The Brick Is the Best Productivity and Mindfulness Product Released in Years
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Each morning in our office, the smartphone debate rages. My editor, Luke Guillory , is staunchly team dumb-phone and would easily switch to a flip phone in a heartbeat if our jobs, or modern lives, allowed it. He's not the only one .
Personally, I don't think there's any going back. You can't reverse the psychological rewiring of having information everywhere at all times for decades, but you can implement guardrails. Considering our phones now include screen time monitors and app limits, it is clear that even the makers of these devices recognize the issues extended screen time can present. Despite spending too much time on Bluesky and lost in Discord servers, I've never been kept in check by any of these features or apps because I know I can just switch them off. My willpower is weak as shit. The only thing that will stop me is putting my phone in another room and locking away.
Well, I finally got the viral device that supposedly lets me stay off Reddit without falling behind on emails or missing an important text. The Brick is a small, magnetic square that you tap with your phone to lock and unlock access to the apps you choose to limit. And let me tell you, if there's one productivity "hack" to invest in this year, it's this one. In just two weeks, the Brick is helping me doomscroll less, be present more, and lock in completely.
The Brick
First Impressions—It Just Works
First off, the Brick is idiot proof. You just tap your phone to it, like tap-to-pay, to start and end locking sessions. "Idiot proof" is the kind of praise I rarely give tech; I really only reserve it for AirPods , but it's true here. After downloading the app and unboxing my Brick, everything was up and running in minutes. From there, I was prompted to set up my modes and apps I wanted to block—already helpfully sorted into categories from drop down menus that allow you to "select all" and block up to 50 apps at a time.
You can also set up more targeting blocking. My "focus mode" ends up blocking about 40 distracting apps including messages, all forms of social media, and YouTube. My "mindful mode" blocks socials, Microsoft Teams, and email, keeping me from obsessively checking my email and work messages all weekend.
The Brick app is clean and intuitive, not littered with ads or signups or some new AI update it has to tell you about. You can set schedules that will automatically Brick your phone at a given day and time each week. You can it set to end at a scheduled time or just indefinitely until you hit the Brick next. And like an Oura ring or other fitness trackers , it keeps a log of your time spent Bricked, broken down into monthly and weekly charts. It's fully featured, complete, without requiring a subscription beyond the initial $60 purchase. It's one of the rare pieces of tech you can buy these days that just...works.
brick
The Results
So what does all of that translate to? Well, the past couple weeks, I've been able to put Discord and texts on the back-burner and focus on my work during the day (all while working through a cold). I've caught myself trying to check my email more than once, and I have been Bricked out in a social situation where I should just be talking to my friends and leaving the phone in the pocket.
A big thing screen time limiters will do is give you, say, an hour a day to look at Twitter. I love that the Brick is more all or nothing: If you want Twitter, you need to physically touch your phone to it, and that is a strong mental barrier. That said, it would be nice to be able to leave it at home and still have an hour of all-access phone time on my lunch break, but I think it's better for it to be too strict instead of the other way around. Every time I use the Brick I think, "Yeah, this is a good thing and it's helping." I have no plans to stop using it.
Final Verdict—A Must Have Productivity Gadget
Fundamentally, screen time locking is a matter of willpower. It's about putting an extra barrier between you and the apps it has become your second nature to scroll. Scrolling is so ingrained in our current behavior that to do it on your own takes an absurd amount of old-school willpower. The Brick makes the barrier between me and my phone physical. I can leave the Brick at home when I go to hang out with friends. Or I can lock it inside some drawer, stick to my fridge when I'm at the apartment. I suspect that for most people, reducing screen can't just be done by a few timers on your most-used apps. The Brick makes it physical, makes you think, "What am I going to do when I unlock this app?"
It's easy, delivers what it promises, and it doesn't cost all that much in the grand scheme of things. Does it reinforce the feeling that your phone is some kind of addiction? Absolutely. But it also helps you draw your own lines between the addictive parts of your phone and the ones you need to survive in society in 2026. If you're dumb-phone curious or just want a less unconnected option, it's the best option on the market. No contest.
The Brick
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