Most of us pick up our phones dozens of times a day, often without deciding to. During focused work, each of those checks is a small context switch, and the urge to check is a distraction even when you resist it. The good news is that the habit responds well to friction: make checking slightly harder, and you'll check far less.
Why the phone is so hard to ignore
- Unpredictable rewards. Sometimes there's something interesting, usually there isn't. Rewards that come at random keep a habit going far longer than predictable ones.
- Notifications pull attention even unanswered. Cary Stothart and colleagues found that simply getting a call or text alert, without looking at it, made people make more errors on an attention task, about as many as when they actually used the phone.
- It's an escape from discomfort. When work gets hard or boring, the phone offers instant relief. That's the same mechanism behind procrastination.
A much-discussed 2017 study by Adrian Ward and colleagues suggested that the mere presence of your phone on the desk reduces available working memory. Later attempts to replicate it have had mixed results, so the size of that effect is uncertain. But you don't need it to be true for the advice to hold: a phone you can't see is a phone you won't pick up.
Ten ways to check less
- Put it in another room during focus sessions. The single most effective step.
- Turn off all non-human notifications: news, shopping, games, social apps. Leave calls and messages from people, if you must.
- Use Do Not Disturb or a focus mode on a schedule, so it switches on by itself.
- Move the tempting apps off the home screen, or into a folder on the last page.
- Log out of social apps, so each visit needs a password.
- Set the screen to greyscale. Colour is part of the pull; grey is dull.
- Batch your checks: on each break, deliberately, then put it away again.
- Get a cheap alarm clock so the phone can sleep outside the bedroom.
- Notice the reach. When you find the phone in your hand, ask what you were avoiding. Usually it's the next hard step of the task.
- Give the urge somewhere to go. A notepad for “things to look up later” catches most of what you were about to check.
Make the focus session the rule
Rules work better than intentions: “no phone during a session” is easy to keep in a way that “use my phone less” isn't. Pair it with a timer, the Pomodoro timer for 25-minute sessions or the deep work timer for longer ones, and allow yourself a guilt-free look on every break. To see how many minutes the checking really costs, try the context switching calculator.
Airplane mode, literally
On a flight, the phone goes quiet and nobody minds. Flight borrows that: your focus session is a real flight. Put the phone in airplane mode, take off, and don't touch it until you land.