About
De-Viced is a guided day-to-day program to take back control of our phone use—in a way that actually lasts.
Why I built De-Viced
By Rob Samet, Founder
I was deeply hooked on my phone – a mix of chess and social media.
I tried to manage it in the usual ways. I set limits and blocked apps, then ignored them, reset them or found ways around them. So I went a layer deeper. I read more advice, more blogs, more tips and tricks. Set alarms. Log out. Delete apps. Create friction. Build rules and routines. Sleep with the phone away from the bed.
The advice on the internet is very consistent. And I tried all of it.
"The what-to-do was clear. But I couldn't master the how-to-do-it part. Some of my attempts to change literally lasted minutes."
On paper, I should have been able to crack this. I'd spent most of my career in senior commercial and transformation roles – work built around strategy, decisions, pressure and deadlines. But I was really struggling to make progress with my phone habits.
There was also a lot going on. For around ten months, I spent much of my time in hospital with my daughter, who is now thankfully doing well. It was frightening, intense and emotionally exhausting. It was also often very boring: long waits, repeated routines, and far too much time sitting with nothing useful to do. But my phone use had already been drifting out of control before the hospital. Hospital life didn't cause it – it just intensified it.
"Was this a discipline problem? A personality problem? Was it just me — or was the advice missing something?"
As my daughter began a long road to recovery, something in me changed too. We still had months in hospital ahead of us, but it was time to fix what had happened to my attention and my sense of control. I needed a new plan.
I started to wonder whether scientists had already figured this out, but the rest of us hadn't got the memo yet. So I redirected the energy I'd been pouring into chess and started reading the academic research on Problematic Smartphone Use – paper after paper.
What became clear was that mainstream advice and tools don't reflect the full science. Our culture keeps bringing us back to the same question: "How can I cut my screen time?"
But the more I read, the less that felt like the right starting point.
The better question seemed to be:
"How can I rebuild control?"
That question became the beginning of the De-Viced approach.
I kept reading, started collaborating with Dr Maèva Flayelle, a behavioral addiction scientist, and eventually built the program to test whether rebuilding control might work better in the long term than jumping straight to cutting screen time.
Chess is fun. But this felt like a better use of my time.
Leadership
Behavioral science,
built by people who've lived the problem.
Founder
Behavioral Addiction Scientist
De-Viced is operated by Kaiju Sàrl, a Swiss-based company.
