I had a manager collect phones once about ten years ago. I told him if he took my phone I would quit.
He did not take my phone.
I cant work if I don’t have something to listen to. I need to drown out the office noise.
If you don’t trust me to get my job done, you didn’t hire the right person.
This needs to become a human right. Fuck asshole coworkers who think they can monopolize your attention to fuck with you
I’ve never thought about it beyond questioning why they think your real life stops when your work life starts, but yes, it does.
Not only that, but locking down your communication with your family and friends outside the monolithic “workplace.” Screw that!
“I didn’t know my family urgently needed me because my boss took my phone :(”
“11 and counting wounded or dead in workplace violence incident, help was delayed because employees weren’t allowed phones.”
Jobs trying to be your parents, warden, spouse, or god, need to be put in their place. Draw that line hard.
Exactly. Pay me enough, and treat me well, and I will weave my personal and work life together.
But tell me that when I’m at work, my personal life disappears? That’s a different kind of balance, and that means that when I’m not at work, work disappears. Travel, no. Dinners, no. Special events, no. Conferences, no. Don’t even ask, the answer is no.
But that wouldn’t happen. I’m not working anywhere that doesn’t recognize my basic humanity.
Is this a desk job we’re talking about?
Well guess I won’t work anymore. Ya boi’s got his 2FAs somewhere and it ain’t a yubikey.
My office building is a signal dead zone for some reason, and I have to walk all the way to the terrace just to get my 2FA push code.
TOTP doesn’t need internet though?
I misspoke when I said “code”. I meant push notification that you just have to tap to confirm.
You ever had the one where Outlook wants to do the push notification validation on the same device that authorizes such requests? It just interrupts the validation process and forces you to retry.
Yeup. Especially annoying when you have to resolve it yourself instead of opening an IT ticket cause you can’t login to Slack, email, or the Ticketing Portal.
I do love every morning having to login into Microsoft to login to my Password manager to login to Google to log into my product as well.
Oh I see, yeah, unfortunate
I used to work in a basement with that problem. I’d have to wave my phone in the stairwell for a SMS code.
Happily, now IT uses the authentication app on my phone, which doesn’t need cell signal.
I assume management is free to do what they want with their phones, so they can fuck all the way off.
Oh, yeah, you’re in trouble for “stealing from the company” if your wife calls to tell you your kid is in the ER, but if the boss’ wife called just to see how his day was going, he’d answer it.
My boss also went hard on no private calls during work time. My colleague immediately switched his work phone off at 5pm sharp because not mixing private and work. Of course soon there was an issue at 5:30pm. It was amazing how that policy got reversed so quickly.
I’m a grown ass man, im good with all that thanks…
As an ass man, what do you like to use your phone for?
Probably checking his stock…. In dat ass! (I don’t know, it’s very late or very early here)
Yo mama so late she uh… In dat ass! Yeah!
derogatory remark towards your mother
Am I doing this right?
Yesh
That’s the way your mother likes it Trebeck; Ruff.
Won’t be an ass man for much longer if I have a say.
Wat does this even mean lol
He is a bad-ass ass assassin.
Read their username, haha
Assassin man
I assassinate asses, brochacho
With mine dick

It doesn’t work like that in the USA.
Yes it does
Not a ban, as such, but our IT has been tightening security and is now requiring us to install a device management app on our personal phones if we want to be able to run Outlook or Teams on them. I told them that’s fine, I just won’t run the apps, which means it’s a lot harder for people to get ahold of me outside normal working hours. It’s pretty great, actually!
As someone who has to deal with that device management software, good! If your work requires you to be available outside of normal hours, a) make sure you are paid for that and b) make them give you a corporate-owned device. If I could only deal with corporate-owned devices and fully ignore all BYOD I would.
Absolutely. I work from home so I used to run them for convenience, but kept notifications turned off. It was nice to be able to occasionally join a meeting from my phone. But if there’s an actual emergency (very rarely happens) they can call me.
Nope. My work phone and my personal phone are two different devices, and I am not logged into any work-related accounts on my personal phone or any personal accounts on my work phone. I don’t even let my work phone onto my home wifi.
yeah. I had a place that gave a monthly stipend which is the only reason I own a smartphone. its a work phone and not my phone.
deleted by creator
As always, loss of rights for children always spreads to adults in short order.
Wait a minute… Isn’t banning phones from schools a good thing? I’m not trying to be difficult here, but aren’t they a huge distraction from the learning experience?
It depends on how they’re used. Having a supercomputer with the entire knowledge of human history in your pocket can be a pretty powerful educational tool.
Or you can doomscroll TikToks for hours.
