How to lock in

Locked in means fully focused on one thing. A person who is locked in is not checking a phone, not chatting, and not thinking about anything else.

People use it like this: “I have an exam on Friday, so I need to lock in.” Or: “She was locked in for the whole game.”

You lock in by setting things up before you start, so that nothing can pull you away once you begin. Here are five steps you can do today.

1. Pick one task with a clear end. “Study biology” has no end. “Do the ten practice questions for chapter four” does. Write the task on paper and put it where you can see it.
2. Set a length of time. Before you begin, decide how long you will work. A good first try is three rounds. One round is 25 minutes on the task, then five minutes off. Three rounds take an hour and a half, and 1h 15m of that is on the task.
3. Put your phone in another room. Switch it off or silence it first. A phone you can see is hard to ignore, even when it makes no sound.
4. Close everything the task does not need. Shut the other tabs, the chat and the email. Tell the people around you what time you will be free again.
5. Start with the first small move. Open the file and write one line, or read the first question. If starting is the hard part for you, the page on how to stop procrastinating has more.

Locking in works because each step removes one thing that could distract you. Here are three things researchers have found.

Reading takes longer when you do a second thing at the same time.

A review of studies looked at people who read a text while they did something else as well. When they could take as long as they wanted, the reading took them longer. When time was short, they understood less of what they read (Clinton-Lisell, 2021). That is why the first step is one task.

Students with planned breaks felt less tired.

In one study, university students studied on their own for a day. Some took short breaks at set times, such as six minutes off after every 24 minutes of study. Others took a break whenever they wanted. The students with planned breaks said they felt less tired and less distracted. They also seemed to get the same amount done in less time (Biwer and colleagues, 2023). The study lasted only one day.

A phone on the desk can slow you down, even when it is switched off.

In a small study, students took an attention test at home. Half of them had their phone on the desk, switched off, with the screen hidden. The other half had left their phone outside the room. The students with no phone in the room worked faster. Both groups made about the same number of mistakes (Skowronek, Seifert and Lindberg, 2023).

For more, see how to increase your attention span and deep work.

“Lock in”, meaning to start to focus hard on a task, has been used on the internet since at least the 2000s, says the dictionary Merriam-Webster. It lists the phrase as slang, and says it likely became popular through sports and through people who stream video games.

In the fall of 2025, a trend on social media called the Great Lock In asked people to work on their goals from September 1 to the end of the year.

Every finding on this page links to a source below. We read the dictionary entry and the phone study in full, and the authors’ summary of the other two.

1. Merriam-Webster (read October 13, 2026). Lock in (slang).
2. Clinton-Lisell, V. (2021). Stop multitasking and just read: Meta-analyses of multitasking’s effects on reading performance and reading time. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(4), 787 to 816.
3. Biwer, F., Wiradhany, W., oude Egbrink, M. G. A. and de Bruin, A. B. H. (2023). Understanding effort regulation: Comparing ‘Pomodoro’ breaks and self-regulated breaks. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(S2), 353 to 367.
4. Skowronek, J., Seifert, A. and Lindberg, S. (2023). The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance. Scientific Reports, 13, 9363.