"I've got no willpower"

Most people who've tried to cut down have tried the same way. They resolved to use the phone less, and they meant it. It worked until about eleven the next morning. The conclusion they drew was about their character.

I'd draw a different one. Willpower is the wrong tool for this job, and the failure says more about the tool than about you. Consider what resisting a reach by willpower would involve. The phone is in your pocket or within arm's length for sixteen hours a day. Picking it up takes one second and no effort. The cue is any empty moment, and those come dozens of times a day. Most of the time, as the tally showed, the reach begins before you've noticed it. To resist by willpower you'd need to catch an action that starts below your awareness, eighty times a day, and win each time. Nobody does that with anything.

Habits in general work like this. A cue turns up, an easy action follows it, and a small reward follows that. With enough repeats the cue triggers the action without any decision in between. That's a good system. It's how you drive a car and make toast without using up your attention. It means, though, that a habit isn't much affected by your opinions about it. It's affected by whether the cue turns up, and by how easy the action is.

Angela Duckworth and two colleagues wrote a useful review of this. They sorted the ways people control themselves along a timeline, from early to late. The late method is the familiar one. The temptation is in front of you and you grit your teeth. The early methods work on the situation before the impulse has formed, by choosing where you'll be and what will be within reach. One of their own examples is a student who goes to the library and leaves the phone at home. They argue that the early methods are the more effective ones, because impulses grow stronger with time and are easiest to deal with before they've begun. They add a nice observation, which is that people tend to undervalue these methods for the same reason that they work. There's no struggle involved, so it doesn't feel like self-control, and may even feel like cheating.

It isn't cheating. A person who doesn't keep biscuits in the house isn't weaker than one who keeps them and resists. She's thought about it earlier in the day, when thinking was easy.

Applied to the phone, the early methods come down to two. The first is distance. A phone in your pocket can be in your hand in a second, before any thought. A phone on the shelf in the hall takes a walk of twenty steps, and twenty steps is long enough to notice what you're doing and ask what for. I don't know of anything simpler that works as well. The second is friction inside the phone. If the apps in your loop are on the first screen and logged in, going round the loop takes three taps. If they're in a folder on the last screen, or you have to type a password each time, each reach costs a little more, and some of them won't seem worth it.

Most people reply to this with, "I need my phone on me. People have to be able to reach me." Most people do need to be reachable. But being reachable means you can hear it ring, which doesn't require it to be touching your body. A phone on the hall shelf with the ringer on is reachable. We managed for a century with telephones that were fixed to the wall. Outside the house, the pocket is the only place for it, and there the friction has to do more of the work. A zipped bag pocket is better than a trouser pocket. A coat pocket is better than your hand.

I'm not saying no effort is needed. You'll still get the urge with the phone twenty steps away, and chapter 12 covers what to do with it. The point is that the urge you feel with the phone in the hall is weaker, and you'll actually notice it, and it arrives with time to think. Willpower can handle that one.