An iPhone Setup for the Productivity Freaks

In case you missed it, I’m a big productivity freak. I’ve been spending the past 23 years iterating around the most efficient setup on my computer, testing every TODO and note taking apps, or trying various ways to track my time and activities to understand how I can save a few minutes each day.

The past weeks, I’ve been working on my iPhone setup.

With an average daily use of 3 hours and 22 minutes, my iPhone is my second most used device, and the one I’m using almost at 100% when not at the office.

It was an interesting, iterative process and I’m now quite happy with what I’ve reached. This post aims at sharing my setup and the reasons behind some choices. Some settings require an iPhone running iOS 12, which is in public beta as I'm writing.

Summary

Background Setup

• Switch your screen to greyscale
• Reduce transparency
• Increase contrast
• Reduce motion

Home Screen Organization

• Dock Apps
• Lifestyle
• Photography
• Cryptocurrencies
• Knowledge
• Information
• Communication

Control Center

• Actionable Shortcuts
• Up Next
• Todoist Today
• Favorite contacts Shortcuts
• My Next Grocery Shopping

Notifications

• Flash, a-ah, Saviour of the Universe
• Urgent / Actionable Notifications
• Notifications I want to get in Lock Mode
• Notifications that can Wait
• “Spammy” Notifications

Siri

• Filter on your Apps that Matter
• Keep your Lock Screen Clean

Photos

iWatch

• Screen Layout
• Notification Settings

Conclusion

Background Setup

After using various fancy wallpapers, I’m back with a plain black home screen. It makes the various applications icons and labels immediately pop to my eyes without disturbing me.

Settings > Wallpaper > Chose a New Wallpaper > Still > Scroll until you find the black one > Tap > Set > Set Home Screen

The Accessibility menu also provides some interesting options to improve your productivity.

Switch your Screen to Greyscale

I’ve written a comprehensive post about switching your screen to greyscale both on iOS and Mac OS. You can easily switch back by clicking 3 times on the start button.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations > Colour Filters > Greyscale

Reduce Transparency

In the late 90’s, having a transparent terminal on Linux was quite popular. The feature was new, all applications did not support it, and was a good showcase of what Linux was able to do in terms of graphics. Most people promptly switched back since a transparent terminal made focusing on your tasks exhausting.

Recent iOS versions come with many transparency feature. It's part of having a cool, modern and fancy smartphone, but with a cost in terms of productivity as transparency reduces focus. Thankfully, you can easily limit the transparency feature.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Transparency

Increase Contrast

The same way reducing transparency helps you focus on what you're doing, increasing contrast improves readability.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Increase Contrast

Reduce Motion

iOS 11 and 12 come with some nice but terribly annoying animations. That's the downside of having more than the computing power of the NASA in 1969 in your pocket. Once again, the accessibility menu comes to your help.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion

Home Screen Organisation

Organizing your apps the right way is a tricky and personal thing. Should I have a single home screen, with multiple folders to store my apps? Should I have multiple screens with all my apps accessible? Should I sort my apps in folders by category, color or alphabetical order? I've tried a few of them, including multiple home screens sharing both apps and folders before switching back to a two screens layout.

The main screen displays the apps I'm using the most, and for which I don't have actionable shortcuts in the Control Center. I keep my number of apps low, after checking my actual apps use, and get rid of the unused ones every 3 months.

I've put the apps I'm using the most in the dock, and ordered the other ones by category, making sure that a category never goes beyond one line. This forced me use a limited set of apps, and review my workflows for the best efficiency.

My categories and apps are:

Dock apps

These are the ones I use the most.

Slack: enterprise messaging solution. Used to have an IRC gateway.

Whatsap: another encrypted messaging system.

Fantastical 2: an advanced calendar application. See my specific setup for this one at the end of the post.

Fantastical 2

Lastpass Authenticator: an application for 2FA authentication. If you're not using one, you should rethink your security.

Lifestyle

Headspace: a meditation app. I've been using it at least once a day for more than a year.

