Digital Buzz: Tackling Tech Distractions With The 'Brick' - A Journey to Digital Mindfulness

Speaker 1: 0:15

Welcome to the Mindful Bytes podcast presented by Killer Bee Studios. Open your minds as we dive into conversations about the world of tech and the art behind using it purposefully.

Speaker 2: 0:32

All right, everybody, welcome back to the digital segment, the digital buzz segment of the Mindful Bytes podcast. To the digital segment, the digital buzz segment of the Mindful Bytes podcast. Today, me and Shauna are going to be talking about a piece of tech that she sent me and it's called the Brick. So I'm excited to kind of talk about this. We actually ordered one so we can kind of do our own testing and experience, experiment with it. But I guess I would like to start off with the thought of I guess it's a question really for you, shauna what would you say is probably one of the most accessible distractions of today?

Speaker 3: 1:12

I mean, it's definitely our phones, for in my opinion and I know some people don't struggle with getting distracted by their phone, but I really do and you know, I'll tell you sometimes, like you know, we'll be sitting on the couch or whatever I'll find myself scrolling on Facebook and I'll say I was just getting on my phone to check the weather. I don't even know how I ended up on Facebook and that really annoys me and you're probably going to get to this in a minute. But you know, none of the tools that I've tried in the past have helped me in any way. So when I heard about this brick, you know I saw a commercial about it or something on Facebook. I thought, now, that is smart, we should probably talk about that.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Yeah, I agree too. I think my initial thought was for me. I was thinking, oh, it's probably social media, you know stuff like that. But yeah, you're right, it comes down to the phone, and I love technology that is aimed at promoting better digital health experience. I guess I don't know if that's the right way to put it, but we have so many distractions it can kind of become overwhelming and and kind of addicting. So yeah, so yeah, I was excited when you brought it to me because I've tested it. I've used several different things to kind of help and maybe other people that's listening you can let us know in the show notes or in the comments here on our live discord. But I think that probably a lot of us deal with this and have probably tried different applications to help control it. Even I mean even the apple's app where it shows you how much time you're using on your phone, how many different apps. That's kind of scary. Have you ever looked at that before?

Speaker 3: 2:51

oh, yeah, well, I used to get notifications that would tell me on sunday how long I had spent during the week on my phone, you know, broken down into categories, and for some reason I don't get those anymore and I don't really miss that Because, yeah, it's shocking when you have to see that all added together. You know like you've spent this many hours on social media.

Speaker 2: 3:14

Oh, like what could I?

Speaker 3: 3:16

have learned in that time, you know what?

Speaker 2: 3:19

yeah, what did you learn right? We should do a test every time we get off social media. What did I learn today?

Speaker 3: 3:25

that's a good question. Yeah, we're like what, uh, what actually added value to my life from that? And then, if you say, nothing added value to my life enough times, maybe, maybe, that would really you know, open my eyes a little.

Speaker 2: 3:41

Yeah, it could probably open a lot of our eyes if we started doing that. Well, you know, the thing is like I've, I know you, I think you've tested them with me too. I mean, we were married, so we have done some of these tests together on different applications. But one of my biggest things is I don't remember which one it was we're using, but this tends to be the case with a lot of them is, you can set those. Oh yeah, I guess it was. I guess it's the apple, the apple app where you can say, hey, don't allow me to use these apps after this time. But then it's easy for us just to say ignore, like go ahead and give me an extra 15 minutes. Like, how responsible are we when we're trying to hold ourselves responsible? We're not really.

Speaker 3: 4:21

Well, not to mention that it's so easy, Like the way mine is set up. You know I have a certain time period, so don't let me use social media for longer than 30 minutes or whatever. And then the little thing pops up and says your time's out. You just hit one little button that says give me 15 more minutes or ignore for the rest of the day. And up and says your time's out. You just hit one little button that says give me 15 more minutes or ignore for the rest of the day. And it's like I hit that before I even realized what has happened, you know, because maybe I'm right in the middle of an article, Maybe I'm whatever, messaging a friend, so I'm like, well, you know, I obviously have to finish this, but it's not always something important like that. Sometimes I'm like, well, I'll just scroll for 15 minutes. Well, I'll just scroll for 15 more minutes. I mean, it's embarrassing to say, but, like, my self-control must be extremely low.

