Type one: timers
Pomodoro apps, session trackers, anything that counts down. They solve starting and stopping, which is a real problem if your day has no shape and you drift between tasks without ever properly beginning one.
They do nothing at minute six when the work gets hard and your hand moves on its own. A timer counting is not an obstacle. If your sessions collapse rather than never start, this is the wrong tool and buying a nicer one will not help.
Type two: pauses
A breathing screen, a countdown, a "do you really want to" before the app opens. These are genuinely effective at catching the absent-minded open, the one where you unlock your phone to check the time and arrive in a feed with no memory of deciding to.
Their weakness is repetition. After a fortnight the dismiss button has a location your thumb knows, and you stop reading the words entirely. one sec is the best known of these and is worth trying if absent-minded opening is your pattern.
Type three: stakes
Forest grows a tree that dies if you leave. Others charge you money or tell a friend. These work on people who respond to a consequence, even a symbolic one, and they work surprisingly well on that group.
If you are not that person you will kill the tree without emotion the first time something genuinely urgent comes up, and then the spell is broken for good. The Forest comparison goes through who it suits.
Type four: habit gates
The apps stay locked and open when you have done something. Not when a timer expires, not when you confirm you meant it. When the thing is done.
This is the only type with nothing to dismiss, which is why it survives the fortnight that kills pauses. It is also the most demanding, because it will not let you renegotiate at the moment you most want to. The category page covers the mechanic and Broc is our version of it.
Diagnosing yourself honestly
Think about the last time you lost an hour you meant to spend on something else. Did you never start, start and drift, open something without deciding to, or knowingly dismiss a warning you had set up yourself?
Never started points at a timer. Started and drifted points at blocking the substitutes. Opened without deciding points at a pause. Knowingly dismissed points at a habit gate, because you have already proved that you will overrule anything that asks nicely.
Most people who arrive at habit gating have been through the other three first. That is not wasted effort, it is how you learn which one you are.
A note on focus modes built into Android
Android has Focus Mode and Do Not Disturb built in, they cost nothing, and they are underrated. Focus Mode pauses chosen apps on a schedule, and if your distraction is predictable it may be all you need.
Its limit is that you can turn it off from the notification shade in one swipe, which is fine when you are not fighting yourself and useless when you are. Try it first anyway. Spending money before exhausting free options is how people end up with four abandoned apps and a theory that none of them work.
If you have dismissed every warning you ever set, try the one with nothing to dismiss.
Get Broc on Google Play