A Trendy Way to Break Your Social Media Addiction Costs $59. I Found a Clever Dupe.

This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.

Like many of us, I have struggled with social media. After a day of working at Slate, I’d close my computer, only to reach for my phone. Built in screen-time limits didn’t work; I’d just hit “ignore” over and over. Leaving my phone outside my bedroom didn’t work; there were so many hours of primo scrolling time between 6 p.m. and bedtime.

So when my colleague Alex Kirshner wrote last summer about a trendy object called Brick, which offers a “blunt-object approach” to blocking (and unblocking) a selection of apps, I was intrigued. “I put my little piece of plastic in the kitchen, 15 feet away from the den where I work,” Kirshner writes. “I tap my phone to it, and Instagram goes poof.” But this is not a recommendation for Brick. I just couldn’t get myself to pull out my credit card for what even Kirshner, a Brick fan, describes as a “$59 fridge magnet.”

Enter: Foqos. Created last year by Canadian software developer Ali Waseem to curb his own bad phone habits, the open-source iOS app offers all the benefits Kirshner described at absolutely no cost to the user. Instead of a pricey plastic widget, you can use anything with a near field communication, or NFC, tag to act as your “Brick.” (I found out about Foqos—how else?—via an Instagram reel.) I used Foqos to turn an expired ski pass into my “Brick,” but any old hotel key or key fob would work, or you could even print a QR code off your computer to scan if you don’t have an NFC-enabled doodad lying around.

My ski pass stays in my desk drawer, and each weekday as I sign off from work, I tap my phone to the pass to disable all the most tempting stuff from my device. For me that means Instagram, Strava, Reddit, and Facebook. I can’t access them again until I return to my office and re-tap the pass to unblock them. You can choose to block individual apps; whole categories of app, like social media or games; or even certain URLs. There’s also the ability to use multiple different NFC tags or QR codes to create multiple profiles if, say, you want to block social media during the day so you can focus on work, and then block out work at night so you can focus on your family. Foqos is iPhone-specific; for those on Android, Foqos directs users to a similar app called Switchly.

Once I block myself from social media for the evening, I find it so much easier to focus on cooking a recipe and listening to an audiobook, sitting down to read (I finished a physical book last week for the first time in ages!), or actually spending quality time with my boyfriend on the couch. We’ve even gotten to Season 2 of The Pitt without me constantly having to ask, “Wait, who’s that again?” I can still have my phone beside me for the useful things it provides—texting a friend, or checking the weather—but I’m no longer tethered to its addictive endless scroll. And the solution was hiding in my desk drawer all along.