SETL: Focus on Life by Less Screen Time

Reduces your daily screentime by 4h 3m by blocking ios apps

iOS

Productivity

Apple

If you spend 5+ hours a day on your phone and wish you didn’t, read this. For years, cutting your screen time meant one thing: being more disciplined. Don’t open Instagram. Ignore the notification. Put the phone down. Stop scrolling. Do that again tomorrow. Over and over again. That’s a terrible system. Today, you don’t need more discipline to reduce your screen time. You need fewer moments that require discipline in the first place. That’s why I built SETL. Every extra hour you spend scrolling is an hour you’re not spending somewhere else. Not building a relationship. Not making money. Not working on an idea. Not training. Not sleeping. Not learning. Not seeing your friends. Not being present with your family. Not building a skill. Not travelling. Not creating something. Not thinking about your own life. And I know that sounds dramatic, but that was exactly the problem I had. I knew when I should stop. I knew when I wanted to go to bed. I knew I had better things to do than watch another 40 videos. I still scrolled. I tried Screen Time limits. I knew the passcode. I tried bedtime reminders. I ignored them. I tried telling myself I’d be more disciplined tomorrow. Tomorrow looked exactly the same. Eventually I realised I was solving the wrong problem. I didn’t need to become better at resisting distractions. I needed to remove the distractions before I had to resist them. That became SETL. You decide which apps waste your time and when you don’t want access to them. SETL then automatically blocks them for you. At night, your distracting apps go to sleep before you do. During the day, you can remove them while you work, train, study, create, spend time with people or just want your attention back. And if the tired or impulsive version of you decides later that it really wants Instagram back, SETL deliberately makes that decision harder. You make the good decision once. SETL helps you stick to it later. That’s the entire philosophy behind the app. You don’t need stronger willpower. You need fewer things demanding it. I’ve also spent a lot of time working around copywriting, advertising and social media, so I’ve seen the other side of this. A huge amount of work goes into figuring out what makes you stop, click, watch, swipe, stay and come back. SETL is basically my attempt to use technology in the opposite direction. Not to take more of your attention. To give some of it back. And this problem seems to exist everywhere. I’ve spoken to athletes, coaches, entrepreneurs, lawyers, bankers, builders, doctors, students, lecturers, photographers, videographers, farmers and night-shift workers. Different lives. Same sentence: “I know I should get off my phone. I just don’t.” SETL is built for that exact moment. Right now, SETL is iPhone-only, with automatic bedtime blocking, daytime focus blocking and added friction when you try to override yourself. It’s $39.99/year with a 7-night free trial. You can find it at setlsleep.com. And I genuinely want to hear from people here: What does your phone steal the most time from? Sleep? Work? Relationships? Training? Reading? Something else? And if you’ve used an app blocker before, what eventually made you stop using it? I’m building SETL around those answers, so I’ll be reading everything. Thanks for checking it out 🌙