Being present with your family, not just in the room
This one is different from the others because there is no productivity argument to make. Nothing is being optimised. You are not going to get more done.
It is also the one people report noticing fastest, and the one where the cost of failure is least recoverable. A distracted working hour is an hour. A distracted decade of dinners is something else.
What to block, and where the key goes
Four decisions. The last one is the mechanism rather than a flourish: unlocking asks your phone to reach the key over Bluetooth and get a fresh answer back, so the placement that works is one your phone cannot hear from where you are sitting.
Three apps, not thirty
You almost certainly know which two or three actually take you out of the room. Blocking an exhaustive list makes the mode feel like a punishment and you will stop using it. Block the ones that matter and leave the rest.
Attach it to something that already happens
The kettle going on, sitting down to eat, the school pickup, walking through the front door. A block that depends on you remembering is a block that happens on good days only.
Put the phone out of sight, not just face-down
Face-down on the table is the compromise everyone makes and it does not work. In a published study, a phone that was merely visible during a conversation lowered the closeness and trust the two people reported — nobody had to pick it up for it to cost something.
If the phone has to stay, send the key away instead
Some evenings the phone genuinely has to be on the table: someone is expecting a call, or it is the only camera in the house. That is the case the key is for. Leave it in a bedroom drawer on the other side of the flat and the phone on the table can ring, take a photo and do nothing else until you have walked the length of the house to change your mind. Putting the key in the drawer in front of people is also a different act from silencing a phone in your pocket, and it is received differently — this is the one use case where the social signal is doing as much work as the block.
The failure mode: the quick check that is genuinely quick
You look up something factual mid-conversation — a date, a name, whether the shop is open. It takes eleven seconds and it is entirely reasonable, and then you are in the phone, and the conversation has moved on without you. The eleven-second check is the main route back in, and the only reliable defence is that the phone is not in the room to be quickly checked. Write the question down and look it up later; almost none of them survive the wait.
My family are all on their phones anyway. What difference does mine make?
Probably more than it looks, and this is the one situation where going first is the whole intervention. The honest answer is that we cannot promise it changes anyone else's behaviour — but a phone that is not on the table cannot be the reason a conversation stops, and that much is within your control alone.
Questions about family time
Does having a phone on the table really affect conversation?
Yes, measurably: in a published experiment, pairs of strangers who talked with a phone in view reported lower closeness, trust and relationship quality than pairs without one. The phone was never touched.
How do I get my family to put their phones away too?
Not by asking during dinner. The thing that appears to work is doing it visibly and without commentary for long enough that it stops being a statement. We would rather say that plainly than pretend a product solves a family negotiation.
Can I still keep calls available?
Yes, and you should. The point is to remove the feeds that pull you out of the room, not to be unreachable to a school or a hospital.
Four more, each set up differently
Blocking distracting apps for deep work
A two-hour focus block that survives a boring paragraph. What to block, what to keep, and where the key goes so the session cannot be renegotiated.
StudyingBlocking your phone while studying
Study sessions fail differently: the phone is also your notes, your timer and your group chat. A setup that survives a long revision block.
SleepGetting your phone out of the bedroom
The evening block is the one most people need and the one they abandon first. Why it fails, and the setup that survives the hour before bed.
TrainingBlocking your phone at the gym and on runs
Forty-five minutes with music and a timer and nothing else. The one use case where the phone is genuinely needed — and still ruins the session.
If what you want is the method rather than the situation, the guides go deeper, and how it works covers the part that makes all of this hold — the key has to be within Bluetooth range of the phone before it will unlock.
Last updated 8 Aug 2026
A mode you configure once and stop thinking about.
Locking takes one tap, costs nothing and works with Bluetooth off. Unlocking needs the key — which is wherever you decided to leave it, back when you were thinking clearly. The app is free; the key is the one-time buy.