I always struggled with focus; as far as I can remember, it has always been one of the things that bothered me the most about myself. Being unable to focus sucks. It makes it hard to do what you feel you should do, leaving that sense of frustration toward yourself for not being able to resist such basic instincts as picking up your phone every 5 minutes just to open Instagram, check for new stories from your friends or the girl you like, close it, open TikTok, and start scrolling.

If you do so, there is a very high chance that what you told yourself was just a “quick check” actually turns into an hour-long doom-scrolling session over some stupid content. And like that, after realizing what you just did for the whole last hour, you feel guilty, you feel hopeless, you feel so weak in your free will that you let a 6.9” inches display control your entire life.

If you’re conscious enough, you may have even tried some productivity hacks: disabling notifications, making your screen black & white, adding some time limit to social media apps, and many more weird tricks. But still you failed. If you are lucky enough, the trick works for the first time or maybe the first days, and in rare occasions even one or two weeks, but eventually you end up falling back again, enslaved by the device.

You ask yourself why, if there is something wrong with you: “maybe I have ADHD” (seems popular nowadays to hide behind medical conditions you accept you have no control on lol), or maybe you think your brain might already be fully fried and unrecoverable. Well, let me tell you something: none of this is true.

The real problem is that you have been playing a rigged game all along, and you were delusional enough to think that some simple trick could let you get around it. That’s not how it works, buddy. The smartphone you carry is engineered to maximize the expected fraction of your waking time spent on the device by repeatedly capturing and redirecting your attention. It is less like a neutral tool and more like a casino: you can walk in with willpower, but the lights, sounds, and variable rewards are tuned to keep you playing. That is baked into the design, so you cannot undo it with a few simple tricks.

And just like a casino, it’s not only your smartphone, but the entire environment around you. You are trying to roll a rigged die over and over, hoping something will change; it won’t, because it was never about you in the first place! You keep blaming yourself for losing the focus game over and over again, when the only thing you should blame yourself for is the fact you keep playing the game.

After countless things I’ve tried in my life, I’ve found out the only real trick to fix my focus: it’s not about using a dumb phone, uninstalling apps, buying a phone locker or some other weird productivity trick, but it’s just taking my phone and leaving it in the bathroom the entire day as long as I’m working at my desk, that’s it. If you were expecting some weird trick, I’m sorry for you, but there is none. The only way to stop being hijacked is to not have the device around you, period. It does not matter if you modify it or whatever; as long as it’s there in your immediate reach, it will get you.

This is one of the reasons I always suggest reading Atomic Habits by J. Clear. Regardless of its simplicity, it explains early on that environmental design is everything. What is around you will shape your behavior as much as who is around you. You cannot fight it; you are trying to fight against something that has been wired into our biology for millennia; you are literally playing a losing game. Instead, start modifying your environment intentionally. Arrange your working desk to make sure there is nothing in reach that you know you might get distracted by; you don’t need to guess, just observe. Track your behavior and understand your patterns: what cues trigger bad habits? Remove them.

The bottom line is simple: don’t try to challenge yourself to focus on something by making it the most likely or appealing choice; instead, make it the only one available and your brain will have nothing else to fight boredom with.