13 Ways To Make Your iPhone Work For You, Not Against You
The iPhone is no doubt an incredible tool, but out of the box it offers us two paths to take: one that can enhance our lives and become a great tool for productivity, connectivity, and education or a second path that can become the greatest distraction of our lives.
However, if you are willing to spend a little time customizing the iPhone to work for you, not against you, your life will be much better for it.
With an optimally configured phone, you’ll be more focused, have fewer distractions, and you’ll be much more productive. With the right configuration, it will be easier to enjoy the true pleasures in life like spending time with friends and family.
If you’re ready to take back control of your time, your attention, and your life, start with your phone. Here are 13 ways to help make your phone work for you:
1. Turn off nearly all notifications
Your iPhone is set up to be a pesky, annoying, yappy little dog. Left untouched it barks at you all day desperately seeking your attention.
The simplest and easiest way to regain control is to turn off nearly all notifications on your phone. In fact, do this now or else you’ll get a notification as you read this and won’t finish the rest of this article.
There are 2 key reasons to turn notifications off:
- You want to control your experience as much as possible with your phone. It is a tool that should be chosen by you when, where, and how to use. Notifications undermine your ability to control this tool and are uncontrolled distractions that will constantly veer you off course, distracting you from what you intend to do.
- Distractions have a long lingering effect. Once you get distracted from a specific task, research shows that it can take up to 23 minutes to get back on track to the original task at hand. That’s a lot of wasted time.
Here’s how you can turn off your notifications:
- Go to the Settings App > Notifications.
Go app by app turning nonessential app notifications off.
Additionally, it’s best to always keep your phone on vibrate mode. The vibrate mode is plenty loud enough to hear without a ringtone, not to mention nobody wants to hear your phone play Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” every time you get a call.
Most of your apps should look like this when you are done, with notifications off.
Of course, there are some notifications you do still want and need. Here are notifications you should leave on:
- Calendar apps — so you don’t miss appointments
- Phone calls or text messages
- Maps so you get notifications when you’re going somewhere
- Delivery and travel apps — you don’t want to miss a delivery of food from Grubhub or miss your Lyft or Uber ride. It’s also good to leave on your airline apps like Delta airlines so you know when you’re flight is leaving, delayed, boarding, etc.
2. Turn off your email on weekends
Technology has been an incredible tool in connecting the world and making it vastly smaller than ever before but there’s a huge downside to this connectivity.
Many of us are under the false impression that since we have email and work at our fingertips then it is our responsibility to be responsive at all times and days. There’s a huge cost to this philosophy, however.
In order to perform your best, you need to counter intense work with intense recovery.
Look at high performing athletes; their hardest, most strenuous workouts that unlock their best performances are always followed by periods of great rest. Their bodies have to recover in order to heal and strengthen itself for even greater performance.
Your mind and body in the office environment are no different. If you want to be highly productive and effective at work during the week, you must fully recover on the weekend. Detach and relax.
This is probably no surprise to you, but research has found that only 14% of emails are considered critical to work. That’s a huge amount of unimportant, wasteful, and useless emails. It also requires an enormous amount of time to manage these emails and decide which emails to read or delete.
To help you fully recover on the weekend and keep the temptation of work out of sight, turn your email off on your phone during the weekend.
If something really is urgent at work, somebody won’t email you, they’ll call you or text you. Otherwise, if you leave your email on, you’re going to see your growing inbox and feel compelled to think about work when you should be spending time focused on things that help you recuperate like spending time with family, friends, exercise, and rest.
When it comes time to leave the office on Friday, do yourself a favor and switch off your work emails.
- Settings > Passwords & Accounts > Select your work email account > Turn off Mail
3. Delete old and unused apps — Spring cleaning for your phone
A couple times a year I go through my closet and clean it out. My rule is, if I haven’t worn something in 6 months or more, I get rid of it. Your phone should be no different.
Finding an app on some people’s phones can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. They have hundreds of useless apps stored all over the place. The irrational behavior of hoarding doesn’t just apply to our houses and closets, we do the same thing with our phones. We hold on to apps that we’ve used one time more than a year ago on the off chance that we might use it again sometime soon.
Do yourself a favor, delete those old apps you don’t use or rarely use.
You’ll make life much easier for yourself by making it easier to find what you actually need on your phone.
If you end up really needing an app that you deleted later, it will always be there in the App store for you to download again.
4. Move the apps that are best for you to the front
How you determine which apps are good or bad is up to you, but if you wish to spend more time using the apps that help you live better, be healthier, and help you grow and learn, prioritize those apps to the front page of your phone.
On my phone, I limit the front screen to the following categories, commonly used apps like Google maps, travel, the calculator, and the weather, learning apps like podcasts and Audible, and then relaxation and concentration apps like Headspace and Spotify.
Those are the apps I use and wish to use more than any other. Each one ideally helps me be healthier, more intelligent, and more focused rather than wasting large amounts of my time. Keeping these apps on my front page also acts as a subtle reminder to use those apps rather than other wasteful apps.
5. Move the apps that are the worst for you to the back
Conversely, there are apps that I wish to use less, apps like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. For social media apps that have the potential to be huge distractions, I move those to the last page on my phone. That way, if I am inclined to go and visit them, I have to scroll through four pages before I get there.
Often, the fraction of a second it takes to scroll to the last page is just long enough to make me realize what I’m doing and reorients me to focus on the task at hand instead of mindlessly scrolling through apps.