Headspace

Sleep Cycle: a sleep quality tracker, that wakes you up when you're ready. The app provides actionable insights, depending on your habits.

Sleep Cycle

Life Cycle: tracks your habits and how much time you spend daily on your various places and activities.

Life Cycle

Bring!: a great, intuitive shopping list management app.

Bring!

Photography

Photos: Apple built in picture management app.

Instagram: do I need to talk about it?

Snapseed: a great photo editing tool.

Snapseed

Foodie: nice filters for my pastel themed Instagram account.

Foodie

Cryptocurrencies

Bitfinex: crypto trading on Bitfinex exchange. Unfortunately limited to a few pairs on iOS.

Bitfinex

Delta: a crypto portfolio management app. Connects to your favorite exchange API in read only to help you track your investments.

Delta

Coincap: follow your favorite cryptocurrencies market cap.

Coincap

Jaxx: a handy Bitcoin / Ethereum software wallet to store low values in crypto when you don't want to travel with your Ledger Nano S.

Jaxx

Knowledge

Twitter: the official client for iOS. I've been using Tweetbot for years before switching back.

Medium: the best tech stories.

Medium

Reddit: the official iOS client.

Reddit

Hackers News: everything I can't find on Medium or Reddit ends on Hackers new. Comes with a nice Night Theme.

Hackers News

Information

Chrome: I was never able to get used to Safari UI, mostly because of the previous / next buttons not being next to the URL bar.

Google Maps: still better than Apple Map.

Communication

Canary Mail: the only iOS mail client that runs PGP natively. Comes with a Night Mode, but lacks filters, for now.

Canary Mail

Telegram: encrypted messaging system. I also use Keybase on a less regular basis, so I did not put it on my home screen.

Telegram

Productivity

Notion: next gen note taking app. The learning curve is a bit hard at first, but being able to integrate almost everything inside a note makes it a killing one.

Notion

Mindnode: a mind mapping application.

Mindnode

Scanbot: an advanced scanner with some really cool OCR feature.

Scanbot

Hours: a detailed time tracking application.

Hours

Control Center

With iOS 12 Control Center, Apple has made a giant step in the direction of productivity freaks like me. Control Center allows you to display various widgets built in your favorite applications. And the best of all: the Control Center is available on your locked screen.

I have limited my Control Center to some actionable items only.

Actionable Shortcuts

I'm using Launcher to enable a few shortcuts for the things I do the most often. They bring me directly to the screen I need on the application I want to use.

• Add a calendar event in Fantastical.
• Add a task in Todoist.
• Add a new contact.
• Book a Uber. I've configured the Launcher to book a Uber X directly.
• Show me how to go somewhere in Google Map.

Up Next

This built in widget gathers information about what I'm going to do next: at what time my alarm is going to ring, my next calendar events, my upcoming trips…

Todoist Today

This widget displays my next tasks in Todoist as well as a shortcut to create a new one. with a average of 14 tasks per day, I'm an avid Todoist user, which I use both for professional and personal things.

Favorite contacts Shortcuts

I've removed the iPhone built in favorite contacts widget for another Launcher. The built in widget is limited to people's telephone, Facetime and SMS only. This is not enough as I mostly talk with some people through Whatsapp or Telegram. This launcher allows me to create shortcuts to my favorite medium of communication.

My Next Grocery Shopping

Even though I have added Bring! to my home screen, this widget allows me to save a few seconds by bringing shortcuts to my favorite shopping lists.

Notifications

Notifications are both the most painful and useful feature smartphones can bring. Enable too much of them and your phone will ring constantly. Disable them all and you'll be able to focus but you might lose important informations. Thankfully, iOS 12 has made lots of progresses in terms of notifications management.

Flash, a-ah, Saviour of the Universe

I always leave my iPhone in silent mode. Working in an open space, I don't want the sound to disturb my colleagues. But since I still need to get some notifications, I have enable a little known feature, once again from the accessibility menu: the Led Flash for Alerts.

