unfiltered

His office has no outside light. You don't need a bunker — face a blank wall instead of a window, close the blinds, and clear the desk down to the one thing you're working on. Your eyes pull your attention before your phone does.

He uses earplugs and headphones. Layering them makes the point physical: putting them on is a start signal, taking them off is a stop signal. Music alone is still a stimulus.

He uses an app that blocks the phone so nothing gets through. The point is that turning it off has to cost you something.

His phone lives somewhere that requires walking across the building to reach. Distance beats discipline every time — another room, a drawer downstairs, the glovebox. If reaching for it is a 20-second walk, you mostly won't.

A kitchen timer set to how long you expect the task to take. A physical timer beats a phone timer because it doesn't require unlocking the thing you just banned — and it forces you to estimate the work up front, which is half the focus battle.

He goes in with a clear idea of the work to be done. Choosing the task while the timer runs is itself a distraction. Pick it the night before, or in the 60 seconds before you sit down.

Open Screen Time on iPhone or Digital Wellbeing on Android and look at last week's numbers cold: total hours, top three apps, pickups per day. Pickups matter more than hours — 80 pickups means 80 interrupted trains of thought. Write the number down; you'll want the before-and-after.

Turn off every badge and banner that isn't a person contacting you directly. Everything else — likes, promos, app suggestions, most email — becomes something you check on your schedule, not theirs. Highest-leverage change on the list, and it takes about ten minutes.

Most of the damage is three or four infinite feeds, not the phone itself. Set a hard daily limit on those specific apps, delete them from the home screen so opening one requires a search, and turn on grayscale during work hours — the color is doing more work than you think.

Charge the phone outside the bedroom and use a real alarm clock. Scrolling in the first waking hour sets your attention baseline for the day; scrolling in the last hour costs you sleep, which costs you tomorrow's focus. Schedule Downtime or Bedtime Mode so it happens without a decision.

Desktop distraction is quieter but just as expensive. One task, one window, everything else closed — and a blocker running on the browser, not only the phone. Slack and email are apps you open twice a day, not surfaces you live inside.

Built in. App limits, Downtime, and the usage report you need for the audit above. Weakness: you can tap straight through your own limits.

Best free upgrade. Adds a forced pause and a cap on how many times you can open an app per day, which targets pickups rather than minutes. iOS and Android.

The one to buy if the problem spans devices. Start a session and the same block lands on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Chrome at once. Locked Mode stops you ending it early.

Deepest analytics and the strictest phone-side blocking — Deep Focus locks the session. Polished, iOS-first, and the priciest of the three.

The nuclear option, for when you cheat every software lock. A physical tag you have to walk to and tap to unblock — the same principle as Hormozi's across-the-building rule.