Late-night smartphone usage hampers work productivity

Using a smartphone late at night hampers productivity at work the next day, a recent study found. 

The research conducted by a Michigan State University business scholar indicated that people who used their smartphone after 9 p.m. showed more tiredness and less engagement at their workplace the following day. 

Russell Johnson, the MSU assistant professor who led the study, said that smartphones are “perfectly designed to disrupt sleep,” he said.

“Because they keep us mentally engaged late into the evening, they make it hard to detach from work so we can relax and fall asleep.”

Johnson and his colleagues asked 82 upper-level managers and 161 employees to answer questionnaires on their smartphone usage for business purposes, the amount of sleep they got and their work performance the next day. The researchers also compared the usage of smartphones with other electronic devices.

The result showed that monitoring one’s smartphone at nighttime disrupts sleep and saps a worker’s energy at the office. It found that smartphones had a greater negative effect than using tablet PCs and watching TV.

“So it can be a double-edged sword,” Johnson said. “The nighttime use of smartphones appears to have both psychological and physiological effects on people‘s ability to sleep and on sleep’s essential recovery functions.”

The study will appear in the research journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

(khnews@heraldcorp.com)