A young woman wearing sunglasses typing on her laptop with her smartphone pressed between her ear and shoulder.
Image: © Drobot Dean/Stock.adobe.com

Could your phone be absolutely destroying your productivity?

26 Oct 2018

This week in Careers, we got an exclusive look at some of the most cutting-edge tech companies operating in Ireland and learned the value of disabling your notifications.

We live in a distracting world that is constantly pulling at all sides to get our attention. Think of a toddler tugging at the frayed hem of their parent’s sweater while they’re on the phone – multiply that by about 100 and it is a comparable metaphor of the constant battle your brain is waging to stay on task.

We previously reported on a survey from Udemy, which found that more than half of workers admitted that compulsively checking social media is distracting at work. For millennial workers, almost 70pc say that checking personal devices is a huge source of distraction.

The functionality of smartphones has only risen with time and, as such, their importance has intensified. These days, people can – and do – complete virtually any working day task from their phone. It is impractical to suggest getting rid of personal devices to spare yourself the distraction, yet does that mean there’s no solution?

Not necessarily. This week, we spoke to Zendesk co-founder Morten Primdahl, who shared his simple but brilliant solution: turn off the notifications. Only look at your phone when you have selected the time to do so. “We get distracted all that time by these beeping sounds and things that pop up on our screen. Each distraction costs us our concentration.”

This wasn’t the only fascinating insight we learned this week. We also got to see what it’s like to work at Mastercard’s only Europe-based hub, which happens to be in Dublin. We headed down to Limerick to chat to some of the researchers at BD about what the life sciences giant’s Munster research centre is actually like. We spoke to Liberty IT’s Barry Bresnahan about what a senior delivery lead actually does. If that wasn’t enough, we also caught up with PwC graduate Gavin Sheedy.

There was also a lot to report on the jobs front this week, with the announcement of Citrix’s expansion at East Point and the creation of 30 jobs kicking things off nicely. Retail software firm Positive ProStrategy Retail revealed 50 jobs dotted between Dublin and Cork while VEI Global confirmed that it is set to hire 35 in Kildare. Meanwhile, telemedicine company VideoDoc reported that it will expand its Dublin workforce by 29, while ICT services provider Triangle announced the acquisition of Kerna Communications and the creation of 20 jobs in Dublin 4.

For more on any of these stories, check out the links above.

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Eva Short
By Eva Short

Eva Short was a journalist at Silicon Republic, specialising in the areas of tech, data privacy, business, cybersecurity, AI, automation and future of work, among others.

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