Do I Need a Digital Intervention? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [Do I Need a Digital Intervention? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/d0d9eda0-627f-46ee-8585-bf34fe6d08ca) ## Highlights - **Two Week Mobile Internet Break Delivers Big Gains** - A simple two-week mobile internet break produced large, fast improvements in attention, mental health, and well-being. - The study used Freedom to block internet apps (preserving calls/messages) and ran as a randomized controlled trial. Transcript: Cal Newport Imagine if I could offer you a pill that gave you the following benefits. One, your symptoms of anxiety and depression would significantly reduce. Two, your overall sense of moment-to life satisfaction would improve. And three, you would gain substantially more ability to concentrate. Now, to make this even more enticing, let's say this pill would deliver you those benefits in only two weeks. If such a drug existed, it would be a blockbuster. Now, the bad news is there is no such pill that can do this. The good news, however, is that according to a major new research paper, there's a simple intervention for your digital habits that can deliver all of those promises. I'm talking about something that's free and that you can put in place with minimal preparation, something that you could start implementing today. Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show. And clearly, this is a perfect type of topic to dive deeply into. So here's what we're going to do. I have the paper here. We're going to go through it. I'll start by describing the intervention they studied and quantified the exact benefits that they measured. Then we'll look closer at the mechanisms that the researchers believe explain why this intervention works so well. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/81883ba0-b567-41ce-92fa-95ed77f261dc)) - **Screen Time Halved With Lasting Aftereffects** - Intervention group roughly halved daily screen time from 304 to 161 minutes and kept some benefits after restoring internet. - Sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being all jumped during the two-week block. Transcript: Cal Newport They had surveys that they would have the participants filled out. They had various tests, like tests of attention that they would have the participants do at various times. And they would do something called random experience sampling, where they would randomly text the participants and say, hey, tell me right now in this moment how you are feeling. This is sort of the gold standard in social psychology for measuring people's subjective well-being on average. Okay, so that was the experiment. And they had the intervention group do this for two weeks while the control group did not. And then there were some more complexities after that where then they swapped and the control group started using them and they measured what happened with the intervention group For the week that followed. But that was the core of the experiment. What did they find? Well, I'm going to put a couple plots up on the screen here for people who are watching. Okay. So this first plot here is looking at sustained attention ability. I want you to look at the blue lines. This is the intervention group. And between the beginning of the experience and time point two, so two is after two weeks, we see this blue line goes way up, a marked increase in the ability to pay attention. Then as we go forward, it falls a little bit, but not all the way back down the baseline. So even after they started using their phone for the internet again, they still had some attention left. All right, what about mental health? An even more dramatic effect here. Look at this blue line. That's the intervention group. One is right before the experiment starts. Look at how high that jumps up by the end of the experiment. It's a massive increase. And look what happens when they measured in at the third time point after they started using their phones again. Though mental health began going down, they had a long after effect of benefits from spending those two weeks without mobile internet. Here's the third chart, subjective well-being. Once again, look at that blue line from the beginning of the experiment to the end of the two-week period, we see a massive jump. And again, as we go from time period two to time period three and they start using their phones again, it falls, but we still get some after-effect benefits from the two weeks they spent Without using their phone. ([Time 0:03:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e42b65d-0ea4-46d1-9613-effee836b663)) - **Four Mechanisms Explain The Benefits** - Researchers identified four mediators: more meaningful offline activities, increased social interaction, longer sleep, and higher self-control. - Time reallocation of ~150 minutes/day explained first three; reduced reward pull from apps explained self-control. Transcript: Cal Newport So that's our second question here. What explains these results? Now, fortunately, the researchers also looked at this question. They measured many factors during the experiment before and after to try to figure out what changed during the period of not using mobile internet that seems at least like it's likely, Can it, to be mediating the positive results that they saw. Well, the first thing they looked at was just the obvious top line number. When you take mobile internet off of your phone, how much less do you look at it? And they discovered that actually significantly less. The average daily screen time before the experiment began was 304 minutes. By the end of the experiment, that had dropped down to 161 minutes. So they basically dropped the amount of time they're looking at their screens by about a factor of two when you took mobile internet off of the phones. Okay, so they freed up this sort of 150 or so minutes