Speaker 2: 5:10

Well, it's kind of almost like giving yourself a present every time too, like, oh, I'm out of time, but here's another five minutes Congratulations.

Speaker 3: 5:17

So Ashton talks about getting a dopamine hit from things and you know, even when you procrastinate so, for instance, let's say you have it on your schedule today that you need to write a blog and you tell yourself, you know what, I have extra time tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow you get a little dopamine hit from freeing up that expectation on yourself. So then that makes it easier to continue, continue procrastinating because it feels good, you know, and it's. I think it's like that when you give yourself a little extra time of something that you're enjoying or you know sadly even, sometimes you might not even be enjoying that time on social media, but you're addicted to it or craving it or numbing yourself with it. So then if you give yourself a little more, it feels good, it's a little dopamine hit.

Speaker 2: 6:06

Yeah, it feels good. Well, and the thing is, I think that that, uh, you know the cell phones like they're great tools for us to use. I mean, they help us stay connected with friends. Like you said you're you might be in the middle of messaging a friend. Uh, they help us stay connected with friends. Like you said you might be in the middle of messaging a friend. They help us do more, but the thing is that they have become quite a bit of distractions. I know we've talked about it before, about the what do they call it, the phantom vibrations. Yeah, hey, was that my phone vibrating in my pocket, or your phone's not even in your pocket, it's not even in the same room.

Speaker 3: 6:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:44

Those are signs for us like, hey, we should probably slow down and be aware of what. What's going on here. Is this a problem? And and I love this, this tech, because you sent it to me it's called the brick and it's it's all. What is here's kind of like what they say about it is it's meant. This is the story and I'm gonna tell you guys, check out the website. You guys can check it out at get brick dot app. You can learn more it.

Speaker 2: 6:57

But these were two recent college students that noticed the same problem that, if a lot of us are honest, we probably can say, yeah, I can relate to this. But they noticed a problem in the constant distractions that were coming from their phone and it was preventing them from being present in the moment and even getting things done, like being productive when it comes to work. And what they put on their site was that their mission is basically it's making smartphones less, distracting, less. And I love that. Like I love that, that mindset of we're making smartphones less distracting. And I thought about for a second. I was like, wow, that's interesting. Our smartphones, could they be making us dumber because we're so distracted Like we're not even plugged in, not in a bad way, but you know what I mean.

Speaker 3: 7:43

It's, it's just connecting us. Yeah, I think there's no doubt about it. There's no doubt that they're making us dumber, you know emotionally, and you know less able to connect.

Speaker 2: 7:55

Like you said, I don't think there's any doubt about that, and I again, I love tech and I, but I love it when we find something like this, like that can really help us with our the mental health side of digital uh, because I think it's important to be able to unplug. Now I'm going to share, I'll show you guys. Here's the box right here, so if you're watching the video with us, I'm gonna show you. It's a really cool package and it's I love that it came in. It's all pretty. I know you would like it because you really appreciate that they did a good job.

Speaker 2: 8:25

Good job, zack, and I think it's TJ, as Zack and TJ there's like a little personal letter in here and it is right now it's in their early supporter stage, so they wrote a note of sign that you know, hey, thanks for supporting us during our early stage. But the brick itself what I love about it? I don't do product reviews, but this thing is so I guess you would say. It's minimalistic, very simple, small, nothing crazy, nothing fancy, and it is very easy to set up. I mean, literally you take your phone. They have a QR code right when you open up the box, you download their app and then you take your phone and you just tap it on this brick. You tap it on it. It's got a magnetic back so it clicks to like refrigerators, stuff like that.

