Transcripts
1. Introduction: Did you know that nearly
half of Americans spend 5-6 h per day on
their smartphones. And at the average
American checks their phone 96 times per day. Pretty crazy right? Now, I'm sure some
of those people are using their phones that
way intentionally, but many of us are not. We wish we were checking
our phones much less often and we wish we were using our time much
more productively. But the lure of new texts,
notifications, social media, apps, and all the
other shiny objects on our phone keeps
sucking us backend. That's you don't feel too
bad. It's not your fault. The companies that
make our phones and design those social
media apps are spending literally billions of
dollars to keep us using those for as many hours
per day as possible. But there's something
you can do about it. In this course, you'll
learn why so many of the default settings on your iPhone are stacking
the deck against you, making it almost impossible
for you to win the battle, to stay in control of
how you use your phone. And through a few
simple lessons, I'll teach you how
to declutter and optimize your iPhone
for productivity. I've structured this course
to be short and sweet with concise explanations of
exactly which settings you should change on your phone. And I'm also sprinkling in some explanations of why
these strategies work. We'll focus on three
key foundational areas. Notifications, Do Not Disturb and
de-cluttering your home screen. Why did I create this course? Well, first, I've
always loved exploring the ways that technology
can improve our lives. But I found myself becoming a compulsive user of my phone, spending way more time
on it than I wish I was. And over the years, I've read thousands of pages of productivity and digital
minimalism books and articles. And I've taken a lot of time trying different
strategies to figure out how I can optimize my phone use and be
more productive. I want to share some of the
most powerful things I've learned in this course is my
first step to do just that. This course will hopefully
be helpful for anyone who wants to be more productive in the way that they
use their phone. It's especially for
those of us that struggle to control
our phone use. You want to be better with
your time on your phone. But the addictive qualities are just getting
the better of you. If any of that
sounds like you just grab your iPhone and
let's get started.
2. Class Project: Part 1: The project for this
class is simple. Part one is to take a screenshot of your
iPhones home screen. And part two will
be the taken after screenshot once you've
finished the course. And then upload both photos to the class page so
that we can all see the changes that you've
made right now is the perfect time to take
that first screenshot. But go ahead and
grab your iPhone and navigate to the home screen, which if you didn't know, is the first screen
that you'll see once you unlock your
iPhone, by the way, please do not make
any changes or tidy anything up on your
home screen before taking this first screenshot that
would completely defeat the purpose of this whole
before and after comparison. If you have an
iPhone with face ID, you can take a
screenshot by hitting the side button and the volume up button
at the same time, for older iPhones with Touch ID, you can either hit
the home button and the side button
at the same time. The Home button in the top
button at the same time. One other thing I
wanted to mention is that as I'm filming this, I'm running the latest
software on my iPhone, which as of now is iOS 6.2. If your iPhone is running
an older version of iOS, you might want to update
before you start this course. You can do that by going to settings general
software update. If you happen to be running
a newer version of iOS, that's completely fine because most things will probably
be just about the same. And so you can easily take this course even if you're
running a newer version. With all that said,
let's go ahead and jump into the first real lesson.
3. Declutter Your Notifications: It's time to declutter
your notifications. Hopefully, you already
know that multitasking is a terrible way to
try to be productive. If you're at work, it's
usually best if you have 30 min or an hour or even more to focus on your bigger and
more complex tasks if you want to get
them done efficiently. And it's really
the same thing if you're hanging out
with friends or family and you want to be
present and have quality time. Have you ever had
that moment where you're talking to someone, but then they pull
out their phone and start ignoring you
feels terrible. One of the reasons that this
happens because by default, your phone notifies you of almost anything
and everything. But here's what's true. 99% of those notifications
really don't matter. You don't really need to know that thing that
it's telling you, or at least you don't need
to know it right away. What we wanna do
here is eliminate almost all of the notifications
that we're getting. Go ahead and grab
your iPhone and let's change some settings. I'm gonna move through
these pretty quickly. So if you need to pause