each day that they used to be looking at mobile internet devices. How did this then lead to them being happier, less mental health impacts, and ability to focus more? Well, the researchers went on to isolate four what they called mediation factors that emerged as having strong changes during the experimental period. And it's their best guesses at what is actually mediating the positive dependent variable effects. So here's the four mediation factors that they measured during the experimental period. The subject spent more time doing meaningful offline activities. They experienced more social interaction. They slept more and their sense of self-control increased. ([Time 0:06:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/feb01576-47f7-40c0-9aea-8ea3d97bea72)) - **Phones Hijack Short Term Motivation Circuits** - Constant mobile internet trains short-term motivation circuits to favor picking up the phone, producing persistent urges and reduced autonomy. - Removing those apps reduces that vote and restores perceived self-control quickly. Transcript: Cal Newport So one of the things that happens when you have your phone with you at all times, like most people do, and you have these internet-based apps that are highly distracting on the phone, As I've talked about many times before on this show, the short-term motivation centers in your brain learn that picking up that phone and tapping on one of those apps is very likely to Give you a reward signal. The expected value is high. And because of that, because you have such a clean reward signal coming out of those apps, your short-term motivation center of your brain is constantly voting for picking up your phone. And you feel this as like a constant urge for distraction that pulls you away from other things you might want to do or prevents you from doing those things in the first place. And it can make you feel like you don't have control over your own body or mind. You're like, why did I just spend 150 minutes on TikTok? I didn't want to do that. So it leaves you feeling like you don't have much self-control. Now on the flip side, when you get those apps out of your life, those short-term motivations in your brain is no longer voting for picking up your phone so strongly and you find yourself Able to do other things more easily because you do not have to overcome the vote of your brain saying, hey, let's pick up the phone. It's not nearly as strong anymore. What is that going to feel like? I have more self-control. Is when you turn off mobile internet on your phone, you will begin to experience your day as one in which you have much more control or autonomy over what you do, which is also going to be Obviously a very positive factor. ([Time 0:10:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7b290c8a-077a-4ea4-9924-e355ebcd1370)) - **Block Precisely Target Social News And Games** - To succeed, block precisely: target social media, news, and games while leaving pragmatic apps (parking, 2FA) accessible. - Narrow blocking prevents the frustration that causes people to disable controls and fail the experiment. Transcript: Cal Newport How do I successfully stick with this intervention? All if you know the thing to do is to spend 14 days blocking mobile internet on your phone and you get all these benefits, how do we make sure we'll stick with this? Well, this is a relevant question. There's a key data point from early in the paper that should give us pause. They had originally recruited right around 500 participants for this study, but only 25.5% of the participants remained compliant throughout the whole experiment. Now, remember, they could check compliance exactly because they could look at the logs of the blocking software. Now, I assume some of this noncompliance was actually unrelated to the Internet blocking, just people got busy or tired of the surveys and the test and the experience sampling they're Like i forget it i don't want to do it but the sense you get from reading the paper is that a lot of this measured non-compliance was people getting around the mobile internet blocking They could turn it off now it'd be logged if they did and then they wouldn't be counted in the data but you could turn it off and it seemed like a large number of people at some point circumvented It at least a little bit. So this motivates a critical question. If you want to do this experiment in your life to get these benefits, what can you do to maximize the odds that you're like the 25.5% of the participants who stuck with the blocking and Not like the 74.5% who gave in and started using their phone again. Well, I came up with three tips. And if you're going to put this into practice, I came up with three tips that I think would be helpful. Okay? All right. Let's start with the first one here. I'll reveal it. This is dramatic, Jesse. Those who are listening, again, are missing avatar-style visual effects. All right. Tip number one, block precisely. So if you're going to block internet connected apps, you have to be a little bit more precise than basically saying, leave the phone, leave text messaging, everything else is blocked. Problem is, and I'm sure a lot of the participants face this, is that there's many pragmatic apps on our phones in the modern world that use the internet or the cellular, and you need them Just to function practically in the world, right? So I'm looking at my own phone, and I can see on here, for example, Park Mobile, right? You park somewhere. It's how we pay for parking here in DC. That uses the internet, but I need that because I'm often parking in places. The two-factor authentication that I use to log into Georgetown or if we're logging into our system here at our production company, I need that on my phone so that I can do two-factor Authentication. There's a couple other apps like that as well. So if you want to succeed, you can't