When you consider that the average person taps, pokes, pinches or swipes their personal phone 2,617 times per day—maybe companies should ban smartphones from department office meetings.

“I used to say that a person’s most valuable commodity is their time. I now believe it is their attention,” Frank Mauck, Director, Communications, NAA.

If you are counting, those 2,617 such actions amount to 2 hours and 25 minutes, according to a study by mobile app research firm Dscout Inc. And given employees’ need for a mobile phone will on the job, a good chunk of that time comes during work hours.

“For apartment operators, going mobile has become a complete asset management tool that not only drives efficiency in move-ins, move-outs, inspections, service calls–you name it–but can be a pretty impressive piece of marketing material,” Tim Blackwell writes for RealPage block propertymanagementinsider.com.

Wired magazine looked at what phone makers are doing to keep us “glued” to our phones:

Push Notifications Alerts that flash across your phone, even when the screen is locked. These are attempts at social connection—as when a friend texts—except the demand to drop everything and redirect your attention comes from an app, rather than a loved one.

Pull-to-Refresh Apps are capable of continuously updating, but this slot-machine-like gesture provides the illusion of control and the allure of unpredictable rewards.

Variable Rewards The uncertainty of what you’ll find when you respond to a notification or pull down to refresh keeps you coming back for more.

Infinite Scroll Without visual cues to indicate an endpoint, humans don’t know when to stop. We’re looking at you Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Short-term Goals Snapchat’s Snapstreaks feature shows the number of days in a row that two people have communicated with each other.

Gamification Turning something into a game typically involves three elements: points, rewards, and a leaderboard. Fitbit has all three as they push you to 10,000 steps per day.

Phone over-use has led to employees to take a leave of absence from work, reports The New York Times (NYT). San Francisco acupuncturist Michelle Kuroda tells NYT she’s had several patients visit her whose phone hands hurt so much that they had had to take leaves of absence from work.

“They were dropping things,” Kuroda tells NYT. “They couldn’t eat with forks.”

Kuroda says that it was unnatural to concentrate so much movement in one digit on such a small flat surface.

"We’re not meant to just use our thumbs all the time,” she tells NYT. “We’re meant to use all our fingers. That’s what our grip is for.”

She says the reason some people get phone thumb and others do not often come down to stress. Cortisol and adrenaline, which the body releases when it feels stress, make one prone to inflammation.