the video at any point to catch up with changing the
settings on your own phone. Go ahead and do that. So
first I'm going to head into the Settings app and then I'm
gonna go to Notifications. The first little tweak I'm
going to make is to change the notifications from
displaying as a list to staff. And then I'm going to
head into show previews. A preview is what you see
when there's notification, either as a banner on the top of your phone or on your
lock screen like this, it shows you what the
notification is about. If you have this set to never than your
notifications will look like this where it doesn't tell you who sent you a Venmo request, what your screen time was, or what type of notification
you're getting from wallet. What I suggest is you change
this to win unlocked. That way, if your iPhone senses your face is in
front of the screen, or if you actually have your iPhone open and
you're using it, it will show you the preview. But if someone else
picks up your phone, they won't be able to see what that notification is about. Let's swipe back. And then we're going to
head into screen-sharing. We're going to turn this off because if we're ever sharing our screen through FaceTime
or something else, we don't want notifications
popping up, swipe back. And then under Siri and
announced notifications. We're going to turn this
off because we don't want Siri interrupting
us to tell us what notifications
are coming in if we're listening
to music or podcasts or hands-free for any
other reasons why it back then under
Siri Suggestions, We're also going to
toggle this off. That way Siri isn't
suggesting apps that Siri things we should be
using at any given moment. And then swipe back. Okay, now we're getting
to the meat of it. Under notification
style, you'll see a list of every
app on your phone. And for most of
these by default, notifications are probably on. We're going to leave
some of these on. But to make things simpler, it's actually best if you
turn them all off first and then we'll selectively go
back and turn them back on. So what I'm gonna
do is I'm going to open the first one here, which for me is AirBnB. And I'm going to turn
notifications off, swipe back, go
into the next app, turn it off, and then
rinse and repeat this until I get through
every app on my phone. Now, this is a little annoying
and it takes some time, but it's really best if you
turn them all off first. And then in the next video we'll selectively choose which
ones to turn back on. So feel free to pause here
as you turn all these off. And then in the next video, we'll turn some back on. See you then.
4. Optimize Your Notifications: Alright, now that you've
finished de-cluttering your notifications by
turning them all off. It's time to optimize
by selectively turning notifications
back on for several apps. So you should still be in
the notification section of settings and be looking at the list of all the
apps you have there. And it should all say off. So what we'll do is we'll go one-by-one and figure out which ones you want
to turn back on. Now I suggest you be careful
and not go too crazy with turning them back
on because that defeats the whole purpose
of this exercise. What you wanna do is
have somewhere around one-in-five apps
with notifications on if you can go less than that. Great. As an example, I'll start with Airbnb. Now for me, I think it would be good to have
notifications on, because if I'm checking into an Airbnb and the host
is going to message me. I would want to see
that notification. Bell turn that on. And you see for Airbnb, there's a link down here at the bottom where I
can go straight into the Airbnb app and look at the specific notification
preferences I have in there. So you should do this for every app that you
turn notifications on to make sure that they're not spamming you with
marketing messages, e.g. inspiration and offers. I've changed this
so that there are no email push, or
SMS notifications. On the other hand, travel
regulations I've left on. So if I'm traveling
to some city or country and they have a new regulation I should know about. I would want to know about that. Now that we've finished
looking at Airbnb, going to swipe back. And the next one here
is Alaska Airlines. That's another one I would
want to have on because if I'm taking a flight on Alaska
and they change my gate, that's something I would
want to know about. Swipe back. Okay. I have a hiking app. I don't need any
notifications for that. Amazon. Certainly I don't
want them notifying me and having me open the
app and buy more things. I wasn't planning on
Alexa, I can have off. So most of these I can have off. But if I skip ahead, there's other things
like message is one that I would want to have on so that I can get some
text messages. Do you really have to just
think through for you which ones are important to
be notified about. So you really only want to
turn it on if it's important for you to learn about it
within several minutes, are several hours or within the day that something happens. So feel free to pause here
as you finish going through your list and then I'll see
you in the next lesson.