The point is regardless of if it’s good or not. Removing the rights and privileges of ANY group of humans. Will spread to the rest of us. When you restrict something for children in school it almost always ends up in work places for adults. Because many companies consider the work place little more then school 2.0 when it comes to control. The employee is functioning barely more then a child as far as many companies are concerned
Children deserve rights and respect. If it’s a problem you deal with it on a case by case basis. Just as you should in the work place. The sacrifice for freedom and self respect is that some people will try to take advantage of it and abuse it.
Blanket bans in all but the most extreme of cases are only considered smart by assfucks, shit stains, fascists and ignorant fuck muffins who listen to the other groups with out a second thought. And cellphones are NOT a extreme case.
For the rest of us we know how stupid they are and how many knock on problems they cause the rest of us. Or at a minimum ask and question things as to learn why there is a controversy.
So good on you for asking. Props for not being a idiot.
Hold up just a bit. It has little to do with infringing on someone’s rights and more to do with ensuring our children have the best learning environment we can provide them. You can argue workplace rights in a separate argument. Children do not NEED these devices. Parents do not NEED their children to have them.
Am I the old fogey here? Do y’all not see how these devices are a detriment to their learning experience?
Don’t worry, you’re right.
There’s a very vocal subset on Lemmy who think that any issue children have must be the parents/teachers fault, and that no blanket rules should exist. It’s weird.
The funny thing is the schools are the parent while the child is there.
We’re reacting to extreem oversteps aginst rights which are numerous these days
Children not being allowed to have a phone in class isn’t an extreme overstep against rights.
Access to a pocket size computer whenever you want isn’t an unalienable right.
If you own a pocket sized computer than you should be able to use it when ever you want.
It’s not an extreme overstep, but as we can literally see right now in this thread, it normalizes the loss of rights.
There’s another solution to banning phones without needing to ban phones; Fund our school properly so that our children get the attention and proper classrooms that they need. Of course it’s easier to ban phones in classrooms of 30 - 50, because then they don’t need to actually pay the teachers to care, or provide the resources necessary for creating a productive classroom.
Politicians are mad that kids have access to information like “it’s OK to be gay” and “the Gaza genocide is wrong” so they’re pulling every lever they can to remove that free access. Schools are already prison like environments where vague unproven “it’s for education” can be asserted, so they are. So.it the freaky surveillance they’re doing now. Are microphones in the bathroom “ensuring our children have the best learning environment” because they’re doing that in Beverly hills now
I can see why you are pushing back, but I can also see their point of view:
In several schools I visited the children do not have their phones banned or taken away. They simply don’t use them, as they are engaged and have expectations set by their teachers to respect the classroom and their peers. Admittedly these are small classrooms, about 8 to 12 to a teacher with a lot of engagement.
But it shows that children can learn when it’s appropriate or not, without a blanket ban.
Similarly, if you are an adult and expected to perform at your work, do they need to treat you like a child and ban or restrict things?
Whoa, those are small class sizes, an ex-teacher friend had 20+ grade schoolers (6-8 iirc) to manage, most were underprivileged but still had phones and spent classes goofing off on them, even though the school and my friend had set rules stating phones were not allowed during class.
I would have to check, but I don’t think phones arent allowed. Its just that the kids are occupied with each other and engaged so they don’t use them.
I think that speaks volumes about the education system.
Oh and just because we are challenging norms: all three schools have implemented gender neutral bathrooms. They all have private floor to ceiling stalls with a common sink area that is open to the hall way. Extremely visible common area, extremely private single occupancy do your business area. They have had zero issues.
I like that bathroom idea, private is private, washing your hands doesn’t need to be private though (IMO obv.)
I may have agreed with this a year ago, but here’s what’s going on with my son school’s phone ban.
The school requires the children to bring in a laptop from home. The laptop mine brings is controlled via parental controls. My child is a stickler for the rules, so the phone is only used to let us know if parental controls need to be adjusted during school hours because of a change in lessons, or to let us know if there’s a problem on the way home (he has a disability and sometimes he needs a lift from a bus stop, and he’s also been late the bus after school before, so I’ll have texts going between me, him, and the bus driver). It’s never been an issue for him and I’ve never had a complaint from the school. One of the administrative personnel also told me that he’s really good about not using his phone and would never use it when he wasn’t supposed to.
The school banned phones because they wanted the children to be more social. I complained to the school about the above and that my son has already had many issues with bullies and taking away their phones might cause more incidents. The school told me not to worry, not many kids are really using their phones and a lot of them are either going to some sort of computer gaming room on their breaks or at lunch time, or they’re gaming on their laptops, and none of that is expected to change. So, what exactly was the point?
My son also raised a complaint about possible theft. They assured him that the phones would be securely stored in a safe. Within a week the kids knew the code and the school said, “well, it was inevitable”.
