Episode 123: I Tried 'Brick' to Break My Phone Habit. Here's What Changed.
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
I tried Brick, the little device that physically locks you out of your phone apps until you walk over and tap back in, and I'm sharing exactly what happened. This isn't sponsored and I'm not trying to sell you something. It's just my honest experience after a few months of using it to break habits I didn't love: scrolling in bed after my alarm went off, disappearing into my phone during the 5-8pm family window, and reaching for it during my most focused work hours.
If despite your best efforts you are still on your phone more than you'd like, this episode will help you zero in on the real issue, identify what it's costing you, and then think about potential solutions that will help you spend more time in your real life and less time on your phone. Whether or not you use the Brick is totally up to you. But I'm walking you through what I learned so you can decide if it's worth trying for yourself.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
Brick (not a sponsored or affiliate link!)
Ready to be more intentional with your time? Apply for coaching with Katelyn
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode. Hey, hey. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. This is episode 123, And today I wanna answer a question that I've gotten a few times recently, and that is about my review or usage or impression of the Brick tool. So if you don't know what that is, I'm gonna tell you all about it. I do wanna say before we get into this topic, This is not an endorsement. This is not a paid episode. This is purely just me, Katelyn, as a mom, as a human, experimenting with something that I've heard a lot about, and I wanna give you my honest feedback because that has been the question really that I've gotten several times over the last few weeks is, "What do you think? Is it worth it? Is, is it just really good marketing? Am I being hoodwinked into getting something else to try to solve this problem that I actually don't really need?" I had all of those same thoughts. And so I'm here to tell you my honest opinion. Because here's the thing, like many of you, I'm sure, listening, I am pretty regularly thinking about my phone usage, how much time I am spending staring down at the little portable computer in my pocket, carrying it with me everywhere I go just in case I need it. Because not only do I know that it has an impact on my sleep, on my productivity, especially during my workday when I really wanna get in and get stuff done so I can leave at the end of the day and be home with my kids, but I also think about the example that I am setting for my kids I shared a couple of episodes back that we were sort of in the great debate of now that my oldest son is riding public transportation, like our city bus, home from school, does he need a phone? And we ultimately decided against it. He does have a smartwatch, but we are delaying the phone until high school. But it, it brought up this question again of what kind of example am I setting? I don't want to just be the parent that says, " We shouldn't be on our phones this much. I want to show them what it looks like to, yes, have a smartphone available to me to use it when it makes sense, but to not be looking at it all of the time, to not be addicted to my phone. But I am still a human, and at times, especially after a long day, when I'm tired, I'm tapped out, I've made a million decisions, my phone is there, and it is so easy to stare at it, to go down a rabbit hole of scrolling and looking at things just so I can disconnect for a bit, so I can be entertained, so I can get lost in Instagram or looking at emails or news or whatever it is that we all do on our phones But you know what that is like. Suddenly something takes you out of the moment. You, you come out of a trance, and you look at the clock and realize how much time has passed, more than you care to admit. And what do you have to show for it? Like, did you use the phone intentionally for a purpose, or did you just pick it up out of default because you didn't have anything else to do? Did you miss out on connecting and being present with your kids? Did you miss out on completing some work that you could've been working on for the last 15, 20, 30 minutes? Did you miss out on time to actually recharge or do something fun in our analog lives, right? So if any of that resonates with you, you probably also, like me, have seen Instagram reels or TikTok videos, or heard people talk or looked at articles about how to reduce your dependency on your phone. There is so much information out there, so many hacks. Everybody has a hack for how to stay off your phone. I even took a course a few years ago led by a college professor in media studies, and it was fascinating. I learned a ton, but it was all about this very topic: how can we as adults spend more time in our real lives and less time on our phones? There were some tricks that I learned there that have helped and served me over the years, but there were still, especially lately, a few key instances in my days where I noticed I had fallen into a bad habit. I'd fallen into a habit of picking up my phone. So when my coach actually mentioned the brick, of course my phone was listening, and then it started serving me up all of these ads on Instagram. I was curious. And so if you don't know what the brick is, I'm gonna explain it. And I know you can't see me, so I'm gonna really try to describe it. It is a small square. Like, I, I picture a little toy, you know? It's maybe two inches by two inches and maybe an inch tall. It's gray, slightly rounded, and it's just a block. picture it, like, Duplo sized, actually, without the, Duplo ridges on the top. And