4.18 How and if you should use a Brick to reduce phone usage

I really wanted to cut down how much I use my phone and I bought a Brick! This episode is my honest review of the experience so far, and includes some evidence-based advice about what you can and can’t expect from a product like this. I take you through my ups and downs and the behaviour change approaches that I have applied to my Brick strategy. A must for all habitual phone users! {PS this is NOT sponsored by Brick and I bought my own device!}

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on why phone addiction confession might help you too

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Now, for those of you who know that I always preach the whole work life balance, intentional holiday things, rest assured this may be coming out on, I think it's the 29th of December, something like that. It might be coming out then, but I am recording it three weeks early. Check me out. I am using the last gasps of motivation that I have for 2025 to get ahead of myself for these things so that I can have the intentional holiday that I planned. I hope that it has gone that way for you too and that you have used all the skills you've learned listening to the podcast, and for those of you who are members, to have the holiday that you need.

If not, before I get going on the other stuff, I just wanna remind you it's not yet the end of the year. Okay, you may be back at work to some extent. I want you to think we have got a couple of days left of 2025. We have got that little funny beginning of the year where it hasn't quite started properly. I want you to be as intentional as you possibly [00:01:00] can be. Don't say, oh, I ruined it. I didn't get any rest. Oh, I ruined it. I didn't get any work done. Any of those things. Think what have I done, what do I still need, and how can I be as intentional as possible for the remaining days? Okay, let's do it.

Anyway, today's session, though, is about a topic that I started about a month ago. So you may recall, I did an episode a while ago where I was talking about wanting to reduce my phone usage and I talked about a product called Brick. Now, this is not a product placement episode. I have not been paid. I purchased it just like anybody else , based on various reviews that I had seen from people that I respected.

And I wanted to check back in with you about how it's going because I. Used to have a tendency, and I still to some extent have a tendency to find a new thing, think it's the answer, and then to stop using said thing and it [00:02:00] get relegated to a cupboard somewhere. So I thought I would let you know how I've been going with the Brick and exactly how I've been using it, what that process has been like, what I've learned from it, and what I'm gonna be doing going into 2026. 

Now, in case you didn't listen to that episode, this is a Brick. If you're on YouTube, you can see it. If not, it's a little square plastic um Brick, um, for want of a better phrase, it's about what, five centimeters square, about a centimeter deep, something like that.

Says Brick on it, and essentially it's a fancy casing for a fancy one of those, is it RFD tags or have I said the wrong letters? I'm not sure. What are those tag things that does clever things to your phone, but it's like a physical one. It's got a magnet on the back, so I leave it on the side of my fridge in my utility room. And essentially the idea is that you can pre-program it to turn off certain apps and certain websites. So depending on what your go-to distractions are, you can set it up [00:03:00] in different ways.

One of the things I love about it is that you can set up different versions of that, and this is where it's better than just buying the little tags off of Amazon or whatever and setting it up yourself. You can have pre-programmed combinations of what it switches on and switches off. So as an example, and I'll go into this in more detail as we go on through the episode, I have a different version for weekends and weekdays. So during the weekdays, I will absolutely be turning off like the Instagrams and all of that sort of stuff.

But on weekends, I also turn off Slack and email, for example. And within that there's quite a bit of nuance. So you don't just turn off safari or don't turn off safari. You can turn off certain websites. So I've got Facebook in there. I've got a bit of a news habit. So I've got my go-to news sites turned off. Right move. Those of you who are in the UK will know what I'm talking about. It's, uh, property looking at website, I'm not moving. I [00:04:00] have no intention of buying a house in the next five years, but, it's fun to look at houses I can't afford.

Anyway, so that's what Brick is, and I was really using it because I was noticing that I was scrolling more than I wanted to, that I didn't feel better for scrolling and the kind of self-driven resolutions of just, I won't use it in these time slots weren't really working for me. I was also finding it difficult to use the leave your phone in another room strategy. Um, because there are things that I do like having access to, I do like having access to my Spotify. I do like having access to audio books, for example. I do also wanna be able to answer the phone easily if family contact me and things like that. So there were certain things that I did want to be able to have access to that made the Just leave your phone somewhere else more difficult to implement. So I [00:05:00] thought Brick could be a really good solution for me. So how did it go? 