At this point, all of the kids on phones in school stuff seems mostly like theater to me. I’m sure it’s happening in some places, but it doesn’t seem to have been an issue at my son’s school. To some extent, I wonder how much of it has to do with teachers not wanting to risk being recorded, but they still have laptops so I don’t know what exactly they are doing this for. The whole thing seems like it could’ve been avoided by either giving more punishments to the children that are using their phones inappropriately or giving special dispensation to the students that never use it inappropriately.
It’s like peeing in one side of a pool and expecting it to not spread
Having a phone in school would have been incredibly helpful to me. My middle and high schools got rid of pay phones but did not allow students to use the office phone. I accepted car rides from strangers multiple times because I was unable to get ahold of my parents and also unable to walk home due to distance and not knowing any routes that avoided walking along a state highway.
I also sat through most classes with a genre fiction paperback book in my lap because I needed something to catch my interest and I’d already read ahead in the text book.
No, it’s not. It’s being done for censorship.
Children are banned from using phones?
They’re using the same products they sell to schools to enforce phone bans (which are about censorship, not education)
Banning children (which means anyone under
1825) from using phones is the goalIn many schools now, yes.
Now? It was a rule for me 20 years ago.
Somewhere that got lost and kids all have cell phones in the class room and are distracted from learning
Let your employer know that the “ban” works both ways. And you won’t accept work related calls outside of work hours. When I am off the clock, so is my freaking phone.
My workplace refuses to give me a work phone. I have to use their stupid MFA app 30 times a day to if they want to take my phone away they can fuck right off.
I found that most mfa apps are not as proprietary as companies want to make you belief. My previous corp job wanted a specific one but copying the secret code into proton pass worked just fine.
Yeah, MFA is pretty standard these days. The only apps I know that do something different are the big ones. Steam, Google, Paypal…
It makes no sense to go and maintain your own MFA system as a smaller company.
We use two different ones at work.
I refuse now to put work stuff on my personal phone because they require more and more restrictions and I don’t trust them. So I have to carry a work phone around just for the MFA. I don’t really do anything else with it. It seems a bit of a waste of money.
Install grapheneOS on your phone, and their MFA app doesn’t want to run anymore.
Okta works on my tablet, but provides a mysterious “there was a problem” error on my phone. Both are running Graphene.
It’s literally the only reason I turn on my tablet.
My phone works as a universal medical device. There are specialized devices that can replace my phone, and you are free to purchase them for me and pay for the associated subscription costs.
I use mine for my CGM. So yeah, that will go as far as them realizing they need to pay for extra equipment.
My company did this which I mean whatever unless the phone app works better I don’t really care, but the amount of people pissed my company would pay for a $300 device rather than have his phone, absurd. Again I could understand if they were mad his phone worked better, but no they were mad he got something “for free”. Yeah he got diabetes for free you morons.
Every asinine micro-managing policy that the bosses at my workplace come up with shares a common thread…control. That and the fact that it is a non-union plant, so they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and there is absolutely nothing the workers can say about it.
No phones? Sure, why not? The capitalists can only extract every ounce of productivity out of their workers, if they can budget every second of the worker’s time. This is of course so they can move the goal posts and demand more. Don’t worry though, they’ve got a steady stream of college grads who will start at the bottom of the pay scale, ready to take your place after the company has taken everything from you.
If you’ve got time to breath, are you really a valuable asset to the team?
I mean this is already the case and has been since like the 2000s in any blue collar job. You’ll get a bollocking if you’re doing anything other than your work.
Yeah when I used to work in a workshop, phone stayed in your tool box except for smoko and lunch
However, Adrian Chadi, an associate professor at the University of Southampton, says the evidence that phone bans improve productivity is not definitive. His research suggests they can help with simple, routine jobs by reducing distractions, but the impact is less clear in more complex work that involves creativity or problem-solving.
I mean, yeah, if you care what science says…
/s
If you’re doing something that actually takes thinking, you need to give your brain a “break” while still keeping the rpms up.
2 minutes of scrolling articles and quick comments is more refreshing than a 15 minute break relaxing. Because your brain is still “up” but it’s switching to a brand new task which (in a very simplified fashion) is a quick reboot for our brains, it’s just enough to push everything out of working memory so when you pivot back to what you were doing, it’s with a fresh set of eyes.
I thought this was as well known as “rubber duck debugging”?
We really need to start teaching people how their own brains work
2 minutes of scrolling articles and quick comments is more refreshing than a 15 minute break relaxing.
I am not at all convinced, and in fact this might be the first time I’ve heard anyone say low attention span piecemeal content does anything but rot your brain.
