A year ago I quit my developer job to build my own products, and I've been living on savings that ran out a couple of months ago. I love this but there's a "but."

Since then I've been working from morning to night. Always on my phone. Running several projects in parallel, endlessly reading about development and marketing, talking through every step with AI — from idea to release. And when I'm not on my phone or laptop, I'm thinking about features and growth. Of course, the lack of money and the responsibility to the people close to me add a pressure .

But there's a problem. For a while now I've felt that I'm not as productive, I get tired faster, I forget things quickly if I don't write them down right away. And all of it comes from this stream I just described.

To switch off and rest somehow, I play games. It's probably the only way to break this endless stream of thoughts. But even while playing, I open Claude to ask something or drop in a task. Same when I'm cooking, walking the dog, meeting friends — I always need to be doing a few things at once, otherwise it doesn't work.

I feel addicted — to my phone, to work. And it's really hard for me to stop. At night I dream about working. This has been a problem for a long time: I'm not as productive as I used to be. It's hard to focus on one task, my thoughts get tangled, I forget what I need to do, or the idea I just had.

So I decided to build an app called Nothing. To give myself space away from this stream of thoughts. To have a short window to reset. To just stop.

The idea is simple. You set how long you want to do nothing. To start the timer, you put your phone face down — and the moment you pick it up, the timer stops.

It sounds simple, but right now it's a lifesaver. When I feel like I'm on the edge, I just go to a quiet place I like, start the timer, put my phone face down, and try not to think about everything I think about every day. I try to notice the things around me. And it saves me. It's like a fresh shower in the middle of the day — which is literally true, because the shower had become the only place without my phone.

I'd tried different blockers. But they're all the same — solve a task, complete an action. Or they just block the phone. It felt like punishment, like a restriction. I'm sick of all those streaks: "great job, one more day," "come on, two weeks." I wanted free space away from all of that — to be with myself, and not because I have to finish a week without missing a day.

There's another feature to remind you to take a break: apps get blocked during the day. To unlock them, you just have to do nothing. And something strange happened — in the morning, when unlocking my phone means simply doing nothing, I don't even want to pick it up anymore. Because it's just five minutes of sitting and noticing what's around me.

This has given me so much that it's hard to put into words. Such a simple thing to do — and yet it's exactly what's missing right now.

What I've noticed:

A good solution often comes to me after a session.
I can physically feel my brain unloading during that time.
During a session, I look at the world around me and start to feel a bit like a child again—watching the grass or a bird flying by.
My stream of thoughts has become more manageable.

And a lot more.

I hope you'll find this app useful too. Right now it helps me every single day