Well, inevitably because I'm me for the first few days, absolutely bloody brilliant. So for the first few days I was Bricked for usually up to 23 hours a day. That doesn't mean I was using it for a whole other time, but that I was completely out of it for 23 hours a day. This was a massive reduction on my previous screen time, particularly in apps like Instagram and I was just like, this is amazing. I am the new biggest fan of Brick. I need Brick T-shirts. This is just brilliant. This is gonna change my life. All those thoughts that we have. However, because I am now Coach Vikki, and not just optimistic Vikki, I was also aware that I was in that honeymoon period and I knew that that honeymoon period wouldn't just last indefinitely. But I enjoyed it and I was riding it while I could.

I had decided at that stage there's two different ways you can turn on [00:06:00] your Brick. One is that you actually take your phone. So I'm showing people my phone on the video. You take your phone, you go into the Brick app. So, mine is currently Bricked as people will be able to see if they're watching on video. But imagine it wasn't, you would press the, um, Brick there and tap it against here and that Brick it. So I was using that sort of intentional action, that active choice, because I quite liked, and I'd heard. My coach, Karin Nordin, talk about this. I quite liked the sort of ritual associated with, and now I'm tapping and therefore going into work mode so that was how I decided to try it at first.

The other option is that you can schedule it to go into particular modes at particular times. So at first I did the tapping and I put the Brick in my utility room, my utility, I live in a townhouse. My utility room rooms on the ground floor, and then my lounge and kitchen are upstairs, and then the bedrooms are above that.

So the utility room is kind of as far as you can get [00:07:00] from where I normally am, other than putting it in the garage, which I didn't want to do. And it's also not a particularly inviting place, right? It's a utility room. So, it's not like I'm gonna sit in there and scroll. So I thought that was a good thing. And like I say, for the first few days it went really, really well. First week in fact, it went really, really well, really fundamentally changed how I was spending my time.

The other thing that really helped during that time and that I would recommend for any of you who are wanting to change your phone time, is that I had really clear ideas of what else I wanted to do.

I am a hobby monster. I have so many different hobbies, and there were so many things that I wanted to be spending time doing that weren't just scrolling on my phone, that that was a really attractive draw for me. Okay. So I wasn't just trying to stop. Using my phone. I was trying to create space to do all these other things that I wanted to do, and that went really well as well for about the first week.

Now you can all hear the but coming, right? There's a little but [00:08:00] coming here. It started to drift after about a week. I wasn't quite as routine about tapping in. I was sometimes going to bed without Bricking the device. There is a saving grace in it though, I have to say, which is that if you've gone to bed or you've gone somewhere without booking it, you can Brick remotely.

So you can Brick without being near the Brick machine. You just can't un- Brick without being near. Or really like you get five emergency un Bricks, but that's all you get. So you have to be careful not to use those. So you can go, ah, I didn't Brick it and just Brick it there and there. But even so, I was finding myself kind of going, oh, well I'm quite tired tonight. Maybe I'll just let myself look at it. After all I. So I'd, I was starting to blur my own intentions. I thought I had been quite clear with myself, quite intentional with myself about when I wanted to Brick the phone and when I didn't, but I found myself [00:09:00] negotiating with myself. I found myself saying, oh yeah, but you aren't quite tired. Oh, yeah, but it's not for long. Oh, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, all that stuff. Okay.

Now, I sounded quite judgy when I said that about myself. That's 'cause I'm a flippant sort of a person, but I genuinely wasn't. I genuinely, one of the things I'm really proud of myself about is that I didn't get crossed with myself at that stage, and I didn't, as I often would've done in the past, declare that the Brick is useless and didn't work and chucking in a box somewhere.

