Over the course of a day, Americans spend six hours and 40 minutes on average looking at a screen, with the average person spending two hours and 40 minutes on social media alone.
“It starts with a message from your friend or checking your email, and then you slide into TikTok, and it's like 30 minutes gone out of your day, eventually, without even realizing,” Prafull Sharma, a 2023 University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and co-founder of Spool, told The Daily Cardinal. “I built [Spool] as a way to fight back against that and reclaim my focus.”
Spool, a screen time blocking app, has helped more than 2,600 users reel in their scrolling habits and put down their phones since its launch in November 2025, Sharma said. The method: requiring users to voice their excuses out loud before being allowed access to a blocked app.
If a user wants to access an app that they’ve blocked, they must give a five-second spoken or written excuse as to why they want access to the deemed digital distraction. Spool records and categorizes each excuse, providing AI insights and breakdowns of triggers to help users better understand their patterns.
Sharma said the app’s methodology is rooted in a psychological concept called affect labeling — the act of putting a habit or urge into words by simply verbalizing why you want to do something.
Affect labeling was originally tested with cigarette smokers trying to quit in a 2007 research study. When the smokers were asked to describe what they wanted from another cigarette, the researchers noted a reduction in the levels of brain activity in the amygdala associated with addiction.
“I think screen time is genuinely an addiction that should and will be recognized by the World Health Organization, just like how gaming addiction recently got recognized,” Sharma said.
According to a 2025 PEW research study, roughly half of Americans aged 18 to 24 reported opening Tiktok daily and 66% reported opening Youtube daily.
“Attention is the new economy everyone’s trying to capitalize on,” Sharma said. “Billions of dollars get poured into this industry every year to hire PhDs, psychiatrists and engineers to make every small experience of these apps all the more addictive, to keep you pulled in.”
Sharma said Spool acts “as a mirror” for how people spend time on their phone.
“By having users describe why they want to scroll, [Spool] verbalizes the silliness of why you're trying to look at Instagram right before you sleep,” Sharma said. “‘Oh, I'm just bored.’ ‘I have nothing better to do right now.’ ‘I want to sleep.’”
The idea for Spool started through Sharma’s journaling practice.
“I used to just record my thoughts like a video diary… I started talking about my addiction to screens, and it helped me undo a little bit of that harmful relationship, just verbalizing my thoughts and understanding,” he said. “I decided to automate it using an app.”
Unlike other apps with similar goals, Spool seeks to fundamentally change a user’s relationship with their phone, Sharma said, adding that “gimmicks” like making a user solve a math problem or do a puzzle before opening an app can quickly become frustrating and lead to users giving up and falling back into the pit of doom-scrolling.
“[Other apps] treat screen time as a discipline issue, not a willpower problem,” Sharma said.
Sharma told the Cardinal, consistency is the key to success in habit forming, career journeys and passion projects. “The most important thing: making a promise to yourself, and keeping it.”
He encouraged other students to continue their pursuits with both heart and determination.
“Your first iteration of something that you make will be crappy, it will be broken, and it won't really work,” he said. “And that's normal, and that's fine… the idea is you build muscle memory and tolerance continuously, showing up for yourself and the people that you're trying to build for, and that teaches you consistency.”