5. Declutter & Optimize Using Do Not Disturb: Now it's time to declutter and optimize using
Do Not Disturb. Now in the previous lesson, we blocked most apps from being able to send
notifications at all. But in this section, we'll talk about
what happens when a notification does get sent. So I'll go ahead and grab
your iPhone and let's head to settings and then focus. Once you're in focus, tap on do not disturb. And we want to turn this on
by default, do not disturb. We'll make sure that
if any app sends a notification that your phone won't vibrate or make a sound. That's usually best because even if we want to
see a notification, you usually don't want
to see it immediately. It's fine to see it a few hours later or
a few minutes later, really whenever we pick up
our phone and check it. But for some people or apps, you may want to see
that notification, right when it comes. E.g. I'm going to tap on people and I'm going
to have it allowed notifications from
and then I'm going to hit Add People and search for my wife and then
tap her name and hit done. That way. If my wife texts me, my phone will vibrate or make a noise and I can
respond to her quickly. The second thing I'll change
here is allow calls from and if you have that set
to a loud people only, favorites or contacts only, I'd recommend you should
probably change it to everybody. This means that no
matter who calls me, my phone would vibrate
or make a noise. I like that because if the
doctor's office is calling me, I probably don't have
them in my favorites or saved as an allowed person or
even in my contacts at all. But I still want my phone
to ring essentially. Now, if you're
really worried about getting those spam
calls or robocalls, then you may want to change
this to contacts only or one of these other
options to make sure that those calls don't ring. Okay, Now let's go
ahead and swipe back and we'll tap on apps. Now you want to hit
allow notifications from and then you can hit Add Apps to list any app that you would like to be able
to notify you immediately. Now for me, There's a
few in here that are related to logging in
to different services. E.g. the authenticator app, in the Duo app, or both for multi-factor
authentication, where I'm trying to
log into a website and they send me a push
notification so that I can prove it and then be able to login and also have FaceTime, Google Maps and outlook. For FaceTime, I want
to be able to get FaceTime calls and have my phone ring
through Google Maps. If I'm about to make a turn, I want the GPS to be able to send me a notification
for Outlook. That's if I have anything
scheduled on my calendar, I want to be able to get
a notification for that. I do want to turn time-sensitive
notifications to off. If that was on, I
would toggle it off. That's sort of a
sneaky way for apps to end up sending you notifications that you
weren't expecting. So let's keep that off. Then under Options, there's
a few settings here. We do want to show silence notifications
on the lock screen. So if that's off,
toggle that on. And then for the second too, dim lock screen and hide
notification badges. Let's turn those off. Okay, swiping back. We'll skip the
customized screens and then go to set a schedule. Under schedule, we wanna make
sure this is toggled on. And then I have it
set from 05:00 A.M. to 05:00 A.M. and I
have everyday selected. What this means is do not
disturb on my iPhone will be on all the time since it's
set from 05:00 A.M. to 05:00 A.M. for every
weekday and weekends. And if for any reason
I ever toggled, Do Not Disturb off
either on purpose or accidentally would
automatically turn back on at 05:00
A.M. the next day. Then we'll go ahead
and swipe back. And then the last
thing I'm gonna do is under the focus filters, I'm going to hit out of filter. I'm going to turn on
Appearance set to dark and hit Add this way. By default, my phone will
always be in dark mode, which is what I prefer. And then I'm going
to swipe back. There's another setting
here called Focus status. If I tap on this, you want to make sure you
have this toggled off. If you're like me and
you don't want people to know whether or not you
have to not disturb on. If you toggle this
on and when you send someone a text and they
go to text you back, we'll show them if you
have do not disturb on and it will tell
them that you're not getting a notification for me. I don't like people
to know how I'm using my phone or what the
settings on my phone are. So I like to toggle that off. I'm going to swipe back and then swipe back one more time. And now we are done
with Do Not Disturb. Now that Do Not Disturb
is active on your phone. Most notifications, again, will not result in a
vibration or a sound. Only those select people and apps that you've allowed
to break through will. Now there's one last thing which is on this side of your phone. You have this little
toggle for silent mode. Now for me, I like to have
silent mode on all the time. So I'm going to slide this so that I can see the orange color. And on my phone it says
silent mode is on. That means that for any of those notifications that
are breaking through, like my wife texting
me or I'm getting a phone call or one of those
other apps is notifying me. I'm just going to get a
vibration, not a noise. And that's what I prefer
because usually I can hear my phone vibrating if it's nearby
or feel it in my pocket. And so I don't really
need the noise. So just consider if
you want to keep your phone in silent mode
all the time as well. Alright, Onto the next lesson.