I instead thought, Hmm, that's interesting. Gonna need a plan for that as well. Gonna need a plan for when I am feeling too tired, or I'm motivated to do the fun things that I thought I wanted to not be doing. Okay, and that required me to make another decision. Did I want, if I was too tired to do in my head, too tired in speech marks, to do the fun hobby things that I had been wanting to do, did I then think it was [00:10:00] okay to be on my phone? And for some of you, the answer will be yes. And that's absolutely fine. For me, the answer was not. Yes for two reasons. One, because I know that if I've got the option of going on my phone, then suddenly the, oh, I feel too tired is a really low barrier to get over. It's like, oh, I'm too tired. And so I go on my phone, um, and b, I don't feel better. So if I am too tired to do something else and I go on my phone, I don't end up feeling less tired. I just end up passing some more time. And that was not how I wanted it to be. And so what I realized was that I needed a plan for what tasks I wanted to do, what activities I should say, not tasks, what activities I wanted to do when I wasn't energetic or motivated enough to be doing my hobby things, but I still didn't want to pick up my phone as an option, and I found that quite difficult because anything that [00:11:00] wasn't pointed at any of my kind of hobby interests slash goals felt like a waste of time. It was really, really interesting to observe.

So like I was like, I could do coloring and puzzles and things. It's like, well, that don't get me anywhere. That's no point. You know, that total like eldest daughter, high achieving bullshit that I'm sure lots of, you're susceptible to that. It must be useful what you're doing, even if it's hobby useful, it's building your skills and da, da, whatever. Right. Building a side quest, the notion of coming up with stuff that was just a bit mindless, but not my phone, I found really hard, but when I noticed how hard I was feeling it, it was like, oh, okay. Cool. It just needs to be things that I quite like doing, that I find relaxing, and that is where I did then start slotting in things like coloring things like puzzles, that kind of stuff.

I've asked for a jigsaw board for Christmas. I'm very excited. I have to do jigsaws that have got [00:12:00] words on 'cause I'm so bad at matching colors. But you know, the jigsaws that are like covered in signs or books or whatever, I like those ones. Mom's under very strict instructions, what to get me anyway.

Um, so I had to come up with things that I could do when I was feeling tired or motivated. I think this is a really important step for all of you to think about 'cause often we think about what are we gonna do when our besto set you? It's the same if you want to exercise more, right? That often we think, oh, well, if I've got the energy, then I'll do my full routine.

But having an idea as to what will you do if you feel like you haven't got the energy to do your full routine, but you want to do more than nothing, what does that look like? Okay, so I realized this fitted into something I talk about in the membership all the time, which is not just planning for your best self, planning for the self that you know will also show up.

So I kind of got back on it again and I started being a little bit more intentional. I started Bricking the phone a little bit more. I still wasn't back up to quite the [00:13:00] same hours of being Bricked as I was previously, but it was a bit better. And then I have my big life issue. So those of you who've been listening, you'll know that we had family stuff that happened, um, that I will not be going into on the podcast, but that was very disruptive, meant that I was away from home for a week. It's still somewhat ongoing now, but I'm back home again.

But I was away from home and I didn't take the Brick with me. Now part of that was just the leaving in a little bit of a hurry and not really thinking about it. But part of it was also the kind of, um, you know maybe I need to just be able to hang out on my phone and not worry about it. Maybe this is not the time to be sort of trying to stick to resolutions.

So when I look through my Brick data, I had 13 days in the end where I didn't Brick it once. Now I wasn't away for all of that time, so I can't use the, I physically couldn't thing but I [00:14:00] had 13 days where I didn't break it at all, and I'm not a hundred percent sure whether that was the right decision for me or not.

I think it probably wasn't, but I'm going with it because it's what I did. Now, the reason I say that is because I'm not convinced that that kind of black and white, oh, well I shouldn't even think about it thing, is a useful way to think about anything. I think it probably would've been helpful for me to take the Brick with me and at least Brick for some of the time.

I think that probably would've encouraged me to do other things, to spend time, not just on my phone, to spend time on things that were a bit more rejuvenating, so I'm not gonna beat myself up for it. It was a really tough time, but I think in future, I want to plan for those kind of emergency crisis moments as well, and I think that plan will involve less [00:15:00] usage of the Brick, but not no usage of the Brick. Now, so where am I now? Like I say, the issues are still somewhat ongoing, but I am back home. I'm back in much more of a normal routine, and the thing I'm more proud of than anything, I always encourage my members. I encourage all of you to identify things that you are proud of. What I'm proud of more than anything is that I have got back on the metaphorical Brick horse.

