10 smartphone habits that are getting in the way of your success

smartphone work

The smartphone has given us instantaneous connection and access to limitless information, while helping keep our lives in order.
However, spending too much time on social media, constantly receiving notifications, and sleeping near your smartphone could be hurting your productivity more than you think.
Here are 10 smartphone habits that are ruining your productivity, according to experts.
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Being on your phone at work, once the sign of a bad employee, is now the norm.

Text messages are "making deep inroads" in workplaces across America, says Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen. Yet messaging your boss can lead to accidental texts like "Love you" or "pumpkinbear."

"While email helps silo work communications, the text inbox is a more blended affair, where notes from friends and family jostle with communiqués from bosses and co-workers," Chen writes.

Besides awkward text exchanges, there are other miscues many employees can make as smartphones become more commonplace at work. For instance, overusing your phone or constantly getting bombarded with notifications can lead to decreased productivity.

"Productivity is often at its apex during a flow state," when a person is fully immersed in an activity, NYC-based psychotherapist Jordana Jacobs told Business Insider.

According to Jacobs, while phones are great for the technology they provide, they also feed into our natural distracted state. Cell phones take us out of the flow state, "which is so fundamental to productivity," she said. "Essentially, we are consistently interrupting our own thought process," she said. To put it simply, our phones "take us away from 'the now,'" she added.

It's probably not plausible for you to get rid of your phone at work completely, but you can still take steps to keep it from getting in the way of your goals.

The first step to being more productive is identifying all the ways our phones keep us from staying focused. Jacobs and Jonathan Alpert, psychotherapist and author of "Be Fearless: Change Your Life in 28 Days," broke down the phone habits that are ruining our productivity:

This article was originally written by Audrey Noble.

Mindlessly checking emails on your phone can easily take you out of the flow state that productivity requires.

According to Jacobs, smartphones take us out of being in the present. When we're constantly checking those work and personal emails, she said it puts us in the mindset of, "I'm doing this rather than just being where I am now."

Constantly taking out your smartphone to take a photo can keep you from being in the moment.

One of the perks of today's smartphones is that they double as high-quality cameras.

While it's great to want to take a picture here and there to have a keepsake of a particular moment, Jacobs said that playing paparazzi in our own lives is another way of taking us from living in the now.

Checking social media on a smartphone makes us obsessed with what everyone else is doing at the expense of the actual task in front of us.

Social media can feed our obsession with other people's lives, but Jacobs said it's also a platform for us to brag to our followers about what we are doing or have done.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider