"I'll get straight back to it"

Chapter 2 listed five payments, and the fifth was a way out of something hard. It gets its own chapter because it's where the reach does most damage to the things you care about getting done.

Here's an example. You're writing something difficult, perhaps a reply to a complaint. The first two paragraphs went fine. Now you've come to the part where you have to say no, politely, and you don't know how to put it. You read your last sentence again. Your hand goes to the phone. Four minutes later you come back, read the last sentence again, and you still don't know how to put it.

The belief here is that a quick look will clear your head, and that you'll come back fresher. It's understandable. Stepping away from a stuck problem is good advice, and people have always done it. They got up and made tea, or stared out of the window, or walked round the block.

The Dutch study from chapter 3 found the first half of this pattern in real offices. People were more likely to pick up the phone the more tired or bored they felt at work. That's the strain, followed by the exit. The second half is what happens on return, and that was chapter 4. Attention comes back in pieces, with some of it still on whatever the loop served up. And from chapter 3, a break on a phone refreshed people less than the same break on paper.

So the phone break at the hard point has two faults. It doesn't refresh you much, and it loads you with new material just when you need a clear head. There's a third, which is my own reading. The point where a task gets hard is often the point where it's about to move. Not knowing how to put the refusal is the work. If you stay in that discomfort for another minute or two, a first clumsy version usually turns up, and a clumsy version can be fixed. Leave at that moment, every time, and you train yourself to leave at that moment. The hard part of every task then becomes the signal to reach.

This applies away from a desk too. The hard bit might be a child's long story, a dull stretch of a meeting, or the point in an argument where you ought to be listening. The strain is the same and the exit is the same.

Here's an objection I'd make myself. "Sometimes I really am stuck, and staring at the sentence doesn't help." Agreed. Then take the break that people took before phones, the one the first study would predict works better. Stand up and get a glass of water, or look at something a long way off. Let the problem sit at the back of your mind while your eyes are on the car park. The difference between that break and a phone break is that nothing new comes in. When you sit down again, the last thing in your head is still the sentence.

One practical step makes more difference here than any amount of resolve. When you sit down to something that matters, put the phone where reaching it takes a walk. A bag in the hall will do, or another room, or a drawer across the office. Chapter 10 explains why that works better than deciding to resist. If your work needs the phone near you, turn it face down and out of arm's reach, and let it ring if it must.