How To Configure Your Iphone To Work For You, Not Against You

6/24/2019 How to Conﬁgure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You
This wallpaper trades money and battery life for increased charisma and personal longevity (full
explanation in Step #6).
How to Con gure Your iPhone to

Work for You, Not Against You
The Very, Very Complete Guide to Productivity, Focus,
and Your Own Longevity
Coach Tony Follow

Oct 15, 2018 · 75 min read
The iPhone could be an incredible tool, but most people use their
phone as a life-shortening distraction device.
However, if you take the time to follow the steps in this article you will
be more productive, more focused, and — I’m not joking at all — live
longer.
. . .
Practically every iPhone setup decision has tradeoffs. I will give you
optimal defaults and then trust you to make an adult decision about
whether that default is right for you.
In addition, because this is a long post, I’ve written it in a way to make it

easier to skim. Here’s how to read the post:
https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-set-up-your-iphone-for-productivity-focus-and-your-own-longevity-bb27a68cc3d8 1/127
1. Level 1 — Casual. Read the headlines — figure out the details

yourself. Most of this isn’t rocket science.
2. Level 2 — Tutorial. Read the steps underneath the headline. I’ve

spelled out every step so that you can save your brain power for
something else.
3. Level 3 — Productivity Nerd. Below the tutorial steps, I’ve included

discussion of the behavior design implications. This is for true
productivity nerds, i.e. the readers of Better Humans.
As a bonus, because I know you got excited when you saw this was a
seventy minute read, I’ve gone all out on getting pedantic about
productivity and even included three appendixes to give an overview of
the behavior design principles, to break out the potential financial
budget for implementing this advice, and then a real-world example
from my own phone.
. . .
Also, for convenience, here is a clickable table of contents. (The links

below work if you’re reading in a browser, but not if you’re reading in
the app.)
Optimize First for Single Tasking
#1. Turn OFF (almost) all notifications

#2. Hide social media slot machines
#3. Hide messaging slot machines
#4. Disable app review requests
#5. Turn on Do Not Disturb
#6. Be strategic about your wallpaper
#7. Turn off Raise to Wake
#8. Add the Screen Time widget
#9. Add Content Restrictions
#10. (Optional) Use Restrictions to turn off Safari
#11. Organize your Apps and Folders alphabetically
Switch to Google Cloud to Work Faster
#12. Choose GMail

#13. Choose Google Calendar
#14. Replace Apple Maps with Google Maps
#15. Install the GBoard keyboard for faster typing
#16. Switch to Google Photos
Install These Apps for Productivity
#17. Use Evernote for all note taking, to-do lists,

everything
#18. The Case for Calm as your go-to meditation app
#19. Install the right goal tracker for you
#20. Store all your passwords in a password manager,
probably LastPass
#21. Use Numerical as your default calculator
#22. Put the Camera app in your toolbar
#23. Use this Doppler Radar app
#24. Use this Pomodoro app
#25. Use Brain.fm for background noise
Use These Apps and Configurations for Deep Learning
#26. Subscribe to these podcasts

#27. Install the Kindle app but never read it in bed
#28. Use Safari this way
#29. Organize your home screen for deep learning over
shallow learning
Use These Apps and Configurations for Longevity
#30. Track steps this way

#31. Prefer Time Restricted Eating Over Calorie Counting
#32. Schedule Night Shift
#33. Set up Medical ID
Make The Finishing Touches with These Configurations
#34. Change Siri to a man

#35. Change your phone’s name
#36. Turn off advertising tracking
#37. Set auto-lock to the maximum time
#38. Set your personal hotspot password to a random three
word phrase
#39. Turn on control center everywhere
#40. Turn on Background App Refresh
#41. Delete Garage Band
#42. Develop verbal memory for talking to Siri
#43. Set up these text replacement shortcuts
#44. Set your address
#45. Backup this way
Appendix A: Principles
Appendix B: Budget & Costs
Appendix C: Case Study
Appendix D: Updates
. . .
#1. Turn OFF (almost) all notifications

Open the Apple Settings App, then go to the Notifications Section.
You’re going to need to get good at opening the Settings app, so learn to
find this icon:
Go app by app, turning off all notifications.
No badges, almost all noti cations o . See below for exceptions.
By the end, the vast majority of your apps should have a notifications
setting that looks like this, i.e with no notifications:
Please, please, please: No noti cations is best, but at least turn badges o .
There are only a very few reasons to leave notifications on for a

particular app. Here are those reasons:
• For all delivery apps, leave notifications on. These notifications