6. Declutter Your Home Screen: Alright, it's time to
declutter your home screen. I'm guessing you probably
fall into one of two camps. Either you haven't organized
your apps and so you have multiple pages of apps
and no particular order. Or perhaps you've
consolidated your apps into one or two screens and
categorize them using folders. Either of those could
be okay options, but I think there's a
third option that's really much better for setting
you up for productivity. Now when I look at
the home screen that I have set up now, there's a bunch of apps on here, and so it's really easy
for me to get distracted. Perhaps I opened my phone
to respond to a text. But then when I see
this home screen, that Wall Street Journal
might catch my eye. I open the app up and
then before I know it, I've been reading news
for 30 min or an hour. So this is not productive
and it's not effective. So what I recommend is to start, Let's go into settings
and then scroll down and go to home screen. Once we're there, Let's
select the option so that newly downloaded apps are
added to the app library only. So they won't show up
on your home screen unless you
specifically add them. Then let's uncheck both of these toggles
so that we're not seeing extra
notification badges and that the search bar doesn't
show up on the home screen. Then we'll go back
to the home screen. And then one by one, we should remove
each of these apps. You can do this by tapping on any app and holding
and then hitting the minus bar and then hitting removed from
the home screen. Now this is similar to what
we did with notifications, will remove everything
and then we'll come back later and selectively
add things back. I also want to
note that if I hit this minus bar and
hit delete an app, that will permanently delete
the app from the phone. Whereas if I hit removed
from home screen, It's still on the phone, but you can only get
to it if you search for it or if you use
the app library, which we'll talk about
in a few minutes. So what we should do is continue and remove each app one-by-one. You don't want to just remove the apps that are on the
upper portion of the screen. You should also
remove the apps that are in your doc down below. I'll go ahead and stop there. If you want, you can
pause the video and continue with removing
all of these apps. And then in the next video will optimize by selectively
adding some back.
7. Optimize Your Home Screen: Alright, now that
you've finished de-cluttering your home screen, it's time to move on to the optimized step where we add back some of the
most essential apps. Now if you've done the
previous step correctly, your home screen should
look like this with no apps visible at
all on any page. But we'll wanna do next is
swipe over to the app library. This is where your
phone is showing you every app that you
have on your phone. And they're
categorized according to Apple's app categories. Now we'll skip the
first two boxes, suggestions and recently added, but for every other
box will open it up by tapping in the lower right
corner of the box, e.g. in social, I'll tap in the lower right corner
to open that up. And then we'll look at the apps and think through one-by-one. If it's an essential app that we want to have
on our home screen. And I think there's really two categories of essential apps. First, there are items that
are really useful utilities. And for me, I would include
messaging in that category. For messages I can tap and hold and then hit add
to the home screen. And then the second
category is things that I want to encourage
myself to use more of. So for me, if I scroll
down here and the app library to education,
there's the musician. I'm trying to learn guitar. And so for me, taking
more guitar lessons, using musician is something
I'd like to do more of. And so I'll tap on that and then add that
to my home screen. Now, I prefer personally
to have things that are more utilities down in my taskbar so I can
get to them often. And then what I recommend is
that you limit the apps on your home screen to
either four or eight, or maybe 12 apps at the most. And that will give you 12
or three full rows of apps, but still leave a lot of blank real estate in the
middle of your screen. The advantage of that
is that when you open your phone and are looking
at the home screen, if there's an app
that you're trying to encourage yourself to use, it will be prominently
on display and not lost in the mix of a bunch
of other apps on there. Alright, so I'll let you
pause the video and then if you want to finish adding
apps to your home screen, I'll catch up with
you in a few minutes.
8. Class Project: Part 2: Now that you've
declared an optimized your phone using notifications, Do Not Disturb and cleaning
up your home screen. It's time to get back
to the class project. And now what you wanna do is
take your after screenshot, you go ahead and head to your
home screen that you just finished organizing
and take a screenshot. Once you have that, you can
upload it to the class page. You'll have to have
the Skillshare app downloaded on your
phone to do this. So if you don't
have it downloaded, you can go ahead and do that. Now, once you have the app open, you can navigate to the page for this class and select
the project section. From there, you can
add a new project. This may redirect you
to your web browser, so you may have to
sign in a second time. There's two different
places to include photos. One is the cover photo
for your project. I recommend you just use your before screenshot
for the cover photo. But there's a second section. It says add more content. If you find that add
more content section, you can add multiple
photos there. So that's where you'll want
to add your before and after photos if you want to
add any comments as well, describing what changes
you made and how you're liking your new
setup on your phone. Feel free to do that too. I'm really excited to see
what you guys upload. Alright, Seeing the next video.
9. Conclusion: Well, congratulations
on completing the course by following
along step-by-step, you've optimized your
notification settings, do not disturb and you've
cleaned up your home screen. All of this is optimizing
your iPhone for productivity. I hope that you'll see
great results at work, at school or in
your personal life. I did want to leave
you with a final note, which is that this course
is barely scratching the surface in terms of what's capable of being
optimized in your iPhone, I do plan to release a more detailed and
comprehensive course at some point in the future. Plus I have other tips
and tricks I like to share on tech and productivity. If you're interested
in any of that, please feel free to subscribe
to my e-mail newsletter, which is linked to below. Thanks again for
taking this course. And I wish you a productive day.
Justin Cook, Finance & Productivity Geek
