RESEARCH & IDEAS

Breaking the SmartphoneAddictionPublished: May 14, 2012

In her new book, Sleeping With YourSmartphone, Leslie Perlow explains how asmall group of high-powered consultants madea concerted effort to disconnect from theirmobile devices for a few predetermined hoursevery week—and how they became moreproductive as a result. This excerpt from thebook introduces the idea the scheduleddisconnecting process, dubbed "predictabletime off," which helped these phone-addledemployees to take better control of both theirworkdays and their lives.

Editor's note: Check out the crowd at aconcert, a movie, a school play, a beach—heck,even a funeral—and you'll likely see severalpeople sneaking prolonged peeks at theirsmartphones. They just can't help themselves.Ringtones and message alerts are siren songsthat lure them back to the world of work, nomatter where they are.

"Let's face it," writes HBS Professor LesliePerlow. "When that phone buzzes, few of ushave the mental fortitude to ignore it."

In her new book, Sleeping With YourSmartphone, Perlow explains how a smallgroup of high-powered consultants made aconcerted effort to disconnect from theirdevices for a few predetermined hours everyweek—and how they became more productiveas a result. The following excerpt from the bookdescribes how the scheduled disconnectingprocess, dubbed "predictable time off," helpedthese phone-addled employees to take bettercontrol of both their workdays and their lives.

Excerpt from Sleeping WithYour Smartphone

It all began with anexperiment that myresearch associateand collaborator,Jessica Porter, and Iinitiated in order toexplore whether onesix-person "caseteam" at one of theworld's most eliteand demandingprofessional servicefirms—The Boston

Consulting Group (BCG)—could work togetherto ensure that they each could truly disconnectfrom work for a scheduled unit of time eachweek. This modest experiment generated suchpowerful results-not just for individuals' worklives but for the team's work process andultimately the client—that the experiment wasexpanded to more and more of BCG's teams.Four years later, over nine hundred BCG teamsfrom thirty countries on five continents hadparticipated.

Sleeping with Your Smartphone sharesBCG's story. It also serves as a guide foranyone who is on a team or leads ateam—whether a junior or senior manager,from big organizations or small, in the UnitedStates or abroad—and wants to make theimpossible possible: turning off more, whileimproving the work process itself. Sleeping withYour Smartphone proposes a way to makeexactly that happen: a process testedsuccessfully by BCG teams in North America,South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Aprocess I have seen implemented with good andnot-so-good managers; on big and small teams,with tight deadlines and less pressingdeliverables. A process that I have come to call"PTO"—because at the core, when people worktogether to create "predictable time off," people,teams, and ultimately the organization all standto benefit.

To be clear, PTO won't solve all yourproblems. Nor is it about being always off in aworld that is always on. Rather, it is aboutincremental changes that promise to improveyour work-life and your work in ways thatmake them notably better.

Creating Change Where NoOne Could Even Imagine It

I chose to conduct the original experiment atThe Boston Consulting Group because therewas widespread skepticism about the possibilityof such hard-charging professionals turning off."It has to be this way," explained oneconsultant, echoing many of his colleagues. "Itis the nature of the work. Clients pay huge sumsof money and expect—and deserve—thehighest-quality service."

"When people worktogether to create'predictable time off,'people, teams, andultimately the organizationall stand to benefit."Most consultants simply accepted the

resulting demands on their time as the pricethey had to pay for annual salaries of well over$100,000 for recent business school graduatesto millions of dollars for the most seniorpartners, as well as for unequaled exposure tocolleagues and clients of the highest caliberworking together to tackle pressing problemsfaced by the world's leading organizations, notto mention résumé building work experience.Moreover, many actually thrived on theintensity of the work and did not want it to bedifferent. Even those who wanted more time fortheir personal lives presumed they had noalternative but to leave the firm to achieve it,and many did, including some of BCG's mosttalented consultants. I figured that if changecould be fostered here, it could be made tohappen most anywhere.

Imagine my delight then, when four yearsafter we conducted our first experiment atBCG's Boston office, 86 percent of theconsulting staff in the firm's Northeastoffices—including Boston, New York, andWashington, DC—were on teams engaged insimilar PTO experiments. These team memberswere much more likely than their colleagues onteams not participating in PTO to rate theiroverall satisfaction with work and work-life