Speaker 2: 9:09

So you can hang this thing anywhere you want. You can throw it in your purse Not that I have a purse, but I know you do, shauna so you can throw this in your purse, take it with you and we'll explain why, because we have some ideas and some ways. We're already using it. But I love how the design is just very minimalistic and the app makes it very straightforward on how to set up. I mean, I know you haven't set it up on your phone yet, but I'm going to let you do it. Do that this week and you'll see how simple it is. It really is so simple. Um and some of you might have some questions about this, as you look more into it, you can use this on multiple phones. One brick can be used across multiple forms of phones.

Speaker 2: 9:45

I love that, yeah, and I love. Like you know, I only bought one. You know, as soon as I was buying one, they offered hey, do you want to get a second one? I think they were giving me half off for basically both of them and it's somewhere close that price. But I'm like man, yeah, we probably shouldn't get two, but I didn't. I was like you know what? I don't know the product yet, I don't know what to expect.

Speaker 2: 10:04

I've used these before, some of the things, the workarounds that I've found. I bet we're going to be able to do that with no consequences. So I better just get one, because it might turn out to be just like everything else. But the great thing is it's not. I wish I would've gotten two, maybe even three, but again, if you get one, you can take this with you, throw it in a purse, whatever you want to do, you can take it with you. It doesn't have to stay in one location. Now, my initial thought, shauna, when you told me about it, was this could be great for work environments, like when people were you remember the days when we used to clock in? Like when you go to work you have to clock in like a time card. I don't think many places do that anymore.

Speaker 3: 10:44

Probably not.

Speaker 2: 10:45

Yeah, but I thought with this brick it could be a cool way if you come up with a good idea on how to use it. But you could make it where people tap it with their phones when they come to work and it deactivates certain apps that distract you and until you go back and tap, you have to go tap the brick again with your phone to unlock all those, which is kind of cool, because I thought, well, hey, if you're, if people are, if you're on social media, and those things are distractions at work you could, could set up like this is the next cool thing about it you can set up multiple customized uh settings. So you have, like you can, and you can label it. So I have one for me. It's not, it's not work. I don't have one for work because we use digital, so we have to be on those platforms, but I have one for no work, like I'm checking out for the day. So like the apps that I use, like email, uh, some of the social media apps, like LinkedIn, stuff, like that I don't want to be opening those up outside of work. Like I have checked out like this should be my personal life now, like so I added a no work and I selected all those apps.

Speaker 2: 11:51

And what's cool is you can choose up to 50 apps. That's all you can choose. So you can either create a list of apps that are allowed or apps to block. So, depending on I have a lot of apps that I allow. So when I first went through and created that list, it all went through, it looked good, and then I went to save it. It said, oh no, sorry, you have, like I think it was like, 70 apps selected. We only can do 50. So I was like, oh well, maybe that's why I had the option to choose the block apps. So I blocked apps, plenty of space. So I said choose, I want these apps to turn off when I tap it when I'm checking out of work. And it works great, I mean flawlessly.

Speaker 2: 12:29

Now, the thing that I did want to test out, because of knowing the workarounds that we've done in the past, I wanted to go ahead and I saw the apps were locked. So I was like, okay, what happens if I delete the brick app? That's just going to open everything up, right. So I did. And, yes, it opened everything up. So I reinstalled the app and when I got into the menu settings, the settings of the app, there's a setting that says it's called. Let me open it up here real quick. I'll tell you what it's called, because at first I'm like, oh, what is this? I clicked it and it says header. It says emergency on bricks and it says you have four remaining. And then they have an option that you can toggle. It says strict mode. So I was like, well, what's this?

Speaker 2: 13:11

So I toggled strict mode and what happens is when strict mode is on, if you tap your phone against the brick, say I'm going to work or I'm outside of work, or you know, we've talked about putting in your purse If we're going out for a date night, and it's like, hey, we're going out with friends, we need to have a night on the town, or whatever it might be option like label that you can tap and say, hey, I'm going on a date, I'm going to hang out with my friends, I'm going to tap this and then leave this back in the car.

