is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
“We need to talk.” Nobody likes to hear those words from their spouse. Especially when it’s delivered in a grave tone as you rot on a couch in a grubby blankie, staring like a zombie while doomscrolling.
“Wut?” I said, very intelligently.
What came next was a compassionate but firm speech about how I was in dire need of an intervention. My attention span, my spouse said, was utterly shot to hell. They’d just asked my opinion about something happening on the TV show we were watching. I hadn’t heard them. At all. Apparently, they’d repeated the question three times. Instead, I’d been engrossed in… actually, I couldn’t tell you.
“You have a problem,” they said, tapping my phone. “You can’t put it down.”
I launched into an impassioned self-defense. A close friend was going through a tough time, and I was worried about them. My bestie was asking my opinion on a dicey work matter. Those texts could not wait! Plus, it was a busy week at work, and I was keeping an eye on something in Slack. And I’d only picked up my phone during our sacred viewing of Love is Blind to look up a factoid about the tea the show producers had kept hidden, and then I’d seen an ad for a new sunscreen and — oh.
“It’s not a ‘you’ problem,” my infinitely patient spouse said. “I do it, too. Which is why I think you should Brick yourself.”
For the second time that night, I uttered a very intelligent, “Wut?”
This and memo pads have been helping me focus on TV when I’m actually watching TV.
As it turns out, my spouse heard about Brick from a podcast and had been using it for months. It’s an app that ‘bricks’ distracting apps and their notifications. Similar to other screen-time apps, you can create modes that let you pick and choose which distracting apps to block. For example, a “deep work mode” that blocks all social media. But unlike other screen time apps, this one gets a bit nuclear.
... continue reading