Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, which is looking at your phone while you're driving. Not the person who props it on the passenger seat and types a paragraph at sixty. The ordinary version. The look at the red light. The message read on your knee at thirty because it buzzed and you wanted to know. The call taken on speaker with the phone in your hand because the cradle's in the other car. The tap on the map because it's taken you the wrong way.

You know it's dangerous. Everyone does. You've seen the adverts, and you may have a rule about it that you keep most of the time. This book isn't going to tell you what you already know, and it isn't going to describe a crash to you. It's going to do something else, which is look at the beliefs that let a person who knows it's dangerous do it anyway. That it's only a glance. That you only do it when it's safe. That you're a good driver. That you've done it a thousand times and nothing's happened. That hands-free is fine. That the message might matter. Each of those has something true in it, and each one, I'll argue, is doing a job for the habit rather than for you.

The law is stated once here and once in chapter 15, and that's all. In Great Britain it's illegal to hold and use a phone or any similar device while driving, including at traffic lights and in queues, and the GOV.UK page on the subject is the source for anything I say about it. Hands-free use is allowed. Chapter 7 is about why that's a fact about the law and not about your attention.

If you drive for a living, chapter 22 is written with you in mind, and nothing in the method needs you to be unreachable for a whole shift. If you're the parent of someone who passed their test in the last two years, chapter 15 has one fact you'll want them to know, and chapter 22 has the thing that works better than telling them.

And if the phone is a problem everywhere, not just in the car, the book you want is The phone can wait. This one takes the urge as read and deals with the car.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning rather than a finding, I'll say so.