What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Check your phone? Maybe browse your emails, or check social media feeds to see what you’ve missed while you were sleeping?
Our average day is a collage of screen gazing: idly playing games or scrolling through messages on our commute, sitting at our desks hunched over a computer, watching TV in the evening, all interspersed with a constant refreshing of emails and social media on our phones. According to a 2014 Ofcom survey, UK adults spend more time looking at screens each day (eight hours and 41 minutes) than they do asleep.
“I realised a few years ago from growing my business that actually I was making myself ill from constantly being connected, working until bedtime and then getting up and working again,” says James Eades, managing director of IT support company Systemagic. Before being diagnosed with stress and exhaustion by his doctor, Eades says, he’d spend his days at work at his desk, or in meetings with clients, and his evenings at home on his laptop answering emails. “I wasn’t having time to recover from being at work,” he says.
“The advent of all the tech we use has been so fast, that it’s landed and we’ve not had time to think, actually, how do we want to use this?” says psychotherapist Jennie Miller, an expert in workplace boundaries. She says being online and connected all the time has become an unspoken office culture that’s hard for people to step away from.
Eades says before getting a wakeup call from his doctor, he’d assumed that always being connected and thinking about the business was an inevitable part of running his own company. “But I’ve realised it wasn’t healthy for me or the business,” he says. Now James takes at least one 24-hour break from all devices per month, he says, and only answers emails during normal working hours.
Psychologist Tanya Lucas, a partner at advisory firm Transform Performance International, explains that our brains aren’t designed to pay attention for hours at a time. “The evidence shows that the brain cycles from the highest attention to lowest attention every 90 minutes; so you can only maintain focus for 90 minutes before [your brain]needs a rest,” she says.
Matt Fox, co-founder and CEO of last-minute cottage holiday hub Snaptrip, also believes there’s often an “unwritten rule” about putting in extra hours, which he wanted to dispel in his organisation. Staff at Snaptrip are discouraged from taking phones to lunch or checking work emails outside of office hours.
“We spend more time speaking to customers via online chat than over the phone, so we’re very conscious of the need for some time away from [screens],” he explains. “By being open it eliminates any confusion of obligation outside of the office. We would rather people relax outside of the office so that energy is brought into the workplace.”
Since implementing rules to ensure his staff had regular screen breaks, creativity and productivity have improved, he says. One of the most noticeable differences has been in meetings, when staff are asked to put their phones in the centre of the table. “We always see a massive increase in focus when we [do this],” he says.
According to Lucas, psychological evidence suggests that removing the distraction of devices at work will improve productivity. She says that while we may think we’re multitasking, we’re actually just switching between tasks very quickly. “There’s a big cognitive cost in doing that. We actually ignore the task that’s not right in front of us at the time, and that causes worry and stress. This actually makes us less efficient, and it’s been found to increase our production of the stress hormone, cortisol, and the fight-or-flight hormone, adrenaline.”
It’s not just mental fatigue; Tanguy Peers, co-founder of pet-sitting app Pawshake, says that one of his reasons for implementing regular desk breaks when he launched the company was because of the repetitive strain injury he’d sustained in his arms from constant keyboard use in his previous job at Ebay.
A survey by the British Association of Chiropractors of 2,000 adults who experience back or neck pain found that 56% of them reported pain after using some form of tech device. Almost half (45%) of 25-34 year-olds said they experienced pain after using a laptop.
But changing the culture of a company is easier said than done: after all, old habits die hard. “It has to be modelled by the senior staff,” says Miller. For staff that habitually work through lunch, she recommends encouraging them to take 15 minutes away from their desks to start with and build up to an hour.
After feeling the benefits of limiting his own screen time, Eades wants to bring those changes to his team as well. Earlier this year, Systemagic moved offices to a new workspace in a more rural location, partly to encourage the staff to get away from their desks at lunch. “We realised that a lot of the team were sitting at their desk through lunch because there wasn’t really anywhere to go,” he says. “Productivity does go down the longer they’re sat at their desk.”
Now, they can go for a walk or do some exercise outside in their lunch break (there are shower facilities at the new office). “The impact has been outstanding. The atmosphere is totally different.”
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