Henry Cooper

Yesterday, @pamela_arienti mentioned that her Product Hunt launch ended up somewhere in the middle, and one of the main lessons for her is that the connections gained on the platform are much more important than the placement.

I agree with this statement. Although...

Now I thought I'd ask:

Hey everyone!

Exciting update for all Proximity Lock users

When we launched, the idea was simple:

I left the UK in August 2024 to go traveling with my partner. By the time I got back, I was single and unemployed.
I wasn t in a good place. To cope with the traveling blues and the breakup, I turned to bedrotting. I was lying there, scrolling Instagram and TikTok, jumping from news app to news app, opening dozens of loops but never closing any of them. I was looking for distraction and some sort of comfort, but I couldn t get it on a screen. My phone habits were making me feel worse.
So I set out to better manage my relationship with my device.
And it didn t work. The existing screentime apps like Opal, Brick, and Jomo are very all-or-nothing. There's no middle ground where I felt I could stay informed without getting sucked back in by social media algorithms.
I still wanted to go on YouTube to see what news channels were saying about international politics, but I didn t want to get distracted by all the other recommendations that happened to be there. I still wanted to see what my friends were up to on Instagram, but I didn't want to be enticed by the reels asking me to watch just one more video. I still wanted to check my emails, but I didn t want to lose half an hour to meaningless messages. Software s stickiness made it nearly impossible for me to stay disciplined.
So I set out with a new mission: to make something for myself that would allow me to stay updated without becoming easily distracted.
What I envisioned was a hub that put things in an environment where I had control letting me stay on my home turf instead of cruising through internet neighborhoods filled with booby traps. That way, I could avoid the endless stream of information, the notifications, and the slot machine-like UX.
I ve started building that. Siftly (https://siftly.space/) is part wellness tool, part productivity tool. It s completely customizable and designed to put people back in control of their digital experience. Ironically, my relationship to screens has improved since I started creating the app because I'm coming at it from a creator mindset instead of a consumer mindset. But if Siftly doesn t work out, even if I go on the dole, I ll be doing it without the scroll.