your generation, but a recent survey by Experian Marketing Services determined that on an average, adult Americans spend one hour of their day using a smartphone. If you're part of the younger generation then that number probably seems quite low.

Based on this one hour a day metric, you spend 15 days a year on your phone. That's a significant amount of time if you think about it, and this survey only covers smartphone use. There are plenty of other mobile devices we use throughout the day such as tablets, media players, netbooks, and PDA's all of which make a large impact on our day to day lives. We tend to use these devices to juggle between things such as checking our e-mail, text messaging, changing our social status etc. all the while we try to complete our main task.

We may think that multitasking improves our productivity, but recent research has proven otherwise. Carnegie Mellon University found that the rapid toggling between tasks has decreased our quality of work. They conducted the research on two different groups answering test questions. One group answered questions completely uninterrupted while the other was submitted to various smartphone interruptions. The interrupted group answered incorrectly 20% more than the uninterrupted group. A 20% decrease in productivity and work quality is a big number in relation to a business atmosphere.

Another study, from University of California at Irvine, found that an average office worker receives an interruption every 11 minutes and takes 25 minutes to recover. While you can't control every aspect of interruption in your office, these numbers are alarming enough to have some form of control over them. A company policy regarding mobile devices may not be enough. Employee's having free access to the web can still fall victim to these statistics. You need to implement a Unified Threat Management device, also known as a UTM.

A UTM can help thwart these interruptions by filtering user specific access to specific websites like social networking sites, microblogging sites, or personal e-mail. That's not all a Unified Threat Management device can do. Think of it as an all-in one security device. It provides a firewall, gateway anti-virus and anti-spam, bandwidth balancing, VPN, and application control all in one location. This cuts the cost of using multiple devices at the point of control that do the same thing. To learn more about how a UTM can save you money and increase your productivity, contact Computerware at (703) 821-8200.