Leave your phone at home.

Twenty minutes. No phone. That is the entire suggestion, and the reason it needs an essay is that it will feel disproportionately difficult the first time.

The discomfort peaks around minute four. Your hand goes to your pocket for no reason at all, finds nothing, and reports back that something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. That is just the shape of the habit, and it dissolves faster than you expect.

What arrives after is the part worth having. Unstructured, unrecorded thinking, the kind that solves the problem you had been grinding at all week, usually about eleven minutes in and usually about something else entirely. Boredom is not the absence of thought. It is the room thought needs.

If leaving it behind feels genuinely unsafe or impractical, put it in a bag rather than a pocket. Distance is most of the effect.