Forge

For iPhone · In beta

A blocked phone is an empty hour. Not a finished one.

Forge shields your phone for stretches of the day you choose — and the only way to get it back early is to do the work you said you'd do.

5 min of work 1 min of phone

Why I built this

I'm on my phone too much, and I've been trying to fix it for years.

Opal is the one I stuck with longest. The trouble was that I controlled the settings. I'd give myself generous breaks while I was setting it up calmly, then use every one of them. After a couple of weeks the blocks weren't really blocks.

So I'd switch on strict mode instead. That held until the first evening I needed my phone for something real and couldn't get at it. Then I'd be furious at a piece of software, which is a stupid thing to be furious at, and I'd delete it. I went round that loop more than once.

What I eventually worked out is that neither setting was the problem. When my phone was blocked I had an hour in front of me with nothing in it, and I couldn't sit still in that, so I'd go and find a way out. Making the block harder to escape only made the hour worse.

A to-do list fails from the other direction. Mine was always full. I'd open it, look at it, and do nothing.

Forge is what I built to sit in between. You write down what counts as done before the block starts, and you report against it when you stop. It sounds like admin, but it's the reason the hour has something in it.

These days I finish at least one thing in every block and I can tell you what it was, because I wrote it down at both ends. The hour isn't empty, so I'm not spending it trying to get out of it.

The thing I didn't expect is that the block often ends and I keep working, because I'm partway through something and want to finish it. That never happened when the app just took the phone away.

The rate is five minutes of work for one minute of phone. It's deliberately stingy. Some days I earn twenty minutes and don't spend any of them.

— Sagar
Forge is the app I use every day.

How it works

Block your phone

Set stretches of the day, or start one right now for as long as you like. Each block has its own list of what stays open — everything else is shielded by iOS itself.

Say what done looks like

Before you start, you write three versions: bronze — the least that would still count, silver — a good session, and gold, if it goes better than expected. Bronze exists so there is always a version small enough to begin.

The way out is through

While you're working, the block's countdown runs half again as fast. Both clocks are on screen at once. Waiting it out is genuinely the slower route back to your phone.

Report, and sit with it

You say which tier you hit — honour system, no scoring — then spend a minute on what actually got done, what fought back, and what you'll want to know next time. Stopping early is debriefed exactly like a triumph.

Two deliberate pauses

You can't start a session for sixty seconds after opening it, and you can't close one for sixty seconds after ending it. These are the product, not a loading screen.

Before

The minute where a vague intention has to become something checkable.

After

The minute where what happened gets written down while you still remember it.

Strict, if you want it

Per block: no release, no edits, and the app can't be uninstalled until it ends.

Why it works

Forge didn't invent any of this. Each part of the loop is built on a finding that already existed — mostly meta-analyses and field experiments, so the evidence is a body of work rather than one striking study.

Bronze / silver / gold

Deciding in advance is most of the battle

Writing what you'll do, before the moment you have to do it, is one of the most replicated effects in applied psychology. Forge makes it mandatory: you can't start a session until the tiers are written.

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. — Across 94 independent tests and over 8,000 participants, forming an if-then plan had a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, d = 0.65.

Blocks & strict mode

People will tie their own hands, and it works

A block is a commitment device: you restrict your future self on purpose, while you're calm enough to want to. The strongest evidence for these comes from money, where the stakes are measurable.

Ashraf, N., Karlan, D., & Yin, W. (2006). Tying Odysseus to the mast: Evidence from a commitment savings product in the Philippines. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2), 635–672. — In a randomised trial, clients offered an account that restricted their own withdrawals raised their savings balances by 82% after one year.

Phone time, earned

Put the thing you want behind the thing you avoid

Forge's whole economy — five minutes of work buys one minute of phone — is a sixty-year-old principle: a behaviour you'd freely choose can reinforce one you'd otherwise put off, if access to the first is made contingent on the second.

Premack, D. (1959). Toward empirical behavior laws: I. Positive reinforcement. Psychological Review, 66(4), 219–233. — The original statement of what is now called the Premack principle.

The 60-second debrief

Stopping to look back beats going again

The minute after a session — what got done, what fought back, what you'll want to know next time — is the part most likely to feel skippable, and the part with the clearest evidence behind it.

Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231–245. — Across 46 studies, structured debriefs improved subsequent performance by roughly 20–25%.

Why the rate is small

A distant reward is worth less — much less, for some of us

Forge pays out in minutes, immediately, inside the session — rather than in a weekly total you'd see on Sunday. That's deliberate: for the people it's built for, a reward that arrives later is discounted far more steeply.

Jackson, J. N. S., & MacKillop, J. (2016). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and monetary delay discounting: A meta-analysis of case-control studies. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 1(4), 316–325. — Pooled case-control evidence for steeper discounting of delayed rewards in ADHD, at p < 10⁻¹⁵.

No streaks, no guilt

Being hard on yourself doesn't make you try again

Stopping early is debriefed exactly like finishing. Nothing counts your absences. This isn't softness — treating a bad session as information rather than a verdict is what makes the next one likely to happen at all.

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143. — Participants induced to take a self-compassionate view of a failure spent more time trying to improve than those induced to bolster their self-esteem.

A caveat worth stating plainly: these studies support the mechanisms Forge is assembled from, not Forge itself. Nobody has run a trial on this app, and any claim that they had would be worth less than the citations above.

What it will never do

Every feature is tested against one question: does it point at the next twenty-five minutes, or at your past self? If it points backwards, it doesn't ship.

Guilt is what makes people delete apps like this in week two. Nothing in Forge can make you feel worse for having been away.

It keeps nothing

Forge collects no data at all.

No account, no server, no analytics, no tracking. Everything you write stays on your phone. iOS hands the app opaque tokens for the apps you block, so Forge can shield them without ever being told what they are.

The honest cost of holding none of your data: there is no backup. Delete the app or move to a new phone and your history doesn't come with you. That's a deliberate trade, and it's written down in full in the privacy policy.