Speaker 2: 13:37

So all the apps that normally distract me are not going to get my attention. When the when you turn on strict mode, it disables where you cannot delete the app. So now you cannot take that route to unblock all the apps. Now I did not realize this when I deleted the app the first time, because it wasn't turned on strict mode, it used one of the emergency unbricks. Now I still, at this point, don't know exactly what emergency unbricks mean. If I run out, I don't know what that means. I guess that means you can no longer unlock it unless you tap the brick, but you have five to begin with. So since the strict mode was not turned on, when, like oh man, I have to use those apps, I can use one of my emergency unbricks out of those five.

Speaker 3: 14:39

Do you know yet how long? Like the five emergency unbricks, is that for the life of like the brick, or is it a month, or is it a year? Do you have any idea about that yet?

Speaker 2: 14:52

I do not know that, like I have not found anything on it, I'm going to message Zach and TJ and see what they say, because I'm like do they, can you reset them? Or is that just that's somebody who's assigned to the brick and if you do it, you can no longer unbrick it? And I also don't know, like, if we connect multiple phones to that one brick, do we all share the same emergency bricks?

Speaker 3: 15:13

Yeah, good question.

Speaker 2: 15:15

Because if that's the case, there's three of us, and if there's only four remaining, better be.

Speaker 1: 15:22

Better be careful.

Speaker 2: 15:24

It also would be nice to know and I know this is like a new product, so this might be a good suggestion for them If you can connect multiple devices. It would be great to be able to see a history to see who on brick, who used emergency bricks.

Speaker 3: 15:38

Yeah, yeah, and maybe I mean maybe that is already set up, but we just haven't gotten that far in the process.

Speaker 2: 15:45

Yeah, so. So I mean I love that they went all those extra steps to make this uh, it's deaf, make it a really good device to use to really help turn off those distractions. Now for myself, I'm going to ask you another question here in a second, and it might be a little bit personal, I don't know, I guess we'll see. But for myself, when I first bricked it and said okay, I'm checking out of work and I use that, I thought for myself, like you know, there's not going to be, there's not really going to be anything that I'm going to be trying to open. But I don't. I think I tried to open my email three times. I think I tried to look at LinkedIn and as soon as I went there it was like nope, blocked. So it's, it's doing a great job at it.

Speaker 3: 16:26

I would like to ask you Shauna like what are some of the apps? If your phone's a distraction, what are some of the apps that would probably be going on your block list right now? Oh, yeah, okay, so it would be Facebook and Instagram and then my business email. My personal email does not distract me that much because it's mostly junk and you know I only go to my personal email when I'm looking for something specific, so I don't really get caught up in that. Some apps I've already just deleted off my phone entirely because I just don't. It's not so much of a draw, as once I get in there it takes too much time. Like Pinterest for interest. I said Pinterest.

Speaker 2: 17:09

Pinterest. You got a new app coming out the Pinterest app.

Speaker 3: 17:13

Pinterest, for instance. I took that off my phone altogether because when I go to Pinterest, normally I'm looking for something specific and it's a lot more convenient if I just use my laptop and then I also don't get distracted by my laptop. Like, I don't just sit for hours on my laptop. Just, I don't know why it's always been like that. You know, back before you could get email on your phone easily. I mean, I know you could get email on like a Blackberry. I never did any of that, but before it was really easy to have your email on your phone and I would only have it on my laptop.

Speaker 3: 17:51

I was not one of those people that would check my email 10 times a day. I just didn't care about it. And I don't like sitting on my laptop. I like to like move around and do things and take my phone with me. So there are certain things that tempt me on my phone and certain things that don't. So the things that do take too much time on my phone, I just delete it all together. Um, but Facebook, instagram and my business email those are things that will distract me, so I will be blocking those. I do love the idea of being able to set up different um, what's the right word? Like how you were saying, like check out of work, date night, stuff like that. Is that like a mode?

Speaker 2: 18:31

They call them. Yeah, it's a brick mode, so they call them modes. So you can set up different multiple modes. So like mine's going out, no work, and then it has a default one. I don't think I have not been able to figure out a way to edit the name of the default one, so it's just if you have a default one you can set that, but you can add on top of that.

Speaker 3: 18:50

Yeah, I really like that because you know there are certain times where you want to have access to certain things and not other things. I read that that was a really smart feature they added, you know, to make it really practical to use in your life.