6. Delete and reinstall addicting apps daily
Even better than moving addicting apps to the last page, delete them and reinstall them each day.
This is a huge time saver.
Think about the most wasteful and distracting app you have on your phone, the one that you most frequently revert to when you are mentally checked out.
You always end up spending more time on these apps than you wish to because they are specifically designed to suck you in. That’s the whole reason all of them are scrollable. There’s no end to it, you can just keep going and going deep into the black hole of social media.
For me it’s Instagram. Several times a day I will open my phone and out of pure habit I will scroll over to Instagram and check out what’s happening. Worse yet, when I’m stuck in a meeting or spending time with friends and family I find myself without even realizing it checking Instagram…how rude is that?! Nothing looks worse or says you don’t care more than looking at your phone.
With the help of an app tracker, I found that I spend on average 6 minutes each day on Instagram. That equates to 2,190 minutes in a year or roughly a day and a half spent on Instagram! There are plenty other things I could and should be doing with my life with an extra day and a half.
That being said, it’s still fun and nice to every once in a while mentally check out and see what your friends are up to.
The best and most efficient way to use apps that have the potential to distract you the greatest is to delete them after each use and to only reinstall them once a day.
When you want to check Instagram, or Facebook, or the app of your choice, install it again the next day.
You can’t waste time on things that you don’t have.
This one simple technique will save you hours of your life each year. Deleting and installing an app once per day is the greatest forcing function possible. It’s the same thing as if you are on a diet. If you want to eliminate junk food from your diet, it’s a heck of a lot easier when your pantry isn’t full of potato chips, salty snacks, and sugary sweets.
If you construct the right environment, you’re much more likely to stay on track.
7. Disable app review requests
Picture this, you open your phone to do something important for work and a message pops up with a prompt to rate an app. You decline the message but when you go back you have completely forgotten why you opened your phone in the first place.
This is a costly interruption you want to avoid. Go and turn off all app review requests.
- Settings > Apple ID> iTunes & App Store > In-App Ratings & Reviews
8. Set a night shift schedule
Our phones and devices are little blue light producing machines which can be pretty terrible for our sleep and circadian rhythms.
A recent study from Harvard found the negative effects of blue light emitted from devices include:
- Suppressed secretion of melatonin (a hormone that influences circadian rhythm and makes you feel tired)
- Disrupted circadian rhythms
- Lack of sleep or trouble trying to fall asleep
- Restless sleep
To help combat blue light on your phone, set a night shift schedule.
The night shift on your phone when turned on gives your screen a slightly orange tint effectively reducing blue light. It’s best to not use your phone 1–2 hours prior to going to bed, but if you must be on your phone at night, definitely set a night shift schedule.
- Settings > Display & Brightness > Night Shift
9. Turn on do not disturb
For most of us, 99% of our calls and texts are not urgent or overly important.
Turning on your do not disturb and scheduling do not disturb periods is great for limiting distractions for focused work and a must for nighttime to get better sleep.
The worst thing you could do at night for sleep is to have your phone right next to you on your nightstand with alerts on. Anytime you get a text, call, alert, or ping whether you realize it or not your sleep cycle gets disrupted leading to restless sleep.
Having the do not disturb on is much less harsh than you may think. If you still need to get calls from important people like your family you can add them to your Favorites list.
- Settings > Do Not Disturb
- Allow calls from your favorites. This allows anybody you have added to your favorite list to reach you in case of an emergency even if your phone is silenced.
- Repeated Calls. In an emergency where somebody outside your favorites list calls you twice within three minutes the phone call will go through.
10. Turn off ad tracking
To minimize pesky ads sucking you into an unintended search for the cutest cat on earth, turn off ad tracking. You’ll still get ads on your apps but they will be less targeted to you based on your past viewing habits making ads less likely to grab your attention.
Simple yet very effective.
- Settings > Privacy > Advertising > Turn Limit Ad Tracking on.
11. Go grayscale
As Tristan Harris, former Google employee and founder of the Center for Humane Technology explains, our phones are specifically designed to do one thing: grab our attention.
Everything about our phone is deliberately and specifically designed to make it the most appealing, addicting, and attention-grabbing device possible.
One way our phones make sure to constantly grab our attention is through color. There’s a reason why all these apps on our phones are candy-colored, they get our attention. To combat this and make your phone less appealing, turn your phone to grayscale mode.
As drastic and boring as it sounds, turning your phone to grayscale is a huge help. Your screen becomes less appealing when its colors have been muted, saving you countless hours of phone use each week.
- Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Color Filters
12. Track your time
Until you actually know the impact your phone has on your life and how much time you spend on your phone and where you spend your time, it’s hard to correct your behavior.
More likely than not, you’re underestimating how much time you are on your phone each day. To get an accurate picture of how much time you spend on your phone, you must track it.
There are great apps like Moment that can help provide you with insights into where you spend time and how much time you spend. It can also help you set goals for limiting your daily phone usage.
If you don’t want to get an app like Moment, you can also turn on the Screen Time functionality on your iPhone to help track your time and set limitations.
- Settings > Screen Time > Turn On Screen Time
- Set App limits to limit time spent
13. Turn your phone off and put it in a drawer
This may be hard to believe but humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without smartphones so you shouldn’t go into full panic mode by turning your phone off and putting it away in a drawer.
It’s ok, take a deep breath and remember, life goes on when your phone is not with you.
I dare you to even take a day off from your phone and leave it at home. You never know what the positive side effects are to not having a phone on you like spending a great time with a friend or striking up a conversation with a stranger!
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