Homescreen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
I’ve long had an all-or-nothing relationship with my smartphone. When I was a teenager with an alphanumeric Nokia brick phone, I had the habit of switching it off and leaving it in a drawer for several days, so as not to waste any time on it – something that was awkward in 2008 but feels outright unthinkable now.
Now, my phone’s bright, responsive touchscreen has me fully under its spell, acting as a compact portal to a wide variety of messaging apps, social media platforms, browsers, streaming services, banking services, alarms, timers, weather widgets, and (underutilized) meditation apps. When one device has everything in it, it’s hard to put it away, even for an hour or so.
2024 has seen me slowly reduce the dopamine grip of my smartphone in a multitude of ways. I switched my entire display to grayscale permanently, making it dull to look at; I removed all apps from my home screen, adding some extra tedious steps to accessing them; and I switched off notifications for everything except calls and texts (no, LinkedIn, it’s not urgent. It’s never urgent).
Still, though, this wasn’t enough. And in a world where ‘brain rot’ is the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, it’s clear I need some better tools for disentangling myself from the sugar-rich, nutrient-deficient information highway. Enter One Sec.
Just a second…
For the past month, I’ve been using a productivity app called One Sec. It has a simple premise: whereas some apps look to block your access to certain apps or services entirely, One Sec instead slows down the process by which you open a specific app.
The free version allows you to select a single app – in my case, Instagram – and halts your activity every time you go to open it, triggering instead a short breathing exercise. This means every time I click on Instagram, often in a frantic, reactive manner – I’m just going to check one message, one inbox, one more thing, etc – One Sec forces me to slow down, and take a deep breath, before politely asking whether I still want to go through to the app.
This has been revolutionary for me. There’s also a healthy dose of shame thrown in, as One Sec tells you how many times you’ve attempted to open your chosen app in the past 24 hours. This gets sobering very quickly.
One Sec lists a few reasons you might want to use its services, though they boil down to reducing social media usage and screen time.
The company ran a behavioral study in tandem with the Max Plank Institute – a non-profit research association based in Germany – and the University of Heidelberg. Using data by One Sec users, they detected a 57% reduction in social media usage, effectively halving the amount of time people opened their ‘problem’ apps in the first place.
The thinking is that, by interrupting the instant gratification of ‘hit button, get dopamine’, One Sec can help you cut down on phone use in the short term, but also rewire your brain in the long term so that you try to open these apps less often.
The website says that “one sec’s breathing intervention increases the activation energy for a habit that may not benefit your life: by adding a delay, gratification is not instant anymore. The brain adapts to this new behavior and loses interest in social media as a resource of quick dopamine.”
Put simply, if it’s more effort to open Instagram, I lose interest in doing so.
One app to rule them all
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You’ll need to upgrade to ‘One Sec Pro’ to use it on more than one application, though the premium plan also lets you customize the length of the breathing exercise and personalize the message that comes up when opening the app. (My default is “It’s time to take a deep breath”, but I could see the usefulness of “Again, Henry, really?” as a motivator.)
The Pro plan costs $2.99 / £3.19 per month, $19.99 / £9.99 per year, or a one-off lifetime payment of $29.99 / £29.99. It’s worth noting that you can add this security layer to specific websites as well as apps, and there’s a browser extension available too.
But even on the app’s free plan, I’ve saved countless hours over the past month and been able to utilize my time more intentionally. So if you have a particular problem app, I’d recommend giving it a go.
Download the One Sec app on iOS or Android.