Speaker 2: 19:31

Yeah, I love, I love the modes and again, I think that's it's. At first I thought I'm going to have a mode for work, but then it didn't really make sense for because of what we do. But I love the idea of like, well, I need one for no work. But I kept some of my social apps, Cause I'm like you know, some of those social apps I go to, cause it's entertaining. I was like, hey, I want to be able to go and connect to my friends, Uh. But then, like when I check for going out, uh, oh, I'm going to add one today about going to bed. This is a bad one, you know. So if I want to do that, like, hey, I don't want my Facebook messenger to be dinging, you know.

Speaker 1: 20:06

I want text messages.

Speaker 2: 20:07

That's fine if it's an emergency, but I don't want Facebook messages. I don't want all the social apps, anything that can cause distractions right before I'm going to bed. I can turn those off. See, I love the brick modes, I love that you can create your own, and I think it's good to sit down and really think about how you would use it in different scenarios, like the going out, the going out one for myself. I left, I turned off all the social ones, but I left a couple. Uh, I left facebook messenger. I left that on there because I'm like you know, someone might actually no, I don't, I think I turned that off. Yeah, I turned it off because I'm like, if it's a facebook messenger, you can wait uh, so there might be different ones that you use at different times.

Speaker 2: 20:46

I think we're gonna have to order another one because, I mean, you're're best to be able to use different. I guess you can connect these somehow, these bricks, so that way the settings are the same. You can just click whichever brick you're by. So that'll be interesting to see, because I would like to have one that's just kept in the car. I'd like to have one that that is here at the house because you know if again, if you're going out and you're like, oh, or somebody calls and we're driving, we're like, hey, we're going to go see some friends. I want to be able to tap that to kind of remove those distractions. And I think that once you do it, just like with me checking out for work, there was things I thought I was getting better at, but you can still see like, oh, it's so easy to click and go, yeah.

Speaker 3: 21:29

Quickly open those apps and not even realize you're doing it over time. If it is effective, I think it would definitely be effective for me, but we'll just have to see over time. If you decided, like no, I really need to get on linkedin right now, even though you actually don't need to, but you want to, are you going to walk over and unbrick it or not? You know, I don. I think if, if the option is sitting there with me to go ahead and do what I want to do, I'll do it. So, like for the Apple app, where you just click and say give me 15 more minutes, that's way too easy. But if I have to actually think about enough to get up, walk into the other room or you know, we originally talked about putting it down in the garage, which is down on a floor below our apartment then there's no way I'm walking down there to do that. I mean, sometimes I won't even walk down there. If there's something I really need down there, yeah.

Speaker 2: 22:21

I know. I mean, that's the thing. It's. Like Nikki said, like you can figure out if you're, if it's too easy for you to say, well, I'm just going to walk into the room and unbrick it, then put that brick somewhere where it's not so easily, so easily accessible, even put in a safe man. Could you imagine that having to open a safe every time to unlock your phone, that would drive you crazy.

Speaker 3: 22:39

I just thought of a really good use case for this too. You know how some people love to like shop at night, like shop on you know, chemo or however you say it, or like all sorts of different things like that. That'd be a really good way to break that habit for yourself to like turn off the apps at night and like you have to walk, like you know, down to your car or something if you absolutely need to look at something.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Oh my gosh. Yeah Well, I have to be honest. I did not brick my Amazon apps for shopping on Amazon, which is probably a good idea. I mean, as long as you're not bricking it on your like, as long as you don't add Instacart to yours, because I know like I get in those moods. I'm like, hey, you know what sounds good Ice cream and you're like, well, let me just go to Instacart, it'll be here in five minutes. Don't do that. Do not brick Instacart. Actually.

Speaker 3: 23:27

I think we should brick Instacart because, then if you're like I need ice cream, I'll be like all right, you have to walk down to the garage Like walk down unbrick my phone.

Speaker 2: 23:36

The brick is one block up the road. If you want to get ice cream, that's the brick you got to tap. It's like that a geocache thing, maybe that's it. You create your own geocache game and you hide all the bricks everywhere and you got to find it.