are supposed to only come when you want them to, i.e. if you’re
standing on the corner trying to get a Lyft. Apps in this category:
Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Grubhub, Caviar. Of those, Postmates is the
biggest offender of spamming you with unwanted interruptive
notifications. Consider deleting that app.
• If you get very few text messages, turn off badging on your
Messages app but leave banners on. Since you’re setting your
phone up to have very few notifications, you’ll actually end up
seeing most of your text messages on your home screen as they
come in (previously, they were probably swamped by other
notifications). Then, the unread badge for messages is just overkill
to create anxiety about messages you already saw. If you get lots of
text messages, then turn off all notifications and treat text
messages like an inbox that you only check at set intervals. If you
are one of those people sending hundreds of text messages
throughout the day, then you are crazy and throwing your life
away.
Never allow badges!
• Leave notifications on for your calendar app. Not missing

appointments is basically the entire point of a cell phone.
• Leave notifications on for Maps and Google Maps. These apps

only notify you when you’re actively getting directions.
• Leave notifications on for phone calls. Although, consider turning

them off and updating your voicemail to say that phone calls are a
dead medium. My voicemail says: “You have reached my voicemail
which means you tried to call me which means you are a dinosaur.
Please upgrade your life and try me via text or email.” (It doesn’t
really say this.)
• For all the notifications that you left on, go back and make sure
badges are turned off. Badges are the red dots with numbers in
them that give you anxiety that there’s something important going
on in that app. You’ll live longer if you never see another badge.
I led with this advice to turn off notifications because it’s the most
powerful. Also, you’re never going to finish reading this post if you
leave your notifications turned on.
. . .
These are the productivity reasons that should make you wary of
notifications.
#1: Notifications are uncontrolled interruptions from your real goals.

They prevent you from ever getting into a flow state. You should be in
control of what you do and when — not your phone. I’m going to refer
to this over and over as “your phone is a tool, not a boss.” See
Appendix A at the end of this article for more.
#2: The brain science behind learning requires sustained focus to

trigger myelin growth around active neural pathways. That’s what
brain plasticity is about. However, if you go around interrupting that
process, you’ll never get the myelin growth that locks in whatever you
were learning. Essentially, notifications lead to a stunted life.
#3: Those red dots cause anxiety, and anxiety causes health problems
like heart disease. It’s not hyperbole that I talked about life expectancy
in the title of this post. Not specific to red dots, but mild anxiety was
shown to increase mortality by 20% over a ten year period.
. . .

‘Slot machine apps’ is a pejorative phrase to refer to apps that use
variable rate rewards to try to trigger mindless and addictive behavior.
That’s how the app tries to become your boss — although maybe boss
isn’t even a strong enough word. These are virtual drugs and due to
societal oversight, your dealer (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Snapchat) is allowed to pose as a respectable member of society.
Thankfully, you can configure all of your social media to eliminate the
addictive elements.
• Move Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest,

Periscope, LinkedIn and Tumblr into a folder on your second
screen. These are addictions.
• Some people call this folder ‘Social’ or ‘Media’. For a while, I titled
my folder Worthless. That was overly judgmental. I’d recommend
calling this folder Leisure so that you’re being clear with yourself
about when to open it.
• This setup goes a little bit deeper, though: hide your favorite social
apps on the second screen of that folder.
This last trick comes from Tristan Harris.
Here’s what I mean. When your addictions are in the first screen of a
folder, they’re still visibly calling out to you. Still bad:
Source: Tristan Harris
Instead, move your apps to the second screen of that folder, like so (the
first screen has just one app, the second screen has the rest):
This second-screen-of-folder-on-second-screen strategy requires that at

least one app be visible. When you reach this decision point for social
media apps, you obviously should choose LinkedIn. It’s the least
addictive.
Extra credit for people that are actual productivity nuts: just delete all
your social media apps. . . .

This is the same strategy as #2, just for messaging apps. Messaging
apps also have a built-in variable rate reward — that’s what makes them
slot machines.
• Move your mail apps, Slack, Messages, WhatsApp and Facebook

Messenger into a folder on your second screen. You decide when
you check these. Live a life without interruptions!
• I call my folder Messages. The default iPhone folder name

suggestion is Productivity. That’s an outright lie.
• Follow the same trick from #2, hide all but one of the apps on the
second screen of the folder.
I check these on my own schedule and have all noti cations turned completely o .
. . .
The productivity secret for inbox management is to decide when you

want to check your messages. Then, process them all in one big batch.
Batch processing puts you in control. Unfortunately, most people live
life reactively, constantly checking their inboxes for messages to react
to. For you to reach your full potential, you need to switch to a batch
processing mindset for all of your inboxes.
These messaging apps should never interrupt you. This goes back to the
brain science justification in #1. You want to block off your day so that
you have some contiguous time dedicated to being smart and creative
(no interruptions) and then other blocks dedicated to rapid task
processing (email, etc.). Cal Newport calls this Deep Work (in a very
good book).
Productivity nuts: consider deleting all of these apps. People who set a
schedule for when and where they check their inboxes often realize
they can do all of their emailing from a proper computer. For Slack
users, private messages and channel notifications are meant to be
asynchronous — that means you don’t need immediate alerts.
. . .
#4. Disable App Review requests

