@drawohara
published on: 2015-01-16

People love gadgets and gimmicks, especially those that promise to help them get more shit done. Maybe no single thing ever invented has more potential than the smartphone to liberate people from having fill their brains up with the massive amounts of minutiae trying to move the needle requires. The magic of having a CPU, camera, beautiful screen, GPS unit, crazy good navigation, the internet, all of wikipedia, and even an actual phone in your pocket is truly something straight out of The Jetsons.

Of course, like all tools, it is the user that decides what to do with it’s potential and the reality is, for 99% of people the phone has become an agent of distraction, entertainment, relationship destruction and generally “Not Getting Shit Done” (TM).

Following is my own personal list of techniques for using my phone as a tool instead of a toy:

1) Clean that thing up!

Move all the Apps you don’t use out of the way, and put ‘first things first’ on your home screen. Here is a shot of my Android phone’s desktop:

android.png

And here’s my iPhone:

iPhone.png

No ‘Angry Birds’, no iTunes, just the stuff I Need.

2) First Things First

The apps I do choose to keep handy are organized with a very deliberate goal: to GSD (Get Shit Done).

I have all the essential, but minimal, ingredients of my work life striped across the top, organized from ‘most urgent, and important’ to ‘important, but not urgent’.

A Brief explanation of the 4 apps up top:

And the 3 down low:

3) Shut up everyone!

My loathing of bleeping beeping notifications is well documented, but the phone is my least favorite notifier. I absolutely do not need a beep-y digital device interrupting my concentration like some kind of remote control anyone in the world with a a host of stupid apps can activate.

I have notifications for all apps turned 100% off. My phone makes no noises, no beeps, it has zero badges showing piles of unread stuff. None of that.

You may be wondering how people get ahold of me who really need to. That’s actually pretty easy: I’ve installed a silent ring tone as the default for my phone. This truly wonderful as my phone never rings ;-) However, I have an audible ring tone assigned to three people:

This let’s me never need to mute my phone and, with all sincerity, interrupt any meeting when my phone rings with a polite “I’m sorry, but I really need to get this” before stepping out and taking what I already know to be an important call.

4) Backup nothing

Although I used to be an avid film photographer I never got into any form of digital photography; the idea that I could fill up a drive with 10,000 photos without caring about the quality or cost was bad enough, but needing to plug the damn thing in was an absolute buzz-kill. Don’t we have technology for that sort of thing?

Some people are religious about backing up their phones but that is something that needs actually doing, and I’m all about less doing of things. My approach is simple:

photos.png

5) Write, but do not read

I’m sure some of you are doubting my sincerity here since I do, in fact, post quite a bit of stuff to Twitter and Facebook but here is my secret: I use email to post everything. I do this via our family tumblr and Tumblr’s excellent ability to accept posts, including photo posts, via email and relay them to both Twitter and Facebook, and a variety of other methods that let me snap a photo, open up mail, type something quick, hit send, and forget about it. This has the added advantage that email always works, even when I’m offline.

So, there you have it. 5 ways to make owning a smartphone less stupid or, at least, more conductive to moving your life forward.