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You have probably heard the advice: put your phone in another room and you will think more clearly, even if it is switched off. It comes from one well-known 2017 experiment, and later research has made the picture more careful. Here is what has held up, and a plan you can use tonight.
What did the 2017 phone-in-another-room study find?
The study is Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity by Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten Bos, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research in April 2017.
According to the University of Texas at Austin release on the study, the team ran experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users. Participants set their phones to silent and were randomly told to place them face down on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room, and then took computer tests that needed full concentration.
In the first experiment, people whose phones were in another room did significantly better than those whose phones were on the desk, and slightly better than those with phones in a pocket or bag. The same release reports that it did not matter whether the phone was on or off, or face up or face down. The authors' idea was that part of your attention goes into not thinking about the phone, leaving less for the task.
Did later studies replicate the effect?
Not reliably, and not at the original size.
In 2022, Ana Ruiz Pardo and John Paul Minda ran a pre-registered direct replication of the second experiment, published in Acta Psychologica. They used six conditions: phone on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or outside the room, each switched on or off. They found no difference in performance between the phone-location conditions.
Two meta-analyses, which pool many studies, followed. A 2023 meta-analysis by Böttger, Poschik and Zierer in Behavioral Sciences combined 22 studies with 43 effects and reported a significant overall negative effect of smartphone use and presence, while noting that not every kind of thinking was equally affected.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Douglas Parry in Media Psychology looked only at a phone's mere presence. It ran six meta-analyses across 56 studies and 7,093 participants. Only one pooled effect was statistically significant: working memory was lower when a phone was present. Parry described this as limited support for a negative but smaller-than-theorised effect, and pointed to generally poor statistical power across the studies.
So does keeping your phone away help you study?
Probably, though for a simpler reason than brain drain. These studies tested a phone that just sits there, silent, during a short test. They did not test a real study evening, which is longer, and where a real phone lights up, buzzes and invites a quick check. Putting it in another room removes all of that, costs nothing, and may still give you the small working-memory benefit one meta-analysis found.
If you want to see the notification side for yourself, our post on testing whether phone notifications hurt your study focus walks through a one-week self-experiment.
A phone-away study block you can start tonight
Before you sit down, write the one task for this block, for example "10 JEE Main kinematics problems" or "CBSE Class 12 chemistry, chapter 4 notes".
Put the phone in another room, on silent. If you need a device for an online class, use a laptop if you can, with only that class open.
Set a kitchen timer or a desk clock for 40 to 50 minutes.
Keep a scrap sheet for "check later" thoughts: a message to reply to, a fact to look up.
When the timer ends, take a 10-minute break. You may fetch the phone now, then put it back before the next block.
After three evenings, compare: how many problems did you finish with the phone away versus on the desk?
Tip: if longer blocks feel hard, our guide to a 25-5 Pomodoro plan that protects focus offers a shorter rhythm that works the same way.
If the hard part is knowing what to do once the phone is gone, Fermi's AI tutor can work out what you already know and build a plan for the session, so you sit down to a clear next step.
How can parents bring this up without a fight?
Frame it as an experiment, not a rule. You might say: "There is a study that says phones in another room help focus, and other scientists are not sure. Want to test it for three evenings and tell me what you find?" Let your child keep the score.
Nights are a separate question; see our post on whether a teenager should keep the phone in the bedroom at night.
Try one phone-away block tonight, and let your own results decide.
