Then, for battery usage, what I want you to do is show usage by activity. Now, what this should tell you, really, really importantly, is the number of hours you’ve been using each app on your phone—not in the background, but active screen time, the number of hours you’ve been using your phone in the last seven days.

Now, when I do this experiment in workshops with lots of people, what I often discover is that students will pull out their phones and say, “Oh, geez.” It’s really, really common for students to find that in a seven-day period, they’ve been using their phone for almost 50 hours. That’s right. Now, that’s on the higher end. I often find that most students have used their phones for 30 to 40 hours in a seven-day period. And this isn’t background usage; this is active screen time. That’s right, active screen time. That means if you’re spending 30 hours over seven days, or even 35 hours, you’re on your phone five or six hours a day.

I mean, my math isn’t amazing, but that’s a lot, right? I think either way, it’s almost an entire school day. You’re at school for six hours a day, and if you’re using your phone 30-plus hours in seven days, you’re almost using it three to five hours a day, which is almost like a school day.

So that’s why your phone is going to be your biggest obstacle to nailing your HSC. Because it’s going to be such a big distraction. I know on my iPhone, it tells me the number of times I pick up my phone every day, and I was horrified to find out that I picked it up 75 times on a single day. Now, you don’t even realize it because it’s so unconscious, but when I discovered that, I realized that every single time I’m picking up my phone, I’m breaking my concentration. And it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds, give or take, for you to get back in the zone and focus. So, using your phone and picking it up all the time is going to have a huge impact on the quality of your study.

And ultimately, the quality of your study is going to define the results you create for yourself. So, your phone is going to be your biggest obstacle, your biggest distraction, in actually achieving the goals you set for yourself during the HSC. So, what we need to look at here— as painful as it might be—is what are a couple of simple things you can do over years 11 and 12 to really minimize those distractions and take control of your phone? Because to be fair, right now, it probably controls you.

So, let’s find out what these simple things are that you can do.

The biggest barrier to your success during years 11 and 12 is going to be your phone. So, what we need to do is identify how you can actually reduce it as a distraction. Now, all of us have willpower, the ability to make good or bad decisions. Generally speaking, as the day goes on, your willpower diminishes. I want you to think of it like a fuel tank: every time you use it, it starts to fall a little bit more. So, by the time you get home from school, you’re tired, you’ve already had to make lots of decisions, and your willpower’s pretty low on energy.

What that means is you can’t rely on willpower to say, “Hey, I’m not going to check my phone. I’m not going to check the notification I just received. I’m not going to jump on Instagram and do a bit of scrolling or jump on Facebook, whatever it is.” You can’t rely on willpower. That means you’re going to need to put some structures in place, some processes.

The most simple thing is, number one, to have a conversation with a parent, a friend, or a sibling and actually give them your phone. Give them your phone and say, “Hey, look, here is my phone. I’m going to be studying from 4 to 6 pm or 5 to 7 pm, or whatever time zone you’re studying for. Please take care of it. I’ve locked it, so you can’t get access to it.” I know you might be freaking out that your parent has your phone and you don’t want them to look at stuff. Make sure for security, they can’t access it. But then give it to them and say, “I want you to hold this. I want you to only give it back to me, no matter how much I complain, when I finish studying, which will be at this time.”

And give them the phone. That way, you’ve removed it from your reach, and you have no way to access it during that time. You’ll be able to focus. Now, of course, you’ll get your phone back afterward. Great. You’ll still be able to check in with your friends, check Instagram, Netflix, Snapchat, whatever it is that you’re using. But for that time, it’s a small commitment. It’s just a couple of hours a day to say, “Hey, I’m not going to have my phone.” That’s going to be such a key part of creating success for yourself over years 11 and 12.

Now, the other thing you can do is if you don’t have a parent or sibling around— I get that, you might come home from school, and they might not be home yet—is to actually just be disciplined about putting your phone in a separate room. Go into a separate room, put it there on the other side of the house, and then come back and access it later.

Now, if you’re on Apple, the final thing you can do—and there’s probably an Android equivalent—is there’s a screen time feature where you can actually put in blocks and limits on how much you access certain things. Again, that’s helpful, but it doesn’t stop you from picking up your phone and trying to get into it, which already breaks your focus.

So, in terms of order of preference, you should first try giving your phone to someone else for a small window of time. This way, it’s hard to get it back. Second, putting it in another room—though you can always walk there and get it, it still increases the barrier. And third, using screen time or some app-blocking software on your phone is the least effective option.

So, there we have it, guys. Your phone is going to be your biggest obstacle, the biggest thing standing in the way of you actually doing focused, high-quality study during years 11 and 12, and creating the academic results you want. So, my challenge to you is to get your phone out of your study zone. I’d love to hear what you decide to do. Leave it in the comments below, and let me know how you’re handling this. Maybe you’ve come up with some other cool strategies to remove distractions like your phone. I’d love to hear what they are in the comments.

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