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positively. For example:• 51 percent (versus 27 percent) were excited

to start work in the morning• 72 percent (versus 49 percent) were satisfied

with their job• 54 percent (versus 38 percent) were satisfied

with their work-life balanceWe also discovered that significantly more

of those on PTO teams found the work processto be collaborative, efficient, and effective.• 91 percent (versus 76 percent) rated their

team as collaborative• 65 percent (versus 42 percent) rated their

team as doing everything it could to beefficient

• 74 percent (versus 51 percent) rated theirteam as doing everything it could to beeffectiveThe happy result for BCG was that

individuals engaged in PTO experiments weremore likely to see themselves at the firm for thelong term (58 percent versus 40 percent) andwere more likely to perceive that they wereproviding significant value to their clients (95percent versus 84 percent). BCG clientsreported a range of experiences with PTO teamsfrom neutral (nothing dropped through thecracks) to extremely positive (they reapedsignificant benefits). According to BCG's CEO,Hans-Paul Bürkner, the process unleashed bythese experiments "has proven not only toenhance work-life balance, making careersmuch more sustainable, but also to improveclient value delivery, consultant development,business services team effectiveness, andoverall case experience. It is becoming part ofthe culture—the future of BCG."

The Cycle ofResponsiveness: The Root ofthe 24/7 Habit

The reason PTO can be so effective for bothindividuals' work-lives and the work itself: busymanagers and professionals tend toamplify—through their own actions andinteractions—the inevitable pressures of theirjobs, making their own and their colleagues'lives more intense, more overwhelming, moredemanding, and less fulfilling than they need tobe. The result of this vicious cycle is that thework process ends up being less effective andefficient than it could be. The power of PTO isthat it breaks this cycle, mitigating the pressure,freeing individuals to spend time in ways thatare more desirable for themselves personallyand for the work process.

The initial discovery that illuminated all of

this emerged from one of the surveys weconducted of sixteen hundred managers andprofessionals.

Of this sample, 92 percent reported puttingin fifty or more hours of work a week. A thirdof this group was working sixty-five or morehours a week. And that doesn't include thetwenty to twenty-five hours per week most ofthem reported monitoring their work while notactually working: 70 percent admitted tochecking their smartphone each day within anhour after getting up, and 56 percent did sowithin an hour before going to bed. Weekendsoffered no let-up: 48 percent checked over theweekend, even on Friday and Saturday nights.Vacations were no better: 51 percent checkedcontinuously when on vacation. If they losttheir wireless device and couldn't replace it fora week, 44 percent of those surveyed said theywould experience "a great deal of anxiety."

And 26 percent confessed to sleeping withtheir smartphones. Simply put, people were"on" a great deal.

We defined on as the time people spentworking plus all the additional time they wereavailable, monitoring their work in casesomething came up. And, we discovered thatthose whose workweek was more unpredictabletended to be on more. That was not surprising.What caught our attention was that the morepeople were on, the more unpredictable theirwork time seemed to become. By beingconstantly connected to work, they seemed tobe reinforcing—and worse, amplifying—thevery pressures that caused them to need to beavailable.

Our respondents were caught in what wehave come to call the cycle of responsiveness.The pressure to be on usually stems from someseemingly legitimate reason, such as requestsfrom clients or customers or teammates indifferent time zones. People begin adjusting tothese demands—adapting the technology theyuse, altering their daily schedules, the way theywork, even the way they live their lives andinteract with their families and friends—to bebetter able to meet the increased demands ontheir time. Once colleagues experience thisincreased responsiveness, their own requestsexpand. Already working long hours, most justaccept these additional demands—whether theyare urgent or not—and those who don't riskbeing branded as less committed to their work.

And thus the cycle spins: teammates,superiors and subordinates continue to makemore requests, and conscientious employeesaccept these marginal increases in demands ontheir time, while their expectations of each

other (and themselves) rise accordingly.Eventually, the cycle grows (unintentionally)vicious; most people don't notice that they arespinning their way into a 24/7 workweek. Andeven if they begin resenting how much theirwork is spilling into their personal lives, theyfail to recognize that they are their own worstenemy, the source of much of the pressure thatthey attribute to the nature of their business.

Imagine instead that people were not soaccommodating and decided to find alternativeways to do the work. Imagine the upside of nolonger having to accommodate to all thepressure to be on.

Imagine if in the process of making thispossible, new ways of working were discoveredthat were more efficient and effective. Considerthe win not just for individuals but also for theorganization. The power of PTO is that it makesthis all come true—by breaking the cycle ofresponsiveness.

Reprinted by permission of HarvardBusiness Review Press. Excerpt from SleepingWith Your Smartphone. Copyright 2012 LeslieA. Perlow All rights reserved.

Note to readers:Do you think your team ororganization could worktogether to create"predictable time off" fromyour mobile devices? Tell uswhy (or why not) in thecomments section, and youcould win a free copy ofProfessor Perlow's book,"Sleeping With YourSmartphone." Be sure toprovide your email addresswhen commenting so that wecan get in touch with you ifyou're a winner. (Yourcontact info will not appearonline.)

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