How to Stop Getting Distracted by Your Phone: 10 Fixes

To stop getting distracted by your phone, cut notifications down to people and real deadlines, keep the phone out of reach while you work, and make the apps you drift to harder to open. That covers both ways the phone pulls you away: the alerts it sends you and the checks you start yourself. Here are ten fixes, each one quick to set up.

Fixes 1-3: Quiet the notifications

Alerts cost more attention than they seem to. In one experiment, simply receiving notifications, without answering them, hurt performance on an attention-demanding task about as much as actively using the phone.

1. Turn off everything that isn't a person or a deadline. On iOS 26, go to Settings › Notifications, tap an app and turn off Allow Notifications. Do it for shopping, news, games and social apps. Keep messages from people, your calendar and the work tools that genuinely need a fast reply.

2. Batch what's left. Settings › Notifications › Scheduled Summary gathers the less urgent apps and delivers them at the times you pick, for example 12:30, 17:00 and 20:00. In a randomized field experiment, getting notifications in batches three times a day made people feel more attentive, productive and in control, with lower stress, while switching them all off increased anxiety and fear of missing out. The goal isn't zero; it's fewer, at predictable times.

3. Set up a Work Focus. In Settings › Focus › Work, choose which people and apps can reach you, tap Add Schedule so it turns on with your working hours, and pick a Home Screen page without feeds. Apple's guide explains that a Focus can let through only the people and apps you choose, turn on automatically at a set time or place, and switch to a custom Home Screen.

Fixes 4-5: Put distance between you and the phone

4. Keep the phone out of sight during focus blocks. A drawer, your bag or another room. You may have heard that a phone's mere presence drains brainpower. In 2017 experiments with nearly 800 people, those whose phone was in another room did better on tests of available cognitive capacity than those with it on the desk, even when it was silenced or switched off.

That finding is weaker than its fame suggests. A pre-registered direct replication in 2022 found no difference in working memory or attention between phone locations, so treat the effect as contested, not settled. Moving the phone is still a sensible, free precaution: you can't check what you can't reach.

5. Watch where the distraction goes next. In a small 2025 study of 22 people working for two days, putting the phone 1.5 metres away reduced phone use, but people shifted their distractions to their laptops and didn't spend less time on leisure. When the phone goes in the drawer, close social tabs and log out of feeds in your browser too.

Fixes 6-8: Add friction to the checks you start yourself

Notification settings only cover the times the phone calls you. Much of the time, you call it. When researchers filmed people's phone use from their own point of view, about 89% of interactions were started by the user, not by an alert. Attention researcher Gloria Mark says about half of our interruptions are self-interruptions, and getting back to an interrupted task can take almost half an hour. Why the urge appears is a topic of its own, covered in why you keep checking your phone. These fixes make acting on it slower.

6. Clear your first screen. Leave only tools on the Home Screen (calendar, notes, maps) and move feeds and video apps to the App Library, so opening one means searching for it.

7. Give your escape apps a daily budget. Pick the one or two apps you flee to when work gets hard and give them a daily limit. Checking them at 11 in the morning then eats into what's left for the evening, which makes the trade visible. If you also want to cut your overall use, there's a five-step plan to reduce screen time.

8. Block them during your best hours. A schedule that covers, say, 9:00 to 13:00 takes the decision away entirely. Keep in mind that on iOS 26, Screen Time limits can be ignored by default once you reach them; apps are only fully blocked during scheduled Downtime with Block at Downtime turned on and a Screen Time passcode.

Fixes 9-10: Make the work block easy to stay in

9. Give every block a start, an end and a break. Work for a set stretch, say 45 minutes, then take a short break where the phone is allowed. Knowing the next check is less than an hour away makes it easier to leave the phone alone now. Run the countdown on a kitchen timer or your computer: if the phone is your timer, you'll pick it up to see how long is left.

10. Park the urge on paper. Keep a notepad by the keyboard. When you feel the pull to look something up, reply to someone or check a score, write it down and go through the list in your break. Many items look less urgent half an hour later, and the ones that matter are still there.

Where Playlock fits

Notification settings can't stop the checks you start yourself, and that's the gap Playlock is built for. You can block chosen apps at set hours, such as your work or study time, or give them a daily limit, with a heads-up five minutes before they lock. When time is up, the app is covered, and a few more minutes cost a quick mini-game: mental math, a memory sequence or tapping targets. Each extra challenge that day is harder, and that small cost is often enough to send you back to the task. It runs on Apple's Screen Time, and Playlock never sees which apps you use.

Some days focus won't come no matter what you do, and that's normal. If you've struggled to concentrate for weeks, even away from screens, it's worth mentioning to a doctor.