Cal Newport set that line down as a rule in Deep Work, his 2016 book about long stretches of undistracted effort. It reads like a tip about breaks. It is a claim about where you live.

For most people, focus is the place they visit. The phone is home, and after twelve minutes of work you return to it the way you sink back into a chair. Nobody schedules that return.

Newport swaps the two. Distraction becomes the place you visit, at a time you set in advance, and focus becomes where you live.

The swap matters because every idle moment trains you. The queue at the chicken rice stall, the lift up from the carpark, the twenty seconds while a file uploads. Reach for the phone in each one, and you teach your mind that boredom lasts about four seconds before something rescues it.

That reflex does not stay in the queue. It follows you to 3pm, into the middle of the proposal, and pulls you out at the first hard sentence.

A clean two-hour block cannot fix a mind that practised leaving all morning.

The fix is dull and specific. Decide when you will next check messages, and write the time down. Until then, the phone stays in the bag, even in the queue.

When the time arrives, check whatever you like, then write down the next one. The itch you feel in the first hour is the measurement: it shows the size of the habit you have been feeding.

So today: three checking times, on paper, before 9am. Let the queue be boring.