When Your Phone Sucks You Into the Void, This App Notices

Every night, an hour before bed, I stash my phone inside a drawer in my living room. Most days I retrieve it the following morning, when I'm heading out the door. It's a simple habit, but one that has helped me reclaim some focus from my smartphone—my personal fix for a growing problem that user experience researchers at Google recently called an "attention crisis."

Outside the house, though, it's a different story: My phone rarely leaves my side. I reach for it to record an interview, field a slack from my editor, or make plans with family—but succumbing to an Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook binge often leaves me feeling distracted and frazzled. So for the past couple weeks, I've been using an app called Flipd that works a bit like a digital drawer where I can hide my phone. But unlike other time management features currently in vogue, which work by passively tracking the time you spend using specific apps, Flipd requires actual intention to use—a fact that could help users keep their phones tucked away while breaking their impulsive phone-checking habits.

Flipd's most basic feature is called the "Light Lock." It's a countdown that I activate when I want to avoid my phone. To use it, I decide how long I want to unplug—say, 30 minutes for a coffee date, or two hours for an uninterrupted writing session—and initiate the timer. Fans of the Pomodoro method and similar timeboxing strategies might recognize the approach of compartmentalizing tasks, but that's where the similarities end—and where the app gets interesting.

The Light Lock uses two tricks to keep you off your phone. First, it tracks the time you spend disengaged from your device. But crucially, it only logs the time you spend consciously disengaged. "We call these mindful minutes," says Flipd cofounder Alanna Harvey. She compares mindful minutes to a daily step goal. The app's latest feature, Flipd 180, encourages people to spend at least 180 minutes a day intentionally unplugged from their devices. It's not enough to not be on your phone; if you want credit for being offline, you must first proclaim your intention to do so by using the app. Initiating a countdown helps distinguish the time you decide to be off your phone (the positive habit you want to cultivate) from the time you happen to not be using it (which is mostly a matter of circumstance).

The second trick is simple, but if you're like me, it might reveal how reflexive and unthinking your phone-checking habits have become: If you exit Flipd or open a different app, your session terminates. No more mindful minutes. You can, however, pause your timer (hence "Light" Lock). If you remember to pause before navigating away, your session remains active. To resume logging mindful minutes, return to Flipd and unpause to re-initiate your countdown.

You're probably thinking: If the point is to encourage people to unplug, why even give them the option to interrupt their session? A pause-able timer sounds both counterintuitive and easy to circumvent. In practice, though, I had a hell of a time remembering to pause my timer. The result was a lot of aborted sessions.

At first, I thought something was wrong with the app. On several instances, I revisited Flipd at the end of what I thought had been a prolonged break, only to find that I had made it just a few minutes—and on one occasion, a few seconds—into my session.

But the app was working fine. Here's what actually happened: I was accessing my phone via the lock screen, briefly using it, and putting it away—without realizing or remembering it. On many phones, mine included, it's possible to launch apps directly from the lock screen. Firing up the camera on iOS is as easy as lifting your iPhone and swiping left. And when I see I've received a message from a friend, I just tap the WhatsApp notification on my lock screen. For me, these gestures are so automatic, I often perform them without thinking.

That mindless compulsion is precisely the habit Flipd is designed to confront. "The critical thing about Flipd is it helps you realize how easy it is to be pulled in by your phone," says Georgetown psychologist Kostadin Kushlev, who studies human-computer interaction and its impact on personal well-being, and is not involved with Flipd.

Calling attention to an unwanted habit is just the first step. Fixing it often depends on understanding how the habit works—the cue that triggers your compulsion and your state of mind when you succumb to it.

That's one reason recently unveiled time-management features from tech giants could ultimately fall short. Since May, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Instagram have all released tools that show users how much time they spend inside specific apps. Those tools might help users understand how they use their phones after the fact, but they do little to help them change their habits in the moment. By contrast, Flipd's pause feature introduces friction and mindfulness to an otherwise mindless and friction-free reflex, giving users a moment to consider what they're doing and why.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Internet Addiction

Apps like Flipd could serve as a valuable complement to tech giants’ screen-time monitoring tools—assuming they work as intended. (Sample size of one and all that, but I've found Flipd to be helpful: Within a few days, I had stopped launching apps directly from my lock screen.) A large-scale, long-term study of Flipd users would shed more light on its usefulness. Harvey says such an investigation is currently underway.

Kushlev is also suspicious of the app's 180-minute goal, which he says might be counterproductive for users who struggle to reach it. Indeed, early fitness trackers prescribed a daily 10,000-step goal, despite the average American logging only half that number—a disparity researchers found could actually discourage activity in some users. Personalized mindful-minute goals, Kushlev says, tailored to a user's habits, might be more effective.