have those type of frustrations. So you need to block more narrowly. Whatever blocking software you're using, you have to go through and choose specific apps to block, not just all. The simple advice I would give is look at the so-called S&G apps, social media, news, and games. These are the ones that are really engineered to grab your attention and therefore create that sense of motivation to pick up your phone. So go block every S&G you can find, but you can leave the other pragmatic apps, the weather app, the parking app, the two-factor authentication app, you can leave those open so that you're Not going to have the issue where you're like, oh, I really need this app. Let me turn off my blocking. And now you never turn it back on again. All right. So that's tip number one if you want to succeed with this intervention. All right. Tip number two. Strengthen controls. So one of the things that they did in this paper is that the software they were using to block mobile Internet access, it wasn't particularly strong. The subjects could turn it off or circumvent it. It would take them out of the sample study, but they could do it. This is partially experimental design. The researchers didn't want to take over completely the subject's phone. I mean, what if they were in an emergency and they couldn't use it? But it also has to do with the reality of iOS, which several years ago made a change that made it very difficult for third-party apps to really have strong controls over blocking on your Phone. They didn't like the idea of a third-party app being able to strongly block other third-party apps. But if you can have stronger blocking, by which I mean blocking in which there's more friction involved than actually turning it off, it will significantly increase your probability Of compliance with this intervention. So if you want to move just one step above the sort of basic controls they were doing, you can think about a device like Brick. Brick has a physical key fob that becomes involved if you want to actually turn off a particular blocking mode. You have to touch it to your phone. You can put this in another room or keep it in your car or your bag. So you still have access to anything if you need it, but the friction of going to get a device and touching to your device is often enough to give pause and to prevent that short-term motivation Circuit from winning because it sees a real cost to you having to actually demonstrably go and get this thing and make it clear to yourself that you failed with your own rules. You want to go a step above that. You can configure your phone. So if you have a partner, right, you can configure your phone such that it's protected with iOS's screen time, but it's like you're the kid and your partner is the parent, right? And only they know the pin code for actually changing what settings are on your phone. So if you want to change the blocking software, you would have to get the number from someone else. Again, that's a higher level of friction, but that's really going to work as well. You're going to think, okay, I'm not going to go bother like my husband or my wife or my girlfriend or my boyfriend to get this PIN number. That's just admitting I failed. Guess I'm going to have to do without checking Instagram right in this moment. ([Time 0:15:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1436e709-ba66-498c-999e-22363fa8fc63)) - **Strengthen Controls With Extra Friction** - Strengthen controls by adding friction: use a physical key fob (Brick) or give a partner the Screen Time PIN. - Extra friction makes bypassing blocks costly and boosts compliance beyond simple app blockers. Transcript: Cal Newport Strengthen controls. So one of the things that they did in this paper is that the software they were using to block mobile Internet access, it wasn't particularly strong. The subjects could turn it off or circumvent it. It would take them out of the sample study, but they could do it. This is partially experimental design. The researchers didn't want to take over completely the subject's phone. I mean, what if they were in an emergency and they couldn't use it? But it also has to do with the reality of iOS, which several years ago made a change that made it very difficult for third-party apps to really have strong controls over blocking on your Phone. They didn't like the idea of a third-party app being able to strongly block other third-party apps. But if you can have stronger blocking, by which I mean blocking in which there's more friction involved than actually turning it off, it will significantly increase your probability Of compliance with this intervention. So if you want to move just one step above the sort of basic controls they were doing, you can think about a device like Brick. Brick has a physical key fob that becomes involved if you want to actually turn off a particular blocking mode. You have to touch it to your phone. You can put this in another room or keep it in your car or your bag. So you still have access to anything if you need it, but the friction of going to get a device and touching to your device is often enough to give pause and to prevent that short-term motivation Circuit from winning because it sees a real cost to you having to actually demonstrably go and get this thing and make it clear to yourself that you failed with your own rules. You want to go a step above that. You can configure your phone. So if you have a partner, right, you can configure your phone such that it's protected with iOS's screen time, but it's like you're the kid and your partner is the parent, right? And only they know the pin code for actually changing what settings are on your phone. So if you want to change the blocking software, you would have to get the number from someone else. Again, that's a higher level of friction, but that's really going to work as well. ([Time 