You will check your phone 144,000 more times this year. Decide what that is for.

Three hundred and ninety. That is the average number of times an American adult picks up their phone in a day, per the most recent year of data from Asurion's national survey. The median is lower at two hundred; the heavy-use cohort is higher at six hundred. Pick the one that sounds most like you. The exact number is less important than what we are about to do with it.

Multiply by 365.

If you are average, you will pick up your phone 142,350 times this year. Round to 144,000 because the precision is false comfort.

This year. Just this one.

Now multiply by twenty-three. Each pickup, according to Mark, Gudith and Klocke at UC Irvine, costs you twenty-three minutes of refocus time after you put the phone back down. That is not the length of the scroll. That is the cost of the interruption to whatever you were doing before.

144,000 pickups × 23 minutes = 55,200 hours of refocus debt per year.

The number is obviously absurd. You do not have that many waking hours. Which means: most of those pickups happened in a state where the refocus cost was zero because there was no task to refocus on. You were in the queue at the supermarket. You were on the toilet. You were waiting for water to boil. The pickup cost nothing because you were not, in those moments, doing anything you were going to lose.

Fine. Subtract the no-cost pickups. Conservatively, half of them. That still leaves you with 72,000 pickups a year that interrupted something you were doing, and 27,600 hours of refocus debt.

You do not have 27,600 hours either. So the refocus debt does not get paid in time. It gets paid in quality. The book you read, but did not retain. The conversation you had, but cannot remember the details of. The work you did, but had to redo on Friday because it was wrong on Tuesday. These are not separate problems. They are the same problem.

The question

I am not here to ask you to pick up your phone less. That is between you and you. I am here to ask you to pick it up on purpose.

For each of the 144,000 pickups this year, there will be a moment, half a second long, where you could have asked yourself: what is this for. Most people do not ask. The pickup is unconscious. The hand moves before the question forms.

The point of this product is to insert a tiny cost into that half-second. Fifty cents per overage block. Twenty-five pushups when the lock fires. Not enough to ruin your day. Enough to make the half-second conscious. Once it is conscious, your own preferences get a vote.

What I have noticed in twenty years of watching: people who get a vote in their own pickups tend to make different decisions. Not always better ones. But more theirs.

What I am asking

Pick a number. Pick what fraction of the 144,000 pickups this year were worth taking. The remainder is the budget you would like back.

If the fraction is small, the system in this product is designed for you. If the fraction is large, you do not need me. Either way, you should know the fraction. Most people have never computed it.

The clock is the only one of these resources you do not get more of. Spend it knowing the cost.