I got into "deep work" a while ago, keeping my internet off until noon every day. It blew my mind how calm and focused I was when I didn't fill my head with nonsense first thing in the morning.
I think it also depends on what you’re doing on your phone. Big difference between waking up and checking Twitter and waking up and messaging a loved one across the world.
I'm unsure how much of a difference that really makes as there's lots of distractions in my (and probably most peoples) morning routine that are not related to my phone. Boring things like the hygiene routine but also things that come up and require thought such as (almost) empty grocery items or things related to the commute such as radio in the car or ads in public transit. While most of these are not specifically engineered to be attention seeking, I still see most of them as distracting and my focus only starts when I sit down to do some work.
It's all about your body's natural response to dopamine highs and lows.
Social media, doom scrolling, candy crush, etc. are all high-dopamine activities. After you engage in these activates for a while, then stop, you're left at a relative dopamine deficiency, which your brain abhors. It attempts to rectify the deficiency by encouraging you to engage in high-dopamine activities, which you experience as being 'distracted' from the relatively low-dopamine-rewarded work you're trying to focus on. If you avoid engaging in high-dopamine activities in the morning, your brain WILL be more amenable to focus on low-dopamine-rewarded work.
To be clear, I woke up, opened a sugar free red bull, and began working immediately.
The rule was to spend at least the first hour offline, but I'd find myself getting so much done, I'd want to keep going, and usually extend it to 3 or 4.
In fact I was so productive during this time, I found myself looking actually looking forward to work the next morning.
I generally avoided opening my email until lunchtime for the same reason. That meant I could work all morning while I was fresh and alert on the things that I had planned the day before. Then I'd spend the afternoon on the more administrative side of software development including planning what to do the next day.