0:19:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/15971939-b2e5-47f6-8c08-7569420033c6)) - **Lean Into Boredom To Rediscover Better Activities** - Lean into boredom instead of reverting to phone use; boredom will push you toward socializing, sleep, or meaningful offline work. - Allow discomfort and reframe it as an opportunity to pursue better activities. Transcript: Cal Newport Lean into boredom. This is one of the more interesting things I saw in the paper was this idea that many of these subjects naturally drifted to the same high-value activities once you took the mobile internet, That sort of potent distraction, out of their life. The point is our instincts are good. If we get rid of these sort of artificial constraints in our lives, our instincts for how we want to alleviate boredom tend to be good. I want to go hang out with people. I want to go do something interesting. I want to make my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. So you're going to feel discomfort when you don't have access to the same apps that you're used to delivering you numbing or diversion. That's okay. Feel that discomfort. Feel that boredom. And tell yourself, rewire yourself to think, the solution to this boredom is not circumventing the blocks and going back to having access to apps on my phone. Let me try other things that might get rid of this boredom unrelated to my phone. And that's going to drive you really quickly towards activities that are actually very good for you. It's like if you're very hungry and you're put into a food environment where you don't have ultra processed foods that are hyper palatable, you're going to eat the things that are good For you. You're like, oh, I want, you know, I have like meat here and vegetables and fruit, like stuff that your body recognizes and likes. So in the absence of the artificial, our instincts work really well. So in the absence of artificial diversions, the boredom will drive you towards good behavior if you let it. Just take your phone off the table as the solution and see what other solutions arise in that roiled wake. And you're going to find yourself drawn to activities that make a big difference. ([Time 0:21:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/59ca5101-07fc-4af7-9593-039e521da7b7)) - **Use The Break To Make Permanent Changes** - After a successful 14-day break, consider permanently removing or disabling distracting apps so your phone becomes boring. - Reduced exposure makes those apps less alluring and increases appetite for real-life activities. Transcript: Cal Newport So what's the long-term vision here? Let's say you do this intervention for two weeks. You feel much better. You can concentrate. Your subjective well-being is better. Your mental health is feeling stronger. The idea is once you get to that point, you will follow something like my own lead, like what I do in my life, and permanently quit or disable these apps that are on your phone that are causing These diversions to make your phone boring, like losing your taste for junk food. And now you can be around potato chips and have no desire to eat them. You will get there when it comes to these digital diversions. If they're not normally on your phone and you don't normally spend much time with them, they become less alluring. And what becomes more attractive is all of the other interesting things going on in your life, getting a full night's sleep, interacting in the real world with other people, meaningful Offline activities. Take the lesson from this paper and right away go ahead and do a 14-day mobile internet break on your phone. Keep all the apps you need for your day-to life. Just takes off the ones you don't. Remember the three tips that I mentioned so that you're more likely to succeed with this. ([Time 0:23:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/019da1c8-6cb4-4586-aad2-2cfa3bb735f3)) - **AI Increased Submissions But Hurt Paper Quality** - Introduction of ChatGPT coincided with a surge in academic submissions but a decline in manuscript readability and higher desk-rejection rates for AI-heavy papers. - High-AI manuscripts (~70% AI) faced ~70% desk rejection versus 44% for low-AI ones. Transcript: Cal Newport So here's the basic idea. This is a task force. The authors are a task force. They were organized by a particular well-known journal in organization science. It's called organization science. This task force was pulled together to answer the question of what role is AI having in the submissions and publications? Like what role is it having on the academic research community that is publishing in this journal? And they gathered really good data because these are researchers from a field where what you do is gather really good data. So they know what they're doing here. I want to show you a couple charts. I'm going to bring this up here. All right, here's the first chart. So this is labeled monthly submission volume at Organization Science from January 2013 until the end of 2025. The key thing here is at the far right, we see this massive increase in submissions, and it happens right after this vertical line is labeled ChatGPT. So the first thing they noticed is there was a bump during COVID-19. It bumped up from what was happening before, but it was pretty steady. And then post-ChatGPT, they've been having an increasing rate of submissions per year. All right, so that's chart number one. Here's chart number two. This is monthly submission volume by AI use category. So that black line is the total submissions per month. That dotted line in the middle is ChatGPT gets introduced. These lines down the bottom are measuring how much AI was used in the paper submitted. The orange line is 0 15% AI. And what you can see is as the total volume of submissions go up, the total fraction of those submissions or volume of submissions that don't use AI is