Spark & Anvil Privacy
A calm tidy teenager's desk by a window at dusk, a closed blank notebook with a pencil, a small wind-up desk clock, a potted plant and a folded blanket on the chair, quiet and unhurried

📱

PhoneDojo

Your phone was designed by people whose job is to keep you on it. Redesign it back.

🧭 Start the attention audit →

Three rules for a phone that works for you

  • 🔕 Calm. Cut the interruptions. Most pings aren’t from people — they’re built to bring you back.
  • ⏱️ Minutes. Make time visible and chosen. A feed has no bottom and no clock, so time slips.
  • 🧱 Wall. Put a boundary between you and the feed — a room, a screen, an hour.

Ten questions, answered from memory. PhoneDojo never reads your screen-time data, never tracks you, and nothing leaves this device. There is no score and no diagnosis — just an honest look, a short plan, and a one-week card you can print. At the end of the week, keep what helped.

The levers, by name

  • Hushlock (the Calm lever) turns off every ping that isn’t a real person.
  • Clockface (the Minutes lever) sets a timer before a feed opens, and asks you to guess your phone time before you check.
  • Doorframe (the Wall lever) charges the phone outside your room and moves the feeds off your first screen.
  • Ownwell (mentor) owns the phone — not the other way round. Ownwell never lectures; it asks what you noticed.

PhoneDojo is text-forward (ages 15–18). See the pull itself in SignalForge; PhoneDojo is the counter-move.

A real case · you decide

Dev’s week

Dev — a 16-year-old whose phone lit up 140 times yesterday

The idea in play: redesigning a phone around what you want from it, not what it wants from you.

Dev guessed the phone buzzed maybe thirty times yesterday. The real number was 140 — and most of them weren’t people.

Dev doesn’t want to quit the phone. The group chat is where the friends are, and the maps app gets Dev to work.

But mornings start in the feed, homework takes twice as long, and Dev falls asleep with the screen still on.

Dev picks ONE lever to try for a week. Which?

A friend says, “just delete everything, it’s easier.” What does Dev do?

Do my own audit →

A real case · you decide

Hushlock and Doorframe at bedtime

Hushlock & Doorframe — the Calm lever, helping Sam, 15, whose group chat keeps buzzing after eleven

The idea in play: a quiet phone and a boundary do different jobs: one stops the pull, the other moves where it can reach you.

Sam wants to stop checking at night. The trouble is that the buzzing is real people: the group chat wakes up at eleven.

Hushlock turns off every ping that is not a person. Here every ping is a person, so muting means muting friends.

Doorframe draws a line in space or time instead: a room the phone does not enter, or an hour it stops at.

What does Sam try this week?

Do my own audit →

A real case · you decide

Clockface and Ownwell and the five minutes

Clockface & Ownwell — the Minutes lever, with Ari, 16, who opens a video app "for five minutes" before homework

The idea in play: time you have guessed and chosen feels different from time that just happened.

Ari opens a video app before homework, for five minutes. When Ari looks up, it is fifty minutes later.

Clockface makes time visible: a guess before you open the app, a timer before a feed.

Ownwell never lectures. It asks one question afterwards: what did you notice?

What does Ari change tomorrow?

Do my own audit →