You sit down to study. You read the first paragraph, reach for your phone to check the time, and surface twenty minutes later from a feed you didn’t mean to open. You go back to the paragraph and read it again.
It’s not that you can’t focus. It’s that the phone is a much easier thing to do than the hard thing in front of you, and it’s always one tap away.
Your phone is taxing your focus, even when you don’t use it
In a 2026 Pew Research Center survey, 34% of US adults said their smartphone hurts how productive they are. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, that rose to 49%, and among 30- to 49-year-olds, 43%.
Even a notification you ignore has a cost. In a 2015 lab study at Florida State University, simply receiving a call or text alert, without answering it, increased mistakes on an attention task by roughly as much as actually using the phone.
And switching away doesn’t end cleanly. Researcher Sophie Leroy called it attention residue: when you leave a task unfinished, part of your mind stays on it, and you do the next task worse. A quick check of Instagram mid-essay doesn’t cost thirty seconds. It costs the next several minutes of thinking.
How Slide to brick works
Schedules are great for the hours you can predict. Focus usually isn’t one of them. You decide to start now, so the blocker has to start now too.
- Slide. On Bricked’s Home screen, slide to brick. It’s one gesture, with no menus to set up while your motivation is still there.
- Pick a duration. 25 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or until tonight (midnight).
- Your distractions turn to brick. The apps on your blocked list lock immediately behind Apple’s shield. Everything else on your phone keeps working.
- Watch the countdown on your Lock Screen. A Live Activity shows how long until your apps unlock, so you can glance at it instead of opening the phone to check.
- When the timer ends, the apps come back. You don’t have to remember to turn anything off.
Strict mode for sessions you can’t negotiate with
By default, a focus session works like the rest of Bricked: if you really need an app, you can take a 5-minute peek. On Bricked+ that’s a press-and-hold that grows with each unlock that day, from 3 seconds to 60. On the free plan it’s a wait, up to 5 minutes.
Some sessions need no way out at all: the night before an exam, the last two hours before a deadline. Turn on strict mode (Bricked+) when you slide, and the session can’t be ended early. No peek, no hold, no wait. It’s the software version of putting your phone in a drawer in another room.
Read the exact rules on the strict mode page.
Focus setups that work
The Pomodoro block
Slide for 25 minutes. Work until the countdown ends. Take a 5-minute break away from the feed, then slide again. Four rounds is a solid morning.
The exam-week evening
Slide for 2 hours with strict mode on. Put the phone face down across the desk. When it unlocks, take a real break: walk, eat, talk to someone.
The “until tonight” reset
Had a bad day of scrolling and want to stop the slide? Choose until tonight and your apps stay bricked until midnight. Tomorrow your normal daily limit takes over again.
The weekday deep-work block
If you work at the same time every day, use a schedule instead, for example 9 AM to 12 PM Monday to Friday. The apps lock automatically, and Slide to brick covers the unplanned sessions. Multiple schedules are part of Bricked+; the free plan includes one.
Slide to brick, schedules or a daily limit?
All three lock the same apps. They differ in when they start.
| Starts | Ends | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slide to brick | When you slide | After 25 min, 1 h, 2 h or at midnight | Studying, deep work, deadlines |
| Schedule | Automatically, at a set time | At the end of the window | Bedtime, mornings, regular work hours |
| Daily limit | When your budget runs out | At midnight | Keeping total scrolling in check |
A common setup is a daily limit as the baseline, a bedtime schedule for nights, and Slide to brick whenever you need to get something done. See the full iPhone app blocker overview for how they fit together.
Make the session easier to keep
A blocker removes the easiest escape. A few small changes make the rest of the session easier:
- Decide the task before you slide. “Finish the methods section” beats “study.” When the countdown starts, you know exactly what to open.
- Silence the notifications too. Bricked locks apps, but banners from unblocked apps still appear. Turn on Do Not Disturb or one of iPhone’s Focus modes for the same window.
- Put the phone out of reach. The Lock Screen countdown means you can glance at the time left without picking it up and unlocking it.
- Plan the break. Five minutes away from the screen (water, a stretch, a window) is a real break. Five minutes in the feed usually isn’t.
Honest limits
- It blocks whole apps. If you need YouTube for a lecture, you can’t block only Shorts. Either leave YouTube off the list for that session or watch the lecture on a laptop.
- Without strict mode, you can still get in. That’s on purpose: the hold or wait is friction, not a wall.
- It doesn’t block the rest of your life. Messages, email and calls still come through unless you add those apps. If you need silence, combine Bricked with iPhone’s Do Not Disturb or a Focus.
- It can’t make the work easier. It removes the easiest escape. Starting the hard paragraph is still up to you.