This Brick Gave Me My Life Back (From My Phone)

This is not a paid ad. It changed my life that much.

I do not want my son to grow up with a father addicted to his phone.

The challenge is being addicted to my phone is an unavoidable occupational hazard.

As a social media manager in a remote working environment, the line between using my phone for my job and for everything else is a very thin line. The Internet never sleeps, and most social media managers don’t either¹. For the platforms you work with (and I work with most of them), you need to know both the technical back-end and the front-end user experience, including some measure of being able to think objectively about your own addiction to swiping the same app for the dozenth time that day and how that changes how your perfectly-crafted content lands in the minds of those giving it nary a second of thought. Garbage men pick up trash, plumbers deal with toilets, and social media managers get some degree of digital brain rot.

During working hours, my phone is a vital tool for the vocation the Lord has placed me in. Outside working hours, it is effortless to take the time I ought to give to my family, my friends, and my church and continue giving it to my phone. I’ve tried numerous strategies over the years to create some walls of separation between myself and my phone when it’s not needed—“Set up filters!” “Leave it in your bedroom!” “Go greyscale!”—but each of these gave me a jolt of inspiration only to fade as quickly as the addictive cue of notifications came.

With a Brick, however, that wall of separation is now stronger than a brick wall. After three months of daily use, I am never going back to life without one.

What is a Brick?

Brick was founded by two Gen-Z college students who recognized the most addictive apps and features keep them from doing the things they wanted or needed to do in life. Switching to a flip phone solved this problem, but created several others. Smartphones are integral to life in Digital Babylon, and Digital Babylon will make life difficult for those who can’t or won’t participate.

Instead of resigning themselves to defeat, they created a novel solution: a 3D printed plastic brick that serves as a physical key for a smartphone app that restricts other apps in your phone when enabled. To block distracting apps on your phone, you open the app and tap the Brick. To unblock those apps, you open the app and tap the Brick again. If the Brick isn’t physically nearby, you cannot unblock the apps you have blocked.

It’s a simple twist that makes all the difference.

At the end of the workday, I walk to the shelf in the living room where my Brick lays. I open the app, and tap the Brick. All my social media apps (including Substack!) and my work-related apps become unaccessible and stop sending notifications. I don’t want to call it a Severance chip, but the physiological shift of functionally “clocking out” of digital work life is immediately noticeable. Unless there is an emergency, I won’t unBrick my phone until it’s time to start working the next morning, and my time in the real world has never been richer for it.

Physical Proximity: The Secret Ingredient

Software solutions for restricting your phone are better than nothing, but they have an inherent weakness: you can undo those restrictions anywhere your phone is.

Focus filters and password-restricted screen time controls are easy to set up and easy to circumvent. By adding a physical dimension to a software solution, Brick makes circumventing your restrictions a physical task, not just a digital one². As simple as it sounds, this one twist makes all the difference, because physical proximity is a key factor in our tech and media habits. When we are bored at work, or stuck waiting in line at the store or in the doctor’s office, our phone is the first thing we turn to in order to distract us. But if your phone is Bricked, and your Brick is miles away from you at home, using your phone to distract you becomes a non-option.

Of course, you may still end up using your phone while it is bricked. But since you are self-selecting the apps that you want blocked, all that’s left for you to use are apps that are genuinely beneficial. My Greek vocabulary has never been sharper, I’ve discovered more new music this year than I did all of last year, and I’ve spent more time reading directly on websites that I support because in the moments where I could just be mindlessly grazing social media or refreshing Slack messages, it’s just not an option. The key to unlocking those apps is miles away. The temptation is just gone.

Even had my Brick with me at The Gospel Coalition’s 2025 Annual Conference!

Life-Changing Benefits

I do not want to oversell Brick as the magic cure-all to all your problems. And yet, I’d be lying if I tried to downplay all the benefits I’ve seen in my life after three months of using a Brick on a daily basis:

• My baseline anxiety has plummeted. Significantly plummeted.

• My work/life balance is the best it has ever been.

• My weekends are more restful, especially the Sabbath.

• My focus and productivity has gone through the roof.

• I have already read more books this year than I did all of last year, seminary included.

• My time with my family is more meaningful.

• My short-term memory is sharper.

• My long-term thinking is clearer.

• My social media work - both professionally and personally - is stronger than it ever has been (how’s that for a counterintuitive benefit?!)

The brick itself has a one-time cost, but there is no subscription for the app. Right now it is only available for iOS, but they are working on an Android version. The only even slightly negative thing I could say is that the app can be a little unstable when you’re building your profiles (you can have up to five different profiles with unique block/allow lists), but that’s it.

If you care about your tech/media habits, and all your efforts to date have yielded mixed results, get a Brick. You will think it is too good to be true and that this can’t possibly give you control over your phone. But once your phone is Bricked, you won’t want to go back.

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Thanks for reading. I’ve learned the hard way not to promise a cadence of writing, and so I am not about to do that here because the second I do, some curveball will come my way and any consistency I thought I may be able to attain will get claimed by something else. That said, I do have a couple shorter pieces in the works that should come out sooner rather than later. I’ve had to learn the hard way that I am at my most successful when I am ruthless in curtailing my ambition, so maybe some long-promised/always-underdelivered consistency will come through that.

Remember: together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.

Austin

1. Professional social media managers live on the precipice of burnout. Few groups of people understand how terrible social media than the people who work professionally on it in Digital Babylon.

2. I am sure that somehow, somewhere, it is possibly to get around the app if you’re smart enough. Personally, I’ve not found a way to hack the app’s blocking functionality. Apple’s features for restricting apps are very easy to get around; so far, with a Brick, blocked apps have stayed blocked.