that is what comes in the box. And you're like, "Okay, I paid money for a, a little square." But what the brick does is you connect it, when you first set it up, you connect it to your phone. Don't ask me how that works. I don't know. You connect it to your phone, and then what the brick is designed to do is to lock your phone from certain apps. You get to choose which apps those are, certain times, or just manually. And what happens is the brick either locks your phone by a schedule that you've preset or by you walking over to the brick, the actual little square, tapping your phone onto it. And then as you go about your day, if you try to open Instagram or you try to open the news or a game or some other app that you've restricted when you set it up, it blocks those apps, and the only way to unblock them is to go back to the device, to the little square, and tap your phone again. So what is recommended is that you put that square in an inconvenient location I saw some videos where people would put it outside in their car. So if you really wanted to get on social media and scroll but your phone was bricked, you would have to go outside, unlock your car, and tap it onto , the brick that's in your car to unlock the apps that you wanted to use So it is a hurdle that you have to cross. You have to be really motivated to need those apps for you to get up from wherever you are with your phone, and walk to wherever you have this brick stationed in your home or in your car, in your garage or in your basement, all kinds of creative places where you could put your brick, and then un-brick it. So it's not as easy as dismissing, a screen time usage limit, right? We all know how to do that. It's not just scrolling to a folder where you've hidden the apps, two swipes to the side. It is physically taking your phone somewhere to unlock it So my coach got this device and was raving about it and said it's really helped her, and so I was, I was curious. You know, I am talking to women all the time. Many of my clients, phone usage comes up time and time again. We do really well for a season, and then life gets stressful, and we fall back into old habits. We're spending too much time on our phones. We don't like how we feel. And so I wanted to test it out. Could it really make that much of a difference to have to physically tap in and tap out when you want to unlock certain apps? So here is what I have learned. I've had the brick for a few months now. Over the summer, I didn't do as much bricking because my schedule was very chaotic and inconsistent. But I am back into using it again in the way that I initially set it up, and I'm gonna tell you what that looks like and what I think about the results My hope is that whether you are interested in the brick or not, again, I don't care either way, that you walk away from this episode asking some of these phone usage questions of yourself. Where have you developed some bad habits? Maybe they look similar to mine, maybe they are your own unique flavor of habit. And what could you stand to gain from spending less time on your phone? And then how can you do that? Maybe it's not the brick, maybe it's some other tricks, but to just bring this topic to the forefront today, especially as we head into what many of you are telling me is a very busy season, I'm feeling it. Many of you are, are supporting kids back to school, even if you're in the daycare days, fall tends to have a lot of activities 'cause we landslide into the end of the year, into the holidays. And so how do you wanna use your time? And do you wanna use it looking down at your phone Okay, so here's how I've set up my brick, and this is all based on what I noticed were the times of day where being on my phone was costing me too much. So my biggest pain point, this is maybe not what you're expecting, it wasn't what I thought either, but I know I'm not alone because I've talked to many of you who struggle with this as well. My biggest pain point Was using my phone first thing in the morning. So you know that I love to work out. I try to get up early to get as much of that in before my kids wake up, and this school year I'm getting up even earlier. Today my alarm went off at 5:45. It was rough. , for those of you who get up that early on a consistent basis, I bow down to you. You're amazing. I will get there. Today was hard. But what I noticed is my alarm would go off at the ideal time that I wanted to be up, to be moving, to get these things in, and the first thing I would do is snooze my alarm and look at my phone. I would open up my inbox, see what had come in over the night. Nothing but junk. I would look at Instagram, and then I would spend 10, 15 minutes lying in bed just looking at social media And then I would get up, and I'd be five or 10 or 15 minutes behind my ideal schedule to get going, and then I'd be rushing through my workout. So not only was I then feeling a time crunch because I want my alone time, right? 