I beat harder addictions than my phone.

Maybe you know this moment. You pick up your phone just for a second to look something up, and suddenly forty minutes are gone and you cannot even remember what you were looking for. You did not decide for it, it just happens, like it does on most days. That feeling would not let go of me for years, and I want to tell you how I eventually dealt with it, because you might recognize yourself in it.

I am Szymon, I have worked in marketing for years and my whole day happens on a screen anyway. At the same time I am someone who likes working on himself and wants to know how far he can get if he really sticks with it. In 2022 I started setting myself a new challenge every month, always for a few weeks and always something that hurts a little. First it was cigarettes, then coffee, over time harder things too, things that had held me in their grip for years. Along the way I learned something that gives me strength to this day. Even the hardest addictions eventually let go if you just stay at it long enough. After about eighteen months I was free of almost everything that had dragged me down before, and I knew I could pull something like this off if I really wanted to.

But there was this one thing I never got under control in all that time, no matter how often I tried, and of all things it was my own phone. I made it a challenge too, deleted apps, locked it in a drawer and firmly resolved that this was it, and a few days later I was right back where I had started. If you think about it for a moment, it is actually absurd. Here is someone who could ban the hardest substances from his life, and in the end he loses to a small rectangle of glass that fits in any pocket.

I got free of almost everything, but my own phone is the one thing I never beat.

For a long time I believed I was simply too weak at exactly this point. Until I understood that this was never a fair fight to begin with. On one side there is you, with your good intention from this morning. On the other side are the biggest companies in the world, investing billions and paying some of the smartest minds so that you come back again, and again, and again. If even someone who got rid of nicotine and harder things with pure willpower still loses to a feed like that every single time, then it is not about your discipline. It is because this device was deliberately built by the best people in the world so that you lose in the end. That is not a weakness of yours. It was meant to be exactly this way from the start.

So at some point I stopped relying on my will alone, because I had understood that against this device it would never be enough. What really changed something for me in the end was pretty unspectacular. I did not have to win this fight every day in the middle of the pull, just once, beforehand, in a calm moment when I think clearly. Instead of relying on myself in the weak moment, I would rather make the decision earlier, while it still comes easy, and then it holds even when the phone is long back in my hand. Control does not come from pulling yourself together every single day. It comes from setting something up once that carries you, exactly when your will is somewhere else.

After that I tried pretty much every screen time app out there, and a few even helped, at least to a degree. But none of them really fit me, precisely because as someone who works on a screen every day I cannot just put the phone away forever. I needed something made for people who are in the middle of life and still want back the control over their time. And because it did not exist anywhere, we are now building it ourselves. back to ctrl is in the end just a small key and a single tap, but it is a decision that holds, even when your will is weak. It is not against your phone and not against social media. It is for the life that is happening right next to you the whole time, while we are all looking down.

I am simply one of us founders in all this, and we are building it above all because we all stood exactly where you might be standing right now. We would have needed this one thing back then ourselves, and now we have the chance to build it for all of us. If you recognized yourself in even a single sentence of this, then you are exactly right here, and I would love to have you with us.