ZDNET Highlights
- Brick is a $59 device that blocks you from accessing your most-used apps
- This helped me develop a better relationship with my phone
- Positive reinforcement works better than competitors or screen time limits.
November/2025
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As every aspect of our working and social lives has become digital, screen addiction has become less the exception and more a widely accepted feature of the way we live our lives. I see this most often when I ask my friends, family, and coworkers how many hours a day they spend on their phones. Answers vary from three to eight hours.
I spend an average of about four hours a day on my phone, checking email, responding to messages, scrolling social media, and checking the weather. That’s four hours I could spend doing anything other than reading a book, writing an article, learning to predict the weather, calling a loved one, and checking out time-wasters and brain rot like social media sites and messaging apps.
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Every October, as the average daylight hours decrease and my energy levels dip, this feeling of learned helplessness at the hands of technology comes to a head. I don’t have the strength to get up from my bed. It takes me a while to muster up the courage to go to the gym. What do I do instead? I sit on my bed and scroll.
I scroll through financial advice posts that tell me I should be investing in the market more than ever, I scroll through engagements and weddings that my former classmates are celebrating, I scroll through reactionary content posted by strangers on the Internet for clicks, and I scroll through some of the most horrifying news my eyes can see and my brain can fathom. All this stuff tangled together, and I let it flow over me like I was lying on the sand of a miserable ocean.
Once I reach this point, I delete my social media apps. I try to keep my phone in another room when I work, eat, and do things around the house. I make a strict schedule and force myself to get out of the house. Then, a week or two later, when I’m back in my natural, stable, mature, rotund brain, I download all these apps again. Maybe it’s only a few weeks or months, but the cycle continues.
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I’ve tried time limits, app blockers, and using social media on a browser instead of an app. So this October, I tried something new. I saw coverage of Brick and his company miracle device Which effectively locks users out of their high-demand apps. People claimed that, at a minimum, the magnetic cube gave them back their time. I will be the judge of this, I thought to myself.
The folks at Brick sent me a device, which I immediately started testing as soon as I received it and have been testing it for the past few weeks. TL:DR? This device has created statistics on my interactions with my most addictive apps. This way.
how it works
The Brick is a grey, magnetic square with a corresponding app. Upon downloading an app, a person selects the apps they want to disable once their phone turns off. The Brick uses NFC technology, which is also found in contactless payments, digital wallets like Apple Pay, and secure access controls like digital keycards used to gain entry to buildings, to enable and disable app access. Tapping the brick, or “bricking”, blocks use of these apps until the phone is tapped once again and “unbricked”.
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You can set schedules to block apps during specific times of the day and set modes to block certain types of apps. I started testing the product by creating a mode that blocks my most used apps, namely Messages, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
The Brick gives you five free “Unbricks” that you can use in an emergency when you’re not near a physical Brick.
My Experience ‘Bricking’ My iPhone
I haven’t set up a schedule yet, as I’m content to brick my device at will and unbrick when I need to check messages or posts from friends. When I realized the need to distance myself from my phone, turning off the device seemed like an easy first step to stopping my phone addiction. A schedule seemed too strict. Once I spent several weeks fixing my phone and became less dependent on checking it regularly, I found the scheduling feature to be handy, which I’m still working on.
My phone usage is at its worst (and makes me feel the worst) when I’m at home. Scrolling through social media between subway stops or checking messages occasionally at the office isn’t my thing. These are the hours I waste when I return home after a busy day at work, or the time I waste on weekends that I could have devoted to hobbies.
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So this is where I primarily use brick. However, my roommates used Brick before studying at the park, and they reported that it helped them focus for longer periods of time. One Monday night, I turned off my phone and then journaled for 90 minutes, completely uninterrupted.
I like to turn off my phone before bed, which, in the words of my roommate, feels like “turning off the home computer at the end of the night.” Sometimes, I’ll be lying in bed and remember I want to check an app or send a text.
Doing this would require me to get out of my bed, down a long hallway, and to the kitchen to open my phone. It made me rethink my phone usage decisions.
After waking up in the morning, I’ll go to my kitchen, where my brick is stuck on the fridge, and turn on my phone. This gives me about an hour before work, during which I can catch up on messages and daily events.
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Then, once I start work, I turn off my phone again. After at least an hour of distractions, I’ll reward myself with a quick brick. I check my messages or scroll for a few minutes and rebrick. It’s like the Pomodoro effect, but for phone addiction.
Working without constant pings or easy access to social media reminds me of the productivity I used to have when doing my homework on airplanes before Wi-Fi was available — that fearless, distraction-free kind of productivity and clarity that comes with disconnection from the outside world.
why it works for me
The Brick makes access to my most-used apps a privilege I feel I must earn through patience, not something I can take for granted whenever I want. It also reminds me that the number of times I check my phone to see if someone has contacted exceeds the number of notifications I receive per hour. In short, I don’t need to check it as often as I do.
Unlike the Screen Time notification or limit, which gets enabled when one reaches one’s daily app limit, the Brick positively reinforces my time spent without my apps. As soon as you brick your device, a widget pops up, displaying a timer indicating how long you’ve been offline since bricking.
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This is in direct contrast to the negative reinforcement that I receive through screen time like “you’ve reached your daily Instagram limit” notifications. In the app, you can also see how much time you’ve spent making bricks each day. All of these features and touches help me make the case to myself that I can actually live without these apps for a long time.
What improvements would I like to see?
Once you start working, you don’t have to turn off your device to start the schedule, like at 9 a.m. But you will need your brick at 5pm, when you want to unlock your device. It’s frustrating if you’re not at your brick place at 5pm, but there is a solution that a friend told me about.
If you want to unbrick your phone after the allotted brick time in your schedule has ended, my friend recommended creating another schedule and then unbricking a random app immediately after your first schedule ends. It enables the scheduling feature and unbricks the desired apps without the need of a physical device.
My friend also mentioned that when Brick was traveling he did not register his change in time zone, he wanted Brick to correct this.
ZDNET’s shopping advice
i highly recommend Brick If you struggle with checking your phone regularly or wasting time on social media. During the first full week I used it, my screen time went down by 7%. Instead of a warning when you’ve gone over your allotted screen time, it’s positive reinforcement that slowly builds to the point that you can actually live without these apps.
I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to increase productivity – whether that’s what you’re looking for on the job or off the job. After turning off my phone one night, I decided to switch to an app before bed that wasn’t so addictive but was still distracting. I watched a YouTube video for about two minutes until I realized I could read my book instead. I’m not sure if I would have made that choice without Brick.
I know, $59 is a high price to pay for self-control. However, from my experience with the device, it is worth it for the quality of life upgrade and the long-desired autonomy of my devices that I get back.