Speaker 3: 23:48

It's going too far, it's genius no, I can see this. Like you know, you go hide them in the yard. Like you have to climb a tree If you want to get to your Instacart. This is genius. We're going to lose a lot of weight, I can tell.

Speaker 2: 24:00

That's hilarious. That's hilarious. Well, it's definitely a great device, a great tech device. If you know and know someone or yourself, feel like I wouldn't give it as a Christmas gift that you know someone like you know what, you have a problem with your phone, you're distracted Don't give it to them as a Christmas gift, unless it's something they ask for, or if they're like saying like I'm really struggling with this and I can't find a good answer, that's a good sign.

Speaker 2: 24:26

Just don't give it to someone and say, hey, you had a problem and I know you don't realize it, but you need this Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, well, I mean, even like you, you know, when you homeschooled Ashton. That could probably be a pretty cool tool for people that are homeschooling their kids, or even I know kids now that take phones to school. I mean, imagine even if schools had this where kids had to click that in, like when they come into class and it shut it out, shut everything down, but then when they got to their last class, they get unbricked their phone. I don't know. There's a lot of use cases I could see in this.

Speaker 3: 24:58

Yeah, that's a great option for kids to still have the ability to call or text, you know, especially in an emergency. You know, but not have access to other things that are going to distract them from their schoolwork. Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 2: 25:14

Well, I would check it out Again. The website is getbrickapp, that's app. Check it out, Read it up on it. I might even reach out to Zach and TJ to see if we can get them on the Mindful Bites to kind of share their story more about how they built this and what their vision is moving forward. Because, again, right now they're in their early stages and I'm not one to get on here and talk about an app that much. But this thing I can definitely see a lot of use cases for it. It's very promising.

Speaker 2: 25:42

They've done a very good job at making it so simple to use. There is one thing that I have noticed and we're going to test it out again tonight it does tell you how long your your device has been bricked. So you see, like we were going to bed last night, I was like, hey look, my device has been bricked for like five something hours. Well then I got up this morning and I noticed that my phone wasn't bricked and I'm like, well, that's weird. So I looked at all the apps. I'm like nothing's bricked it, okay. So I opened up the brick app and I noticed that the modes I didn't see the modes, I just saw the default. So I was like, okay, well, I don't really know for sure what's going on. So I closed the app. When I reopened the app, everything bricked immediately and then I could see all my modes. So my thoughts were I'm thinking that maybe something at that midnight time might have like kind of told her like hey, you're on brick now yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:35

Like a reset or something like that, or it could be, who knows, Maybe my phone didn't update overnight, so I'm going to do some tests tonight, Just kind of see what happens, Cause there's a lot of things that would come into play. But we'll make sure we send that over to them to help them out. If there is something to to, uh, look at there. But I would check it out. Well worth it, Not not bad price at all. I don't have like I'm not getting any affiliates off of this, so uh. But if you have a problem with your phone distractions or those phantom vibrations, uh, I would check it out for sure.

Speaker 3: 27:03

How much was it? How much was the one individual? I think the.

Speaker 2: 27:06

I think the one was like 50 something dollars and I think you could get two for like $70 is what it came up with After I ordered it. It gave me more options, like, hey, do you want to get two or you want to get three? I should have again. I wish I would have just gotten a three, but, moving forward, the next time I'll order two, so that way we have three and it'll be a great you know, a great device to have in different areas to help keep us from being distracted.

Speaker 3: 27:32

Yeah, like put us back in control of our time and our devices, and yeah, I like that.

Speaker 2: 27:40

Yeah, I mean make these, let these things become a tool again that we use, not a tool that controls us, like we really want it to be a tool that we use and doesn't, but it's not really guiding our life like what we're doing every day.

Speaker 3: 27:52

Doesn't make us its tool.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Yes, that's right. We don't want to be yeah, we don't want to be its tool. I guess that's a good way to put it All right. Well, that's it. That's it for this week's Digital Buzz. You guys, thanks for tuning in.

Speaker 1: 28:13

And we'll put you guys next time. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe and leave us a review.