Decide what you'll do instead before the evening starts, and make it small. Pick a day, a time, a place and a first step, like "9pm, on the couch, open the doc and type one line". "I'll do something else tonight" is too vague to beat your phone.
This is for when you already know what you'd rather be doing: the guitar, the chapter you keep not writing, the walk. If you have no idea what that is, a plan can't pick it for you.
Why does "just do something else" not work?
By the time you sit down, the thing you meant to do feels different. In a diary study, 75 students logged 501 study tasks over eight days. The tasks that got put off felt less important and more unpleasant when it was time to start than when they were planned (Wieland and others, 2021). A student’s general procrastination score did not predict which tasks were put off.
Scrolling is the easy way out of that feeling. Researchers describe putting things off as largely short-term mood repair: the task feels bad, so you do something that feels better right now (Sirois and Pychyl, 2013). In three experiments, people in a bad mood put things off more, but only when they believed putting off could lift their mood (Tice, Bratslavsky and Baumeister, 2001).
We found no study of scrolling itself. This is the research on putting things off, applied to the evening scroll.
What does the research say to do instead?
Decide ahead. The tool is called an if-then plan: if it's this day, this time and this place, then I do this first step. Across 642 tests, the effect on what people actually did was d = 0.27 (Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, 2025). That number is the gap between people who planned and people who didn’t, where 0.2 counts as small and 0.5 as medium.
So it is small, and it shrinks to about 0.15 after correcting for studies that only got published when they worked. It is still one of the most tested ideas in behaviour science.
In that review, plans that named a time and a place did better than plans that named only a time (d = 0.46 against 0.25). The idea is to hand the start to a cue, so you don't have to decide anything at 11pm, tired and bored. You decided in the afternoon.
How do you write one for the evening?
- Day, time, place, first step. "Tonight, 8:30, kitchen table: open the doc and type one line."
- Make the first step small. The more unpleasant a task feels, and the less sure you are you can do it, the more people put it off (Steel, 2007). A small first step goes after both. That link is a correlation, and we found no trial of a tiny first session against a normal one, so this part is reasoning, not a result.
- Add one for what gets in the way. In that review, plans cued by a setback scored between 0.31 and 0.44. "If I get stuck, then I write down the question I'm stuck on and stop."
What about app blockers?
Keep yours if it helps. A blocker can take the scroll off the table, but it doesn't pick what you do with the time. People trying to cut back on their phone keep asking the same thing: what am I supposed to do instead? The blocker takes the scroll away. The plan says what takes its place.
What if you scroll anyway?
It happens. One missed chance does not undo anything: in a 12-week habit study, missing one opportunity did not materially affect how the habit formed (Lally and others, 2010). Go again at the next time you picked.
Where does Omodo fit?
Omodo turns the thing you keep meaning to do into a plan of short sessions, starting from where you are, and reminds you before each session. Each session is an if-then plan with a day, a time, a place and a first step, and the first one is 20 minutes at most. Miss one and the next stays the size it was: nothing to make up, no streaks. You can start free; the current price is on the pricing page. Omodo has not measured its own results yet. The research above is why it is built this way, not a promise about what it will do for you.