Lock your phone when you get to work

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

You sit down to work, open one message, and twenty minutes later you're somewhere else entirely. Research on attention at work explains why this keeps happening, and why the fix works best when it starts before you sit down.

Attention on screens has shrunk

Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has measured how long office workers stay on one screen before switching. In her early studies around 2004, the average was about two and a half minutes. In studies from about 2016 on, it was about 47 seconds (Mark, Attention Span, 2023).

Interruptions cost more than time

In a 2008 experiment, people who were interrupted while working finished as fast as people who weren't, sometimes faster. They paid for it with more stress, frustration and time pressure (Mark, Gudith and Klocke, 2008). The phone adds its own interruptions, and many of them you start yourself.

Keeping the phone farther away helps too. People whose phones were in another room did better on working-memory tests than people whose phones were on the desk (Ward et al., 2017), although later studies disagree about how large the effect is (Böttger et al., 2023).

Make the decision before you sit down

Lock distracting apps when you arrive

The easiest moment to choose focus is before the work starts. Latch can lock a Work profile automatically when you get to the office, using your phone's location, and unlock it when you leave.

Keep what you need for work

Block the feeds and games, and leave calls, messages from your team, maps and authenticator apps alone.

Put the unlock out of reach

If you need a break, make it a real one. A key in the break room or the car means stepping away from the desk to scroll, which is often enough to skip it.

Batch the rest

Check email and chat at set times instead of all day. People who did this with email felt less stressed (more on that here).

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.

Take the two-minute habit check

Sources

• Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press. Author's site
• Mark, G., Gudith, D. and Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress. Proceedings of CHI 2008. ACM
• Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A. and Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain Drain. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2(2). Journal
• Böttger, T., Poschik, M. and Zierer, K. (2023). Does the Brain Drain Effect Really Exist? A Meta-Analysis. Behavioral Sciences. PMC

Photo: public domain (CC0).