I thought this was as well known as “rubber duck debugging”?
That’s… a completely different thing? Rubberducking is when you explain your problem out in words, which engages the speech production part of your brain which often helps you solve the problem by making you crystallize your thoughts.
It works. I use this during my workday when I’m working on highly complex things that have multi inter-dependent relations. It becomes fatiguing. A quick scroll through Lemmy is more refreshing than just sitting there
the first time I’ve heard anyone say low attention span piecemeal content does anything but rot your brain.
Well, that’s the neat thing, you didn’t…
I’m talking about deliberately practicing cognitive flexibility which literally combats that…
That’s… a completely different thing?
100% spot on here.
If I said Wayne Gretzky was as well known as Michael Jordan, you’d also be correct in pointing out they were two separate people.
And if I said Bo Jackson is as popular as Bo Jackson…
I shouldn’t be surprised if someone asked me why I compared the same thing to itself, but apparently some people would take it in stride.
Oh, I thought you said “this was well known as rubber-duck debugging”, with only one as.
2 minutes of scrolling articles and quick comments is more refreshing than a 15 minute break relaxing. Because your brain is still “up” but it’s switching to a brand new task which (in a very simplified fashion) is a quick reboot for our brains, it’s just enough to push everything out of working memory so when you pivot back to what you were doing, it’s with a fresh set of eyes.
you realize these idiots in the C-Suite are going to read this and think the solution is to just give people more tasks, right?
Since you invoke science, can you provide sources for the claim that Lemmy is better than taking a break? Or is it based on your personal experience?
I have never heard of this effect before - is there a name for it?
Cognitive flexibility is jumping between unrelated tasks
Research on CF training is still in its infancy; yet, emerging research proposes that training CF may be effective in improving cognitive skills. Conditions that engage skills at the core of CF may facilitate improvement, that is, introducing variability in training protocols, uncertainty, and switching between task-relevant dimensions and across tasks. Furthermore, skills related to creativity that engage novel and divergent thinking (e.g. generation, remote association) may support CF.
The evidence for far-transfer effects following CF training is currently scarce but promising. Initial studies suggest notable improvements in task switching with transfer effects on different areas of executive functioning 46, 47. Friedman and Miyake [48] have demonstrated through confirmatory factor analysis the potential impact of CF in real-world settings. Further studies suggest beneficial effects of CF training on academic abilities (i.e. language, performance in math tests, sentence comprehension in standardized reading tasks in children 49, 50, 51). Training programs that target the diverse cognitive processes involved in CF may have stronger potential to show benefits that generalize to real-world settings.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154624000640
But we’re kind of blurring the lines between long term practice and short term relief.
But even tho the brain isn’t a muscle, it’s still a metabolic system. Like, if you’re running a 5k you may run/jog, that’s a standard way to rest while still moving because if you stand still, it’s harder to jump back to running.
To get into what I was originally talking about…
Id have to start explaining metabolic processes inside a brain and all the different parts of memory.
Like, I think it might help more to think of highway hypnosis, the problem is if you focus on one thing, your brain wants to offload that workload. So occasionally you need to make your brain focus on something else for a few minutes at a rest stop, then when it goes back to driving it stops trying to offload it
It’s not enough to “pause” the activity the brain wants to offload, because taking a break is normal and the brain still is lazy and will just keep trying to offload it when you start work again.
To fight that, you need to trick your brain into thinking it’s an unpredictable environment and your conscious mind still needs to focus on the task at hand.
That’s what CF is about, training your concousnmind to stay tuned in longer, be ause it thinks that at any moment you may thru something completely unrelated at it.
I was also confused by this part:
“Writing is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do…particularly when you get to the hard part,” Will Young, the theater’s executive director, told The Financial Times. “When you get stuck, it’s easier to reach for a distraction.”
Is it a distraction, or is it a way to refresh one’s brain? Sometimes when you’re writing and you get stuck, a break from the task is exactly what you need to regain focus. Task switching frequently can make things harder, yes, but if you’ve already been writing for hours, I’d argue that spending a few minutes doing something else is a good thing to overcome writer’s block.
Attempting to power through every minute despite your brain hitting a hard limit is how we get burnout. Whether it’s a few minutes taking a walk outside or a few minutes on the phone, giving your brain a chance to wander every now and then can go far in getting you back on track.
why dont i just put a decoy phone in there and call it a day?
That old phone with a chunk of your screen missing, and doesn’t even power up.
“That’s your everyday phone?”
“Yep, I don’t make enough to get a new one.”
“this is a kindle”
can I look at-
“no”
Can I have my watch that does everything a phone does but in a smaller package?
Yes
Umm okay?













