An app that blocks apps while you study

Why study timers stop working

Pomodoro apps assume the hard part is knowing when to stop. It is not. The hard part is minute six, when the material gets difficult and your hand reaches for the phone before you have consciously decided anything.

A timer that only counts does nothing at minute six. It is a clock with ambition. What you need is for the reach to hit something shut.

This is also why "just put your phone in another room" works brilliantly until the one evening you need it for a past paper, and then never gets reinstated.

The setup

Block the apps that actually interrupt you. For most students that is three: one video feed, one messaging app, one you would rather not admit to. Leave notes, calculator and your textbook app alone.

Add a study habit with a timer worth the session length you can honestly sustain. Twenty-five minutes is a good starting point, not because of Pomodoro orthodoxy but because it is short enough that you will start.

Set what it earns. Fifteen minutes of feed for a twenty-five minute session is a fair exchange rate that most people settle on. Adjust it after a week, when you know whether you are being generous or punitive with yourself.

Do not block your study apps

Worth stating plainly because people do it. If you block the app you need to study, the only route to unlocking your phone runs through the app that is locked. Broc will let you create that situation. It will not be enjoyable.

The same applies to your alarm, your maps and anything you rely on in an emergency. Broc only touches the list you give it, so keep that list honest.

What the verification can and cannot check

The timer proves that twenty-five minutes passed with the habit running. It does not prove you were studying. You can sit there and stare at a wall, and Broc will cheerfully award you the minutes.

Photo verification asks for a photo when you mark the habit done and has an AI check it matches. That catches the lazy lie, not the determined one. If you want a system that cannot be fooled, no phone app is it. What this does is remove the frictionless version of giving up.

Notifications are the other half

Blocking the app stops you opening it. It does not stop the app tapping you on the shoulder, and a banner is enough to break a train of thought even when you do not act on it. Reading the notification and returning to the page is not free; the sentence you were holding is gone.

Turn off notifications for whatever you blocked, in Android settings rather than inside each app, so it survives the next update. Do it once and it applies to every session afterwards. This is the single highest-return five minutes in the whole setup and most people skip it because blocking feels like the interesting part.

If exams are close

Deleting the apps before exam season is the traditional move and it fails predictably, because reinstalling takes forty seconds and your accounts are all still there. The TikTok-specific version of this setup goes into that pattern in more detail.

Blocking keeps everything installed and simply shut, which matters more than it sounds. Nothing to reinstall means no decisive moment where you get to reverse the decision in one tap.