I could easily have said that I'd screwed it up by being away, being off for that long and that it hasn't worked, Chuck it in the old tech box that we never look at again. I could equally, and I want you to be really aware if you are likely to do this at the moment, I could equally have said, I'm gonna try again in the new year. That would be a really, really easy thing to say at the moment, but I didn't. I said you are back into sort of mostly normal routine. How do you want to do this now? But importantly, I didn't just say, you gotta [00:16:00] get back on it. Gotta get back on it. You know, it's really important. I said, how can I make it easier for you?

Because I am a bit distracted at the moment, I think it's fair to say. And so I thought to myself, how can I make it more likely that this will be effective? More likely that it will be helpful and something that I can be proud of rather than something that I'm feeling guilty for not doing for example.

And I thought, you know what? As much as I love the kind of ritual of going down and tapping it on my Brick to signify when I'm starting. I think that is a cognitive step too far. So we often talk in the membership about initiation energy, the sort of energy it takes to start doing something and that can be really, really difficult. And that sort of like, okay, I'm going to be Bricked now. Tap. Felt like something that was easy to put off. Or I'll go and Brick in half an hour, I'll go and Brick in an hour. And I thought, you know what, what will support me at the moment? And this isn't saying this is [00:17:00] how I'm gonna use it forever. What will support me at the moment is setting up some schedules.

So I set up schedules where my phone automatically goes onto different modes at different times. So it has, I think I've got four settings, something like that. One which comes on first thing in the morning. One that comes on at the time that I am gonna start work. Where roughly when I'm gonna finish work and roughly when I go to bed, and there's slightly different settings for each of those different time slots, and having that has helped me massively , because there's four changes because I don't necessarily need those four changes, it means it gets ReBricked. So as an example, if in the mornings I wake up and I decide I'm gonna go and un Brick my phone, which is not the plan, I don't intend to scroll in the mornings, but occasionally the Brick is near where I feed the dog, so occasionally I um, Brick it re Bricks again at [00:18:00] seven 30 'cause it's time to start work. Okay, those of you who, if you're worrying about me starting work at seven 30, it's because I'm on a new plan where I then exercise at nine. So it's not that I'm just working crazy hours, I promise. It re Bricks at seven 30 so even if I've got up in the morning and gone and un Bricked it, I can only scroll till seven 30 worst case. 'cause it will then Brick itself again. And it won't unb Brick again unless I go and un Brick it. So having that schedule has taken loads of the cognitive load away from me and has made it much more easy to notice what I'm doing and to stick to what I intended. 

The other thing I've done is I have collated easy other analog options. So I have one of those like foot stool things by my sofa, which is hollow. Used to have dog toys in it. I kicked the dog out. The dog now has his own basket under a different chair, and it now has my toys in it. So I now have right where I'm likely to be sitting and scrolling I have [00:19:00] analog things that I can do. I have a Kindle by my bed so that if I wake in the night and reach for my phone, I've got a Kindle to reach for instead. I've kind know that's not strictly analog, but it's reading, so we're going with it. I've made it easy for me to have alternatives nearby when I would normally pick up my phone. And again, that has really helped.

One of the things that I think Brick is absolutely genius for is the stopping you the times that you don't even realize you're picking up your phone. It has been, frankly, terrifying. My husband has been laughing at me the number of times I pick up my phone, either without realizing I've even picked it up or picking it up to look at the time, and then clicking on the Instagram app, clicking on Facebook, clicking on whatever, and being faced with that black screen saying, uh, you've chosen not to access this app. Go and do something more interesting. Or whatever it says right. It's been really, really useful to [00:20:00] notice how intuitively and how automatically I'm doing that, and it just squishes all of that because you can't access it, so it gives you that moment. Yes, of course I could walk downstairs if I really cared and un Brick it, but I don't because my intention wasn't looking. It was just that I kind of automatically ended up there and it has stopped all of that.

