How hooked are you?

You don't notice it happening

It's 11:40 at night. You told yourself you'd be asleep by eleven. You picked up your phone to set an alarm, saw one message, then one video, then another, and the alarm still isn't set.

Nobody decides to lose an hour. It goes a minute at a time: a glance while the kettle boils, a scroll at a red light, a check in the middle of a conversation. You feel it later, when the morning starts tired or your kid has to ask you something twice.

That isn't a lack of willpower. The apps on your phone are made by some of the best-paid designers in the world, and keeping you there is their job. When researchers at the London School of Economics filmed people's days, they found that nearly nine times out of ten, nothing had called them to the phone. There was no buzz and no notification; their hand just went there.

We built Latch because we saw this in ourselves. The phone was the first thing we touched in the morning and the last thing at night, and "just five minutes" had stopped meaning five minutes a long time ago. What helped was distance: putting the thing that unlocks the phone somewhere we had to get up and walk to. Those few steps are usually enough to ask, do I actually want this?