Do Not Disturb Isn't Just a Setting—It's a Skill

It’s a common phenomenon: the phone is face-down on the desk, the textbook is open when you eventually hit a lull studying. “Just for five minutes,” you think to yourself, and then (somehow!) 40 minutes have disappeared into a TikTok scroll or a group chat spiral. It's not a willpower problem unique to you or this generation. It's a design problem.

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Our phones are built to be picked up and addictive once in use, and putting them down during the moments that matter most—class, homework, study hours—has become one of the hardest, and most important, skills a student can build. Ahead, learn how our team at Cram Crew recommends balancing screen time with study time, and the tricks we’ve found most helpful for our students. 

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How Phone Usage Is Impacting Students

A recent meta-analysis looking across dozens of studies on university students found a consistent pattern: higher smartphone usage frequency correlates with lower academic performance, a trend that holds up across regions and study designs. Other researchers have found the same story from different angles—a study published in Information Systems Research found that in-class texting and social media use during study time was linked to lower GPAs among college students, and pointed to a broader review of nursing student research showing the same pattern in both classroom and hands-on training settings.

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Even more striking: a study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that just having your phone nearby—even turned off, even face-down—measurably reduces your available cognitive capacity. This means that the urge to check your phone isn’t entirely your fault. Rather, your conscious mind isn't thinking about the phone, but part of your brain is still working to not think about it. That effort impacts the resources you need to focus on the task in front of you. 

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Why It's Worth Learning to Put It Away 

We’re the first to admit that phones are genuinely useful—for research, for connecting with classmates, for accessing tools that support learning. The issue is when and how they're used. A few reasons this particular skill is worth the discomfort of practicing it:

• We’re not as good of multi-taskers as we think we are. Even if you believe you’re listening or paying attention, as you scroll on X or TikTok, you’re impacting your ability to retain information.
• The mere presence of the phone matters, not just active use. As the "brain drain" research shows, resisting the phone still uses up mental energy, so distance, not just discipline, makes a real difference.
• Less distraction now means less anxiety later. When we feel like we’re not taking in information, it can put an emotional toll on us, one we call the distraction-to-procrastination-to-stress cycle. 
• It's a life skill, not just a study skill. The same tug-of-war between "one quick check" and staying present shows up in every job, relationship, and goal a student will have after graduation. Practicing it now, on lower-stakes homework, is a lot easier than learning it for the first time under pressure.

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Tools That Can Help

Knowing why to put the phone down doesn't automatically make it easier to do. That's where a little outside structure can help—especially for students who've tried the honor system and found it doesn't hold up under temptation.

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Built-in screen time tools (like Apple's Screen Time or Android's Digital Wellbeing) are a reasonable first step, but they have an obvious weakness: the "override" button is always one tap away. If the same device holding you accountable also lets you talk yourself out of it, it's not much of a barrier.

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That's the gap devices like Brick are designed to fill. Brick pairs a free app with a small, battery-free physical device (about the size of a charger block) that uses NFC—the same short-range tech behind tap-to-pay—to lock and unlock chosen apps. Students can choose which apps to block and which to keep accessible, then tap their phone to the Brick to activate a focus session. The key detail: unlocking requires tapping the phone to the Brick again, so if the device is left in a backpack, on a kitchen counter, or in another room entirely, those apps stay locked until you physically go back to it. That built-in friction—actually having to get up and walk somewhere—is what separates it from an app you can simply swipe past.

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Digital wellness experts point to a similar principle even without hardware. Students can reduce open loops by moving distracting apps off the home screen or building predictable routines around when phones are and aren't in use. The common thread across all of these tools, low-tech or high-tech, is the same: make the distracting option a little harder to reach than the productive one.

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The Bottom Line

Do Not Disturb isn't just a setting you flip on before a study session—it's a skill you build over time, the same way you'd build stamina for a long test or discipline for a training schedule. Some students will get there with a simple habit change. Others might need a physical nudge, like a Brick left in another room during homework hour. Either way, the goal isn't to demonize the phone—it's to make sure it's a tool you're using, not the other way around.