"It's only a minute"

The reach defends itself with its size. It's a minute, and nobody's life was ever ruined by a minute. You'd feel silly making a rule about something so small.

Taken one at a time, that's right. The trouble is that you don't get to take them one at a time, and your own sense of how many there are isn't reliable. In a small British study, researchers installed a logging app on people's phones for two weeks, and also asked them to estimate their use. Twenty-three people gave usable data. They guessed they picked up their phones about 37 times a day. The app recorded about 85. More than half of those uses lasted under thirty seconds. Their estimates of total time were reasonably good, but their estimates of how often were not. Across the group, people's guesses bore no relation to their real counts.

That's one small study of students and university staff, and your number will be your own. If you kept the tally from chapter 1, you have a rough figure. Whatever it is, the real one is higher, because the ones you caught were only the ones you noticed. I'd guess that's the most useful thing the tally shows. A large share of the reaches happen below the level at which you make decisions at all.

So the first problem with "only a minute" is multiplication. The second is that the minute often isn't one. A reach has no built-in end, as chapter 1 said. It lasts until something interrupts it. While the kettle boils, the kettle interrupts it. On the sofa at ten past nine, nothing does. Most people know the experience of looking up and finding that forty minutes have gone, with no memory of having chosen to spend them.

The third problem is the most interesting one, and it's about what the minute does to the time around it.

A researcher called Sophie Leroy ran two experiments on what happens when people switch from one task to another. She found that attention doesn't switch cleanly. Part of it stays behind with the first task for a while, still turning it over, and performance on the second task suffers. She called what stays behind attention residue. Her experiments were about switching between pieces of work, not about phones. But a reach in the middle of something is a switch away and a switch back, so you pay twice. When you return, part of your mind is still on the headline about interest rates or the message you decided to answer later.

A second piece of research adds something. Gloria Mark and her colleagues interrupted people while they worked on a task and measured what happened. The interrupted people did finish, and the quality of their work held up. They managed it by working faster. They also reported more stress, more frustration, more time pressure and more effort. Those interruptions came from outside, and a reach is an interruption you make yourself. I can't see why the bill would be smaller for that.

Put those together with the count. A day broken into eighty pieces is a different thing from the same day left whole, even if the total time on the phone is modest. It's like reading a novel one page at a time, closing the book and putting it back on the shelf between pages. You'd get through it, and you'd wonder why reading had become such hard work.

Here's the honest objection. "Some of my day really is made of scraps. I'm waiting for a file to load. I'm on hold. There's nothing to come back to, so there's nothing to break up." That's fair, and a gap between tasks is a better place for a reach than the middle of one. But notice that the gap between tasks was doing something too. It was the moment when the last thing got put down and the next one got picked up. If you fill it with the loop, you arrive at the next task still carrying three new things that have nothing to do with it.

The practical upshot for now is small. The question isn't whether one reach is harmless, because one reach is. The question is what a day made of eighty of them feels like. You already know what that feels like, and chapter 1 described it.