The other thing I'm proud of is we had to go away again because of the family issues for a day at the weekend, and I decided what I would do this time was I would take the Brick with me. I would Brick my phone, but I would leave the Brick in the car. So I could choose to UnBrick if I decided intentionally that I wanted to, but it wasn't just a free for all access to my entire phone. And that actually worked really well. I went out once to UnBrick it for a short period of time just to check some messages and things like that, have a quick scroll, but I was only out for like 20 minutes or something like that. And then I ReBricked it Happy days, and I was off the phone for the rest of the day. [00:21:00] So that worked really well, and I think that is how I will continue to do it.

If I'm just going. Into town or whatever. I'll just take it Bricked. I still have access to the phone. I still have access to maps. I still have access to all my banking cards, all of that sort of stuff.

I just don't have access to the social media things. In fact, it's quite interesting because there have been quite a few times where I've been with friends going, oh, there was a reel I was gonna show you. And them being like, no, I can't. Then it's like, you know what, Vic, you're gonna have to think of more interesting things to talk about than what you just saw, on instagram and that has actually been really good. You know what? We had conversation before Instagram. You can have conversation about something different. So that has been really, really good.

Now, the one thing that I have not yet figured out that I'm gonna need to think about is that I have not Bricked the entirety of the internet, as in like in my browser. I have Bricked certain websites that I know suck up my time. So the ones I mentioned before, [00:22:00] plus Reddit and Medium and things like that. Now I have a bit of a plan for next year, which I'll tell you about in a future podcast, but if you've heard people on Instagram talk about personal curriculum, I got very excited yesterday and have a bit of a plan. What that means is there are a bunch of places where I could actually get quite distracted, scrolling and looking things up on the internet, and I don't think I really wanna do that either.

So I'm still pondering on this, but I think I'm going to need, they have a setting where instead of having, what websites are blocked, you can have a generic, all websites are blocked except this one, this one, this one, this one. So I'm gonna have a little bit of a ponder about whether, for at least so times a day, I want to have it so that most of the internet is blocked apart from a few things. Haven't quite decided yet, we shall see.

But that's okay because I'm seeing this as a process. I'm seeing this as [00:23:00] something that I'm kind of working through and working with myself, asking myself how can I make this easy rather than, does this machine work? Because the short answer to all of this is there is not a single device that will fix your phone habits. There is not a single piece of exercise equipment that will make you fit and healthy. There is not a single planner that will make your life perfectly organized. All of these are tools that come along with behavior change and emotional regulation and, general self-management.

And when we can see them like that, when we can see them as tools that then need intention and strategy to use, then suddenly they become super, super useful. If we expect them to be a kind of panacea for everything, then they will inevitably disappoint and we will either blame them or we will blame ourselves.

So if you have considered buying something like a Brick before, I think my [00:24:00] conclusion would be, I highly recommend it, as long as you are willing to go through an iterative process of deciding intentionally how you are gonna use it and that you have a very clear plan as to what other things you want to spend time doing if you are not on your phone.

So that's my review of the Brick. I wish I could say in my affiliate links are down there. I don't have affiliate links. I just bought a Brick. So I don't have any of that stuff. I'm not biased in any way. That is just my experience of it.

I would love to hear Brick strategies. So if any of you already have a Brick and are using it in a way that's different to what I've said, or if there's anything you found particularly helpful or not helpful, please do make sure you're on my newsletter. Drop me an email, let me know how you're using it. I would love to kind of further refine it in the future.

If you don't have issues with your phone use, but there are other elements of behavior change that [00:25:00] you are trying to change, I want you to run the same sorts of things through and even to re-listen to this episode, thinking about it in the context of the planner that you think's gonna fix everything. The exercise machine that you think's going to fix everything, whatever it might be. Okay. Being intentional, being able to spot when your behavior is changing, being able to track, being able to choose intentionally, having approach goals, so things you're trying to do rather than avoidant goals. All of this stuff is just really good practice for any sort of behavior change. And I have just illustrated this time using the Brick as an example. I hope that is useful.

This is our last episode for 2025. Thank you so much all for coming. We are heading rapidly towards 150,000 downloads at the point of recording this, which is utterly bonkers. Don't think we'll quite make it by the end of the year, but I'm super, super excited. So thank you for all your support and I can't wait to keep chattering [00:26:00] with you through 2026. So thank you all for listening, and I will see you next week.