Latch

Why a few steps beat willpower

A guide from the makers of Latch · October 3, 2026 · 3 minute read

Close-up of someone's shoes as they walk down a hallway

Most people who want to use their phone less already know what they should do. They set a limit, mute an app, promise themselves a cut-off time. A week later the old habit is back. The research on habits suggests the plan wasn't the problem. The problem is when the decision gets made.

Most phone checks start on autopilot

When researchers at the London School of Economics recorded people's days with small wearable cameras, they found that 89% of the times someone picked up their phone, nothing had prompted it. Only 11% followed a notification (Heitmayer and Lahlou, 2021). Most checks happen before you've decided anything, which is why a promise made in the morning has so little say over what your hand does at 4 pm.

People want to use their phones less, and still don't

Economists Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow and Lena Song ran an experiment with smartphone users to measure this gap. Two results stand out. Paying people to cut back for a few weeks reduced their use even after the payments stopped, which is what you'd expect from a habit. And when people could set limits on their own future screen time, they used them, and their use dropped substantially. By the authors' estimate, self-control problems made worse by habit accounted for about a third of the social media use in their study (Allcott, Gentzkow and Song, 2022).

89%

of phone pickups had no notification behind them (LSE, 2021)

About 1/3

of social media use traced to self-control problems (Allcott et al., 2022)

That second finding matters. People in the study weren't confused about what they wanted. They wanted to use less and found it hard to follow through in the moment, which is a different problem from not caring.

Why effort beats a reminder

A reminder asks you to make the right call at the exact moment you're least likely to: tired, bored, already reaching. A small physical step changes the moment itself. If opening a feed means getting up and walking to the kitchen, the urge has a few seconds to fade, and often it does. Many people find they don't want the feed enough to stand up for it.

This is also why so many limits fail. Screen Time's limits are easy to dismiss because dismissing them costs a single tap. We wrote more about that in why Screen Time limits don't work.

Ways to put a step between you and your phone

Leave it in another room during focused work

In a 2017 study, people whose phones were in another room did better on tests of working memory than people whose phones sat face down on the desk, even though nobody touched their phone (Ward et al., 2017). Later research has been mixed on how big this effect is, though a 2023 review of the studies found the clearest effects on memory and attention (Böttger et al., 2023).

Make the apps you overuse harder to reach

Move them off the home screen, log out after each use, or delete the app and use the website, which is usually clunkier. Each of these adds a little effort, and a little is often enough.

Decide limits ahead of time

The Allcott study found people used limits they set in advance. Pick your hours when you're calm, then let something enforce them.

Lock apps with something physical

Put the unlock somewhere you have to walk to. That can be a key on the fridge, a charger in the hallway, or an app like Latch that only unlocks when you scan a sticker kept in another room.

Where Latch fits

Latch is an app blocker that only unlocks when you scan a key you keep somewhere else: an NFC sticker, a printed QR code, or a number of steps. It's free to start, out now on the App Store and Google Play.

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google PlayTake the two-minute habit check

Sources

Photo: public domain (CC0).