15 minutes late means I'm probably doing a workout in the basement with company because then my kids are waking up, and they're coming down, and, "Can you help me with breakfast?" And so I'm doing a set, and then I'm going upstairs to do that, and my workout is dragging on. I'm frustrated with myself because I had the alarm at the right time. I could have gotten up and been done before they woke up, but instead, I was scrolling on Instagram. And then I would be mad. I'd be mad at them, be mad at myself. It was just not good. So that was actually my number one reason, my number one pain point that I was hoping the brick could solve for me. The next one, in, in order of priority, the next one was that evening timeframe, so, like, 5:00 to 8:00. Again, after a long day, it's so easy to just grab the phone and check out for a little bit. Maybe you were really productive at work. I would be in client sessions all day, and I'd be like, "Oh, I haven't checked in on social media," or, "I haven't seen, all my texts or all of these things." And so I would get lost in my phone during those hours when what I really wanted to do was, one, be getting dinner ready, and I would sort of do that, but I would take too long to cook dinner because I was also looking at my phone. And I wanted to be just, like, listening to my kids, or if they were out playing with neighbors as they sometimes do, you know, they're, "Hey, Mom, we'll see you in a little bit. We're gonna go play with so-and-so," I wanted to be doing something for me, either finishing up some work that I didn't get to during the day or working on my puzzle, taking care of something around the house. I didn't need to be scrolling on social media. I wanted my phone still around because often that's the time when I'll listen to my audiobooks. If they're otherwise engaged, I could have a little bit of listening time while I'm cooking and so on, but I did not need to be scrolling. So second order of business was to protect that 5:00 to 8:00 timeframe so I could be really present And then third, not a huge pain point for me, but something I, I was curious about is I talk a lot with my clients about finding the time of day when you are most likely to be able to get focused work done. So what are the hours during your workday that you really wanna protect from, if you can, interruptions, emails, pings, meetings, and instead use that hour or two hours for moving an actual project forward, doing work? And for me, that's right after I drop my kids off in the morning. So I wanted to see if I restricted phone time during 9:00, 9:30, Our elementary school starts pretty late, not till 9:10, so 9:30 to 11:30. And I was curious how often I reached for my phone. So what I did then was Brick has a setting where you can essentially set a schedule for yourself. So I chose for those three scenarios what apps I wanted blocked and which ones I wanted available. So I know a, a big, Source of hesitancy that I hear is when your kids are at school or they're at daycare or they're out and about in the world while you're at work, we still wanna be able to receive a text or a phone call, right? Your kid's sick, something happened, you wanna be reachable. And so I always made phone and text messaging available, but I would turn off social, I would turn off some of the other apps. Like, I would find myself looking at, I don't know, my health tracker app or, some of these other random things that it's like I don't really need to check that during the day. Like, did I get an offer on Poshmark for one of my pants that I have listed? Uh, that is not really important, but you know how it is. You restrict certain things, and then it's like, "Oh, well, what else can I look at to fill that void?" So I would restrict most things except for anything critical that I needed, and I would set the brick to lock. I think I set it at 9:30 PM, because I didn't wanna be looking at it right up until bedtime, all the way until 7:00 AM. That gets me through my workout. That means that when my alarm goes off in the morning, I can't scroll social media unless I wanna get out of bed right then, un-brick my phone, and then come back to bed to scroll. Which I didn't. I've never done that. It's not worth it to me. So I would set up from 9:30 PM to 7:00 AM, then I also set it to lock and restrict certain apps from 5:00 to 8:00 PM, and then I also set it to restrict from 9:30 to 11:30. You can name each of those, so it was, like, overnight, it was evening family time, and focused work time. Those were my three schedules. I could slightly shift the apps that I would make available or not. Like, my overnight one, I still allow myself to access the weather, because if I'm gonna be walking outside, I do kinda wanna check and see what the temperature is or if it's raining. You know, certain things like that. But I know, and you probably know, too, what apps are the main culprits. Those are the ones that you want to lock. And then what I did was I set my brick... We have a three-floor house. I sleep on the second floor. My office is on the third floor. I set my brick in the second floor. On the far end of the hallway, we have a landing at the top of our stairs. It's in a corner there, just sitting on this shelf. So what that means is at night or in the morning, I would have to get out of bed and walk all the way to the end of the hallway to un-brick it, that means during my workday, I have to go down a flight of stairs to unbrick it, and that means in the evening when I am down on the first floor with the family or outside or doing whatever, I have to go up a floor to unbrick it. That has worked well for me. That is enough of a deterrent that I don't wanna take those extra steps I particularly love the schedule piece because I'm not sure that I would remember or actually follow through on bricking the phone myself at 9:30 in the morning or at 9:30 at night or at 5 o'clock in the evening. I love that the brick automatically locks, and then it's up to me to unbrick it if I absolutely need to. Now, if you do this as well or if you have a brick, don't forget to turn off the schedule when you're traveling, unless you're also traveling with your brick, because you only get so many emergency unlocks, and you don't really wanna be using them on vacation. So that was one thing I did, was anytime I would travel, I would turn off that schedule, and then you have to really be on it, though. When you get home, you need to go right back into it. I lost my way a little bit after some of those trips, which is why I say that I wasn't as great at bricking my phone over the summer. So just learn from my