This simple gadget was a life hack in disguise

• What is Brick?
• My experience with Brick
• Your Brick can do even more
• Should you buy a Brick?

It’s borderline impossible for the average person to navigate the world without a smartphone nowadays, and it’s no secret that we’ve all come to collectively rely on them a little more than we should. Sure, I want to say it’s mostly about convenience, but that argument doesn’t particularly hold up when half my screen time is dedicated to social media apps.

Comparing screen time with your peers is one way to dredge up some existential dread, and mine spurred a quarter-life crisis a few months ago when I put it into a handy, dandy calculator that estimates how much time you’ll spend staring at your phone over one lifetime. If I kept up my already impressive six hours of phone time a day, I would be on track to waste over 14 years of my life staring at my little screen.

So I staged an intervention for myself. I enabled screen time limits (which did next to nothing) and downloaded app blockers like Opal, which helped a little more. But if there was a way to bypass the limits without major discomfort, I’d find it and be four Reels deep before I realized what I had done. It wasn’t until the folks at Brick reached out that the best solution found me and (quite literally) gave me years of my life back.

What is Brick?

Stupidly simple

Brick’s solution is so simple it’s almost funny: it’s a magnetic puck that temporarily blocks distracting apps with a quick tap and only lets you back into them with another tap. It works with Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology that forces you to make a physical connection to both lock and unlock your device. It’s the same kind of connection that tap-to-pay tech like Apple Pay and Google Pay use to complete transactions.

You tap the Brick to lock apps, and you tap it again to unlock them — like I said, stupidly simple. So how is that any better than solely software-based app blockers? It adds a physical barrier to convenience. The Brick is magnetic, which makes it perfect for living on your refrigerator. I work in an apartment, where my desk is about 15 feet away from my kitchen. It’s a short walk, yes, but the decision to get up from my chair, walk over to the fridge, un-Brick my phone, and walk back is enough friction to snap me out of the habitual reflex to scroll through my feed.

I have friends who work in office spaces, hospitals, and other on-site locations who leave the Brick in their car. That way, they are physically unable to un-Brick their phones until they finish the work day entirely. If you do this, make sure none of the apps you block are needed in an emergency.

Because that’s what phone addiction is to many of us — muscle memory. When something’s taking too long to load at work, you’re waiting for a coworker to respond, or you’re simply just bored, thumbs and fingers start reaching for known sources of quick dopamine hits, like social media. The Brick forces that usually unconscious decision to become a fully conscious, deliberate one, and that’s usually when I realize that it isn’t really what I want to do. The scroll doesn’t become worth the interruption of the walk — revolutionary.

My experience with Brick

Revolution isn’t sunshine and rainbows

I was incredibly skeptical of the Brick. When you first glance at the price tag, anyone with a normal-sized wallet would raise a brow and wonder if it was truly worth it. But after over a month of testing, I can confidently say that $60 is a staggeringly small price to pay for the liberation Brick gives you from yourself.

When I first began Bricking my phone, it was uncomfortable. The withdrawals were there. I’d get frustrated with a task at work and my hands would unconsciously jerk to pick up my phone. That’s why screen time blocking apps alone didn’t work — if it was only a couple of taps away, I’d quickly disable it just to get in a few scrolls. It was that slippery slope that would steal hours of time over the course of the day, and tear my attention away from anything I was doing. It was a never-ending cycle that Brick broke.

I thought the frustration would last forever. You’d be just as surprised to learn that after only three days, the habits were broken — I’d even go as far as to say shattered. I wasn’t reaching for Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or any of my other blocked apps because I knew it would mean an intentional walk to get to them. Even after work, I realized I wasn’t gravitating towards them. Instead, I’d reach for my Kindle Paperwhite, physical journal, or even my LG remote — suddenly, the girl who “never had time” to watch TV was caught up on Stranger Things.

Sometimes, I’d even forget to un-Brick my phone after work. It wasn’t until I crawled into bed and tried to initiate “phone in bed” time that I even realized. Brick was breaking my unhealthy attachment to my phone like I was throwing a real brick through a window, and it genuinely feels like it rewired my brain in the best way.

Your Brick can do even more

Set schedules

You don’t just have to manually Brick and un-Brick your phone. The Brick app lets you create and set scheduled Brick sessions with a few different configurations depending on the day.

For example, I have a Brick schedule for work, where my phone automatically Bricks itself at 9:05AM and un-Bricks at 5PM. I do social media management in the mornings for small businesses, so I need to make sure I can access Instagram and Facebook to make sure all is well with any posts I’ve made before my phone locks up for the rest of the day here at Pocket-lint.

My other schedule is for slow mornings on the weekends, since I spend so much of my Saturday and Sunday mornings scrolling on TikTok in bed when I could be going for a lovely walk or even emptying my mind in a journal. My slow morning schedule can only be broken by a manual un-Brick, so it even forces me to get out of bed and begin my day.

Should you buy a Brick?

If you feel chained to your phone, it’s a no-brainer

I can rarely say this about a device, and I don’t say it lightly: Brick actually changed my life. It gave me hours of my day back, which will compound into giving me days, months, and even years of my life back to me without even realizing it. Phone and app addiction is an ever-growing problem in our chronically online world, and Brick is one of the simplest, yet the most effective solution I’ve used in practical, everyday life.

We aren’t all locking our phones in a safe during an ‘unplugged’ retreat in Costa Rica every weekend, and Brick’s $60 is a heck of a cheap price to pay to buy years of your life back.