Settings > General > Accessibility > Led Flash for Alerts

Every time I get a notification that requires my attention, my iPhone launches a flash, so I won't miss a thing.

I class my notifications into 4 categories, which of them having a specific setup:

• Urgent / actionable notifications.
• Notifications I want to get in lock mode.
• Notifications that can wait.
• "Spammy" notifications

This setup requires you to review all your applications setting, as iOS will either enable or disable them completely by default. Another reason to keep the number of apps on your phone limited.

Urgent / Actionable Notifications

These are the notifications I need to be aware of. They include personal messages on Slack, my Uber waiting for me, or my calendar reminders.

Notifications I want to get in lock mode

Urgent / Actionable notifications

They are the notifications that require some actions from me, but for which I don't want to be interrupted while working on something. I also call them the "people notification" and they mostly include instant messaging applications.

I always disable the banners as they are quite intrusive and I don’t want to lose my focus when a notification pops. If I get notified and I don’t know what’s going on, I can still look at the notification center.

Notifications that can Wait

They are the notifications I want to check from time to time, but that are not important enough to get my attention. They are typically the social media notifications (to be configured on an app basis) I can check when I have the time.

"Spammy" Notifications

For everything else, I disable the notifications.

Siri

I don't use Siri's voice control often, except on my Apple Watch when I want to look like David Hasselhoff, minus the haircut. But I use my iPhone search feature a lot, and most of it is powered by Siri.

Using Siri for fun and Profit

Filter on your Apps that Matter

I first use Siri to find these apps I've decided not to display on my Home Screen but I'm still using on a regular basis. For that reason, I don't want every app to be displayed in Siri's suggestions. Thankfully, there is a setting for this, but once again, you need to go through all your installed applications.

When you disable Siri for an application, the Allow on Lock Screen setting is replaced by Show App. I only enable this one when I want it to appear in the suggested apps.

Keep your Lock Screen Clean

Since iOS 12, I've been using the lock screen more and more. It provides some really useful feature that don't require me to unlock, but I only want Siri to go through some applications.

To keep your lock screen clean, simply uncheck the Allow on Lock Screen setting for every application you don't want to use.

Photos

iOS 12 has made great progress when it comes to processing or sharing documents, and specially photos. And it’s (almost) entirely configurable.

If you click on the Share glyph, you get 2 lines of actions. The first one is to share that picture in your favorite application. The second one offers system oriented actions. If you scroll both of them to the right, you'll get a More glyph, that's where configuration happens.

Select the applications you share photos with the most. In my case, it's Slack first, SMS seconds, then the various instant messaging and social media apps. Disable everything you're not using to keep your menu clean!

Then, do the same for the second line. I copy pictures in background a lot, and use iCloud files to share these pictures with my iPhone and my Mac. The Hide item allows you to remove the photo from your main albums and only display it in a Hidden one. Convenient when you have people browsing your photos.

iWatch

I've replicated part of my iPhone setup on my Apple Watch.

Screen Layout

Apple Watch setup

The face I'm using is the modular one, and I've added the apps both I'm using the most, and which have convenient actionable feature:

• Todoist.
• My calendar, to get my next appointments in the blink of an eye.
• The activity monitoring.
• Bring! with my grocery list as a default, so I don't have to get my phone to check what I need to buy.
• Sleep cycle, which I trigger from my bed without the need of getting my phone.

I'm using the white layout for more readability and focus, but any color can do it as long as you're picking a single one.

I've also removed every app I didn't need, to find the other ones more easily. To do this, use the Watch app on your iPhone and uncheck the "Show on iPhone" setting.

Notification Settings

The Apple Watch mirrors the iPhone Message app settings by default, but this is something you can change by choosing "Custom".

The only change I did compared to my iPhone is the number of times an alert is repeated. I only want to get alerts once when I get a new SMS, just like for every other messaging app. For every other app, I mirror the iPhone notification settings.

Conclusion

That's all folks! I'll update this post with application specific tuning from time to time as I'm changing my workflow. I hope you enjoyed this article and that it gave you some ideas and insight to be more productive.

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