Where should your phone go this session?
Five short questions. What comes out is one place to put your phone right now, and the one-line reason.
The short version
- A phone costs you twice: once when it interrupts you, and once just by sitting there. The second cost is the one almost nobody accounts for, and distance is the only thing that touches it.
- The right answer changes by session. It costs most on long, demanding work in a room you cannot control, and costs almost nothing on short admin, or on a day when being reachable is genuinely the job.
- This is a decision, not a verdict on you. Answer for this session and you get back one place and the reason, nothing is saved.
You already know the interruption cost, the message that pulls you out and the minute it takes to find your sentence again. The stranger cost is presence: in one study, people did worse on demanding thinking tasks with their own phone on the desk than with it in another room, while it was switched off, face down and untouched. So "put it face down" and "put it in another room" are not two strengths of the same advice. This tool works out which one this session needs.
Before you begin
Answer for the session in front of you, not for study in general. The same phone belongs in different places on different days. Nothing you pick is saved.
Questions
Question 1 of 5
Where it should go this session
Copy it somewhere it will survive
Select the text below and copy it into whatever you already use. This page keeps nothing.
One thing worth testing
The presence cost is the part people are most surprised by, because nothing visibly happens. If you want to know whether it is real for you, run the same kind of session twice, once with the phone out of the room, once with it face down beside you, and note what you finished, not how it felt. That is the only reading that settles it.
Worth knowing. Ward, Duke, Gneezy and Bos (Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2(2), 2017) found that the mere presence of one's own phone reduced available cognitive capacity, even switched off and face down. Rosen, Carrier and Cheever (Computers in Human Behavior 29(3), 2013) observed students switching tasks within minutes while studying, with switching predicting lower performance; that one is observational and the evidence is mixed, so treat it as a description rather than a cause.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you pick exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.