Distraction and Studying with ADHD: Phone, Home, Library

You are sitting at the desk, the phone face down, on silent. You are going to study for four hours. Forty minutes later your hand has gone to the phone and you do not remember how it got there.

This is what most accounts of exam season gather under the heading of "willpower." Yet explaining what happens here with willpower is both wrong and useless.

This article is the distractions section of the series on how to study for an exam with ADHD.

Why silent is not enough

Stothart and colleagues sent notifications to participants' phones during a task that required attention. The participants did not even touch the phone; the notification just arrived. Even so, performance was significantly disrupted, and the disruption was close in size to the effect seen in people actively talking or texting on the phone (Stothart et al., 2015).

The authors' interpretation is that even a brief notification can trigger thoughts unrelated to the task. So even if the sound of the phone is off, when the vibration is felt or the screen lights up, the mind has already gone.

It is reasonable to expect this cost to be higher in ADHD, because attention drifting toward stimuli from outside is already one of the core areas of difficulty. The practical conclusion is simple: the phone should not be on the desk on silent; it should be in another room. Removing the stimulus from the environment is called stimulus control.

The invisible bill of interruption

The second matter is less the interruption itself than the cost of the return.

The study by Mark and colleagues showed that interrupted tasks were actually finished in a shorter time, but that this had a price: participants worked faster to make up for the interruption and reported more stress, time pressure and effort (Mark et al., 2008).

There is also the part of attention that stays behind. When you look at the phone and return, your body is at the desk but part of your mind is still on what you just saw. In the glossary this is attention residue. If you break a forty-five-minute block three times, what comes out is not forty-five minutes of study but three fragmented entries.

That is why the sentence "let me just look for a minute" is really a wrong calculation. A minute does not pass on the phone; it is one minute on the phone and then four minutes getting back.

The particular problem of social media

Looking at an e-mail and looking at social media are not the same thing. Social media does not end.

A textbook has an end; the page ends, the topic ends. The feed does not end, and because it does not end, you have to be the one to make the decision "let me get up now." In ADHD that moment of making the decision is exactly where the difficulty lies. In the article on infinite scrolling I described how this design works.

A few limits worth trying for exam season.

Deleting the app from the phone. You do not have to close the account; even going in through the browser adds enough friction.

Putting the phone in another room. If out of the field of view is not enough, behind a door.

A separate user or focus mode for study hours. A profile in which only the study apps are open while you work.

Defining the break as screen-free. An app opened as a break makes the end of the break uncertain.

None of these require willpower; they are all decisions made in advance. I gathered the general form of fighting distractions in the article on digital clutter.

Working with a computer

Part of exam study happens on a screen: video lessons, digital resources, online question banks. Here moving the phone away is not enough, because the distractor is on the same screen.

Ravizza and colleagues monitored, through a server, students' actual internet use during lectures in an introductory psychology course. Non-course internet use was widespread and was related to exam performance in the opposite direction; course-related use did not predict performance (Ravizza et al., 2017).

This is a correlational study; it does not establish cause and effect. But reducing the number of tabs while working on a screen is a cheap and sensible precaution. One window, full screen, notifications off. With video lessons, raising the playback speed a little can also help; when the tempo of the task goes up, the mind has fewer gaps to escape through. I wrote about this side in detail in the article on online lessons.

A full task is a shield against distractors

One of the most interesting findings from the research side here is specific to ADHD.

Forster and colleagues worked with 17 adults with ADHD and 17 control participants. The participants tried to ignore irrelevant images that appeared now and then while they searched for a target letter on a screen. The task was presented at two levels of difficulty. The cost of being affected by the distractor in adults with ADHD was more than double that of the control group; but when the task became harder, that is, when perceptual load increased, distraction in the ADHD group also fell to the control level (Forster et al., 2014).

This is a laboratory task and does not carry over one to one to studying. But it supports an intuition: the cause of distraction is not always the environment; sometimes the task leaves too much empty space.

Its translation into exam study is this. Passive reading leaves empty space; reading while marking with a pen does not. Watching a video leaves empty space; taking notes while watching does not. Reviewing a topic leaves empty space; testing yourself does not. That is also a side benefit of the active methods I described in the article on topic review.

A distraction notebook. Do not try to chase away the irrelevant things that come to mind while you study; write them in a single word on a sheet of paper at the edge of the desk. "Parcel," "a relative's birthday," "charger." Writing takes thirty seconds and that thought does not come back. When you take a break, you look at the sheet and decide which one to deal with. A chased-away thought returns; a written one does not.

Home, library, café

I wrote a long article on choosing an environment under the heading study environment; here I summarize the part specific to exam study.

Library. Its strength comes less from its silence than from the people working around you. This is the body doubling effect. Good for hard-to-start tasks and long blocks. The disadvantage: going takes time, and the decision to go is in itself a chance to postpone.

Home. There is no cost of travel; in return there are many distractors. If you will work at home, setting a corner where you sit only to work, clearing your eye level and building a small starting ritual make a difference.

Café. It can work for generating ideas, drafting and building a subject in your head. It is generally not a good place for detail, memorization and checking. For someone with high sensory sensitivity it can have exactly the opposite effect.

It is important not to make the choice a matter of character. "I cannot work at home" is not an identity, it is an observation. And that observation changes with the task.

The home environment and the people around it

The hardest side of working at home is often not the phone but the home itself and the people in it.

When someone living in the same house opens the door and says "I'm going to ask you something," that question lasts thirty seconds but the return takes minutes. These interruptions pile up in exam season, and usually nobody means any harm; it is just not obvious that you are working.

A few things are worth trying.

Putting up a visible sign. A simple card hung on the door, a sheet of paper saying "45 minutes." Less tiring than talking, and there is no need to explain again each time.

Announcing the hours in advance. The sentence "I will be studying today from eight to nine in the evening" markedly reduces interruptions at those hours. A vague "I'm studying" does not do this.

Bundling the interruptions. Asking that questions from the household fall at break times is much cheaper than answering each one separately.

Headphones. Even if you do not listen to music, headphones in your ears work as a social signal.

Telling the household about ADHD is not always possible or necessary. The sentence "If I am interrupted, I have to start over" is usually enough and does not get into a conversation about the diagnosis. If you want to open the subject, I wrote about how it can be framed in the article on telling the family about ADHD.

There are also the home's own distractors: unfinished tasks on the desk, clutter at eye level, sounds from the kitchen. Because trying to tidy the whole house can turn into a new form of procrastination, clearing only the area visible from where you sit is a more realistic goal.

A two-week experiment

Instead of guessing which environment suits which task, measuring gives faster results.

For two weeks, after every study block write three things: where you worked, after how many minutes you were able to start, how many minutes you were able to stay. Three numbers, ten seconds a day.

While measuring, pay attention to one point: try the same environment with different types of task. One day memorization, one day problem solving, one day reading. The same library can turn out perfect for memorization and ordinary for problem solving. A measurement made with only one type of task makes the environment look better or worse than it is.

At the end of two weeks you have data, not a guess. If you start in the library after five minutes on average and at home after thirty-five minutes, the half hour you spend on the road is actually a gain. Or it comes out the other way round and you see that staying at home makes more sense.

What wears a person out in the fight against distractions is having to decide again each time. If every time you sit down you decide anew where to put the phone, which room to work in and what to do during the break, you are making dozens of small decisions during the day, and each of them is a battle that can be lost. Making these decisions once and setting up the environment accordingly is much cheaper than doing the same thing thirty times.