We help schools bring presence back.

NIX began with a class assignment. Philip Johnson, who leads the operations management program at Calvin University, has his intro students spend a semester working on a single habit — drawing on the habit-formation research of BJ Fogg and James Clear, and the same continuous-improvement mindset that runs through good manufacturing. Each student picks one habit to build or one to break. Section after section, year after year, the same one kept coming up: screen time, and how hard it had become to put the phone down.

That part isn’t new. What stuck with us was the question buried inside the assignment: if habits are built by making the better choice easier and rewarding it, why is nearly every answer to phones the opposite — ban them, bag them, lock them in a pouch? So we asked a different one. How do you positively incentivize students to put the phone down and actually be with each other, in a world built to keep them scrolling?

We weren’t alone in wondering. The hand-wringing about phones is everywhere, but so is the quiet celebration of the opposite — remember the fan at the golf tournament who went viral for being the one person fully present, no phone in hand, and turned it into an endorsement deal? Augusta National can simply forbid phones; it has that kind of authority. Most schools, most events, most communities don’t.

That’s why we built NIX. We believe people are better off together with the screens set down, and that you get there not by confiscating phones but by giving people a reason worth choosing. So NIX rewards students for showing up phone-free, and gives schools a way to grow real engagement and authentic community out of shared experience. No pouches, no standoff — just enough incentive to break the tether and look up.