going down. So they're clearly measuring they are getting more AI submissions ever since ChatGPT came out. I think, let's see here. Okay. And then here we see a chart that measures essentially the readability of papers. And Jesse, as you'll notice, it's pretty flat from 2013 through COVID-19. And then what happens at the ChatGPT line? It takes a nosedive, just a nosedive. So the papers become massively and notably less readable right around the time ChatGPT is emerging. Here's a couple numbers from the paper. Among manuscripts that were high AI submissions, so 70% or more of the manuscript was generated with the help of AI, nearly 70% were desk rejected, which means an editor determined They should not be sent out for review. So they were so bad, the editor was like, we're not even going to do peer review on this. By comparison, the desk rejection rate for low AI manuscripts, manuscripts where there was very little AI used, was 44%. So it almost doubled the chance you would get rejected right off the bat if it was written with the help of AI. Now, remember, the editors don't know that. They labeled these after the fact. This is just strictly based on their assessment of the quality of the paper. Later on, the researchers found that the percentage of high AI papers that made it all the way through to the final stage where they say revise and resubmit for publication was around 4%, whereas for low AI papers, that rate was 12%. So you have a 3x reduction in the probability that your paper would actually make it through and be published. So what they're finding is this is a real problem. AI made it easier to write and submit papers. And because of this, they're getting a ton more submissions, which really is actually taxing their resources because editors have to look at these submissions and peer reviewers Have to peer review them if they're sufficiently good. Now, this would be okay if these were all good submissions and we're just strictly increasing the amount of good science. Great. We're going to now have a productivity boom in this actual academic field, but it's not what they saw. What they clearly measured is AI made it faster to produce papers, but the papers you were producing were bad. They weren't readable. They were way more likely to be desk rejected, way, way more likely to not make it through to acceptance. And I think this is a good specific case study of a more general issue that we've been talking about recently on this show, which is when it comes to productivity, making things faster Doesn't necessarily make things better. Making it easier to technically finish and submit a paper doesn't necessarily mean that you are a more productive scientist or science is proceeding more productively. And often you can have a reverse effect where producing lower quality things faster gunks up the works and prevents the good stuff from happening. ([Time 0:28:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7f561ffa-b9d9-4474-9d0c-e4b874e450fe)) - **Landlining Turned Lent Challenge Into Habit** - Tyler and his wife adopted leaving phones in the kitchen during Lent and call it landlining, which they kept practicing afterward. - They use calls for urgent contact and found evenings more focused and social without phones on hand. Transcript: Cal Newport All Tylers today, all Tylers all the time. That's just a nice motto. All right, Tyler, thank you for what you do. Oh, here's his message. I'm not, I mean, Tyler, thank you for what you do, whatever that is, but I'm now reading his message. Thank you for the, thank you for what you do. Deep work and slow productivity have been transformational in helping me move away from distracted, lazy forms of working from home to more focused, satisfying days as a data scientist. Deep Questions helps me remember why the increased cognitive effort is so worth it, and it's easy to get excited after reading a book and fall back into bad habits two weeks later. My wife and I adopted leaving our phones plugged in the kitchen as a sort of mindfulness challenge during Lent and couldn't believe how impactful this was for both of us. We now call it landlining and have continued to practice this even after Lent. It's easy to just tell my wife I'm landlining, so please call if she needs anything while she's out. I like that terminology. I think it's useful. So this idea of leaving your phone plugged in the kitchen is one I talk about all the time. I think it's one of the easiest ways to begin to de-addict your mind from the attraction of your phone, especially if your phone just fundamentally has things attractive on it, is keep It plugged in your kitchen so you would have to get up and go get it if you want to use it. Do not have it on your person while you eat, while you watch TV, while you read books, while you socialize with your family. It makes such a big difference, but I like having a term it. So Tyler and his wife call it landlining. I think that's useful because it gives you a shorthand for explaining to people, don't expect me maybe to immediately see, for example, a text message you send. That's one of the big hooks that keeps us near the ocean so that the jaws of distraction can grab us and pull us under is this idea of people might expect me to answer a text message. And I don't want to seem like I'm being rude. So I need my phone with me to check those text messages. And now it's on you. Now they've got you. And all the other stuff are there. So if landlining caught on, you could use it in the same way that Tyler uses it with his wife, right? Could say, I'm landlining in the evening, so you're going to have to call if you have something urgent to get my attention, right? So I like that, landlining. People should use, I like the terminology, people should use it. ([Time 0:37:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/91f9babb-48fe-41a7-bc4e-f07b5efc8a0c))