Studying without your phone in the room

Motivation carries the first block. By the second, the material is harder, the novelty has gone, and the phone is the obvious relief from a specific unpleasant sensation.

Any method that relies on wanting to study is being evaluated during the hour when wanting to study is highest. That is why so much of this advice tests well and performs badly.

Unglamorous, and consistent across everybody who has actually made this work.

• The phone outside the room. Not face down, not in a bag, physically elsewhere.
• Studying near other people, in a library or with a friend, so stopping is visible.
• A fixed end time. Open ended study invites breaks; a session that ends at four does not.
• One decision at the start rather than a decision every twenty minutes.

Useful, and weaker than the phone simply being elsewhere. A blocked phone in your hand is still a phone in your hand, and you will find the thing that is not blocked.

They earn their place when the phone has to be present: waiting on a call, using it for something, or living somewhere the phone cannot be left. That is a real situation and blocking is a decent answer to it.

A window you cannot lift is exactly what you want in November and a genuine problem the morning a timetable changes.

Whatever you set up must have an immediate way out that needs nobody's permission. If it does not, do not use it during an exam period at all.

The time spent choosing an app, designing a timetable and tuning a technique is time that feels like studying and is not.

Phone in the other room, fixed end time, somewhere with people. If that is not enough, then add something.