I am not a psychologist or a doctor, and this should not be taken as advice. The studies I mention are findings from particular groups of people, not settled science or universal rules about everyone, and nothing here is a substitute for talking to someone qualified about your own head.
In a set of experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users, Adrian Ward and colleagues found that a phone did not have to buzz, light up, or even be switched on to cost you something. Face-down and silent on the desk was enough. Its mere presence, they reported, quietly ate into people’s cognitive capacity. The drain was not the notifications. It was the low effort of holding yourself back from the thing.
I read that and thought about the golf. In the evening I often walk a course alone, clubs on my back, the light going, the place empty, phone zipped away in the bag where I cannot get at it. I play badly, so this is not about the golf. It is the closest thing I have to a habit that reliably clears my head. For an hour or two nobody can reach me, and something settles that does not settle at any other time.
I used to think that was just me liking a quiet walk. It turns out there may be something real going on, and once I went looking, most of what I found was not about the walk at all. It was a lot about being unreachable.
The default that flipped while we weren’t looking
A 2016 study by Liuba Belkin, William Becker and Samantha Conroy of Lehigh, Virginia Tech and Colorado State looked at the toll of after-hours email on a few hundred working adults. Its most interesting finding was not about the emails at all. It was that you do not need an email to arrive to pay for it. Organizational expectations, the authors concluded, can “steal employee resources even when actual time is not required”, because people simply cannot fully separate from work. The waiting is the cost. Not the message, the possibility of the message.
How normal has that waiting become? Well, in one survey of more than 1,100 US workers, around 71 percent said they felt expected to answer email outside working hours. Some places have pushed back in law: France’s “right to disconnect” took effect on 1 January 2017, requiring firms with 50 or more employees to negotiate rules on after-hours contact.
The small guilt we feel when we leave a message unanswered for an afternoon is probably not a flaw in our character. It is a response we have been trained into, by a default that flipped while most of us were looking the other way.
Not everyone feels it to the same degree but for a great many of us it is simply there now, humming away in the background.
What the quiet actually gives back
Here is the part that finally explained the golf to me. Being unreachable is not only the absence of a bad thing. It seems to hand something back.
Ward’s smartphone work is worth returning to for its detail. Even switched off and face-down, the device quietly taxed people. As Ward put it, “the mere presence of their smartphone was enough to reduce their cognitive capacity”. Tellingly, the people who moved the phone right out of the room did best. Putting distance between yourself and the device freed up more of the mind than simply resisting it in reach.
Then there is what the quiet does once you are actually out in it. In a study published in PLOS ONE, Ruth Ann Atchley, David Strayer and Paul Atchley gave a creative-reasoning test to hikers who had spent four days in the backcountry with no devices at all. They scored roughly 50 percent higher than people who were about to set off on the same trip. The researchers are careful, and so should we be: they could not untangle how much of the lift came from the nature and how much from simply being unplugged for four days. But the direction is hard to miss. Take the demand for your attention away for long enough and the mind does not go blank. It comes back sharper.
Which is, I think, what the empty course has been doing all along. The thing I get home with is not mysticism. It is a bit of attention handed back, because for an hour or two nothing was allowed to reach in and ask for it.
Getting a little bit of quiet back
You do not have to move to a cabin, and you do not have to be some superhumanly disciplined person.
The thing that works for me is not willpower. It is moving things around so the decision is already made before I get to it. James Clear puts the general point better than I can: you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. When I fail to focus it is almost always because I skipped a step. Left the phone in reach, kept a tab open. The environment did the deciding, not my character.
So most of what has helped me is embarrassingly physical:
Put real distance between you and the phone. Not face-down on the desk. Another room, a bag, the boot of the car. For me that is the evening walk round the golf course, but it does not have to be golf: a walk, a swim, an hour in the garden, cooking with the radio on. Anywhere the phone is genuinely out of reach does the same work.
Close the laptop, and mean it. Shutting the lid is a small ceremony that tells your head the day is done. Left open on the kitchen table, it quietly insists the day never quite ended.
Split the two lives if you can. Some people carry a second phone for personal life and leave the work one in a drawer after six. If that is a step too far, taking work email off your personal phone, or tucking it behind a separate work profile, does most of the same job.
Set a stop time and keep it. Decide when work ends before you start, and close the tabs you do not need for the task in front of you. A stop time you actually honour is worth more than a longer day you resent.
Tell people what to expect. A line in your signature, or a quiet word — “I check email twice a day” — turns your silence into a known quantity rather than something the other person has to sit and worry about.
Here is what I have come round to. Most of the reachability we treat as non-negotiable is not, in fact, non-negotiable. Yes, on-call shifts and small teams and clients across time zones exist, and for a narrow band of jobs the pager really does have to stay on. But that is a much smaller share of work than the always-on culture pretends. For most of us, the expectation to answer at nine in the evening is not a requirement of the job. It is a habit the workplace has drifted into, and one that we quietly ratify every time we reply.
The uncomfortable bit is that this makes the always-available life largely a choice. Not always a free one, and not always an easy one to reverse, but a choice all the same. The aim is not to disappear. It is to stop being available by default and start being available on purpose.
If the pull to always be available is tipping into something heavier — a low hum of dread when you are offline, a sense that switching off is simply not allowed — that is worth taking to a qualified counsellor or therapist rather than solving with a productivity trick.
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