mistakes if you do end up doing this. So all in all, here's what I know. It is surprisingly effective to add that physical unlocking step to the process. It is so much harder to walk somewhere than it is to just bypass a limit or some setting on your phone. That is mind-blowing to me that it is that effective, but to me it has been. And what I have noticed the most is the area that was my biggest pain point, waking up in the morning, it's almost completely changed it. There is no reason for me to lie in bed anymore. So I might snooze once just because my bed is cozy or I'm a little tired, but without the phone there to really give me anything to look at, to scroll while I'm still cozy in bed, I just get up, which means I get my workout done, which means I'm happier. I'm not upset with my kids for waking up when they wake up because it's not a problem. I've already done it And I'm proud of myself. I got up with my alarm. I did the hard thing, and I didn't allow my phone to deter me from that. The evening also was very eye-opening for me, that 5:00 to 8:00 PM timeframe, because I did not realize how much I was reaching for my phone instead of being present at home with my fam. I did not need to be looking at things. People were still able to reach me via text message, like, "Hey, are you good to drive to gymnastics tonight?" Or, you know, all of that kind of stuff that I'm always logistically planning with carpool and neighbors, or, Oma texting to see how the school day went. I'm still available for those things, but then I would answer it and put it back down. There was no Facebook, there was no Instagram, there was no social anything to look at. I wasn't able to access those, and I found my evenings felt more spacious. I relaxed a little bit more. I paid attention more to what was happening. And instead, I sat down to puzzle or, some of those other things that were always like, "Oh, I don't have time for that." Well, I did when I wasn't on my phone And lastly, my morning focus time, I do pretty well. I've really worked on that skill over the years of setting a timer, focusing for 20 or 30 minutes at a time on something. So it hasn't had as much of an impact as those other two instances have, but it has still helped a little bit. And what I like especially is that it's consolidated any of my scrolling time to when I have breaks in my schedule in the afternoon, which is not my most productive time anyway. I do get on Instagram because Instagram is part of my work. I get on there, I engage in the comments, I am answering DMs, I'm making content and reels and videos to share with you. So there is a purpose to that, but I just didn't want that to take up my most focused time in the morning when I could be recording a podcast episode for you or working on my next training for my clients or writing my emails that go out to my list every Wednesday night with my Working Mom Journal. So All of this to say I do recommend it. I do. I think for you, if you are someone that has a hard time not reaching for your phone, who has tried some of the other tricks and hacks and yet you still bypass those, adding this layer of friction in tapping in and out to an actual physical brick, a physical block, really has made a difference for me and from other people I've talked to, the same for them as well So again, not a sponsored post, not telling you that you need this device, but can you start to pay attention to the times of day when your phone is costing you? When your dependency on this device is getting in the way of the other things that you want to be doing or experiencing or how you wanna be feeling. And then find a solution that you think will work for you I think there is a time and a place for our phones. They are amazing tools, but they are tools And some of us are just so accustomed to filling any space that we have by reaching for our phones. And I wonder what would come of that time if we looked up, if we just sat, if we were present and aware of what was happening around us instead of looking down Whether or not you decide to use a brick or whether this is a struggle for you, I coach so many clients through not just thinking about their phone usage, but also knowing what it is that's important to them to be spending their time on. 'Cause for some of us, we take away our phone and suddenly we don't know what to do. We realize what a crutch it was, how it took the place of time that we might have spent recharging or resting or developing relationships or doing something fun for ourselves I love that exploration work, that curiosity of considering what you want to be spending your time on to live this more intentional, deliberate life if you would like some support thinking through that with guided questions and homework and accountability to follow through on what you are going to practice implementing into your life, I would love to support you. I do have coaching spaces available. You can find out more about what it's like to work with me and the different options that I offer at my website, themothernurture.com/work-with-me. And for the links to The Brick and anything else that I share in this episode and other podcast episodes, you can find everything in the show notes over at themothernurture.com/podcast. All right. I hope this was helpful in getting you thinking about your phone usage. If you've been on the fence about a brick, maybe this swayed you one way or the other. You can always reach out to me with questions about your unique situation. Feel free to send me a DM. I'm @lovemothernurture on Instagram, but only when my phone is not bricked. So all right. I will talk with you in the next episode. Until then, I hope you take care. Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.
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