You open an app intending to get work done, and then that app
prompts you to leave a review. This is an unwanted interruption, and
your job is to remove as many interruptions as possible.
So disable these unwanted Review Requests.
• Go to Settings > Apple ID > iTunes & App Stores.
. . .
Is it crazy how we think of computers as productivity devices but then

allow so many unproductive features? I think it’s crazy. This isn’t just
some app-developer hack, it’s actually a built-in feature provided by
Apple. That’s how blind Apple is to the damage caused by interrupting
your work flow.
What’s happening with review requests is that when you use free apps,
you are actually entering a partnership with the app developer where
you are working on their behalf, often by clicking on advertisements, or
in the case of app reviews, by acting as marketing.
Apps with more positive reviews get ranked higher by Apple. As a

consequence, app developers tend to interrupt you with review
requests just as you’re doing something productive.
Do you care about the morality of opting out of this partnership? A

savvy user can often leach off of the hard work of app developers and
the money of investors without giving anything back. I’ve been doing
that with the MoviePass service — seeing twice as many movies as I paid
for, all subsidized by some venture capital investors. (Unfortunately,
that gravy train seems to be ending.)
When you or I do take advantage, we’re basically stealing. This sort of

stealing is not illegal, but is it bad for your health? The impact off
morality on longevity is muddy. As close as I could find was research on
religious vs. non-religious people within the same country.
Religious Americans are reported to have more robust immune systems,

lower blood pressure, and better recovery times from operations, (although
these claims have been disputed).
If you’re worried about the effect of morality on your longevity, here a

few workarounds. Manually go to the App Store, look through your
recently updated apps, and add reviews to each of them. Share your
favorite apps with your friends (as I’m doing in this post). Or, opt for
the pro or paid versions. I’m finding that I almost always prefer to pay
for an app.
. . .

Most people should have their phone permanently on Do Not Disturb.
Do Not Disturb is not as severe as you might think, thanks to a sub-

feature to “Allow Calls From Favorites.” As a result, you can still allow
certain people to interrupt you or wake you up.
The trick to getting the Do Not Disturb feature to work all day is to turn
it on from the same time to the same time, such as from 9am to 9am. I
tested it and that works (I was worried it would effectively turn itself on
and off again in the same minute).
If, however, you do want strangers to be able to contact you (for

example, if you work in sales), then just set Do Not Disturb for your
sleep and leisure time.
• Go to Settings > Do Not Disturb
• Do Not Disturb works a little differently on your Mac versus on

your iPhone. On the iPhone, you just need to toggle it on and make
sure you don’t toggle the Scheduled option. But on a Mac, Do Not
Disturb is always scheduled, so turning it on all day requires
hacking the schedule to be something like 9am to 9am. Many of
you though will prefer to just have it on for a set time, say 6pm to
9am.
• Allow calls from your favorites. Now your Favorites list actually
takes on more meaning: this is your whitelist of people who you
would allow to interrupt you.
• There’s a Repeated Calls option to allow repeat callers to get

through. Do not select this. We absolutely do not want to train
telemarketers to think this will work.
You might want to double check who is on your favorites — I added my dog’s vet in order to make sure
those calls always came through.
. . .
The justification here is similar to the steps above. Limited

interruptions is smart for a number of reasons, including the science of
brain plasticity, the health impact of anxiety, and the productivity gains
of optimizing for deep work (all covered in more depth in Appendix A
below).
What the above Do Not Disturb setting allows you to do is to take a

‘whitelist’ strategy to interruptions. So rather than banning
telemarketers one-by-one (‘blacklisting’), you pre-select the very
limited number of people who you would allow to interrupt your day.
For me, that’s my immediate family, my dog walker, and my dog’s vet.
. . .

The absolute best wallpaper is an all black background. Choosing black
destroys the idea that your phone is some shiny toy that you need to be
looking at all the time.
Plus, with OLED screens (most new iPhones), black actually saves
battery (as much as 60%). If you chronically run out of battery or are a
true productivity nut, then black is the best option for you.
• Go to Settings > Wallpaper > Choose a New Wallpaper > Stills.

The all-black option is right there at the end.
If you can’t stomach making a thousand dollar phone look that ugly,
choose the black with rainbow stripe option that’s right next to the
black option in the Stills. That’s what I’ve done for all the screen shots
in this article.
Simple background that looks good in all cases.
There are other options:
If you’re shy, choose a wallpaper that will help as a conversation starter.
• The best conversation starter is a pet. If necessary, go get a pet.

Dogs are best (74% of people like dogs, while only 41% like cats).
Always adopt from a pound, rather than from a breeder. As a
possible additional effect, owning a dog corresponded with a 20%
decrease in mortality.
• Take a photo of your pet.
• Go to Settings > Wallpaper > Choose a New Wallpaper > Camera

Roll
• Choose the picture of your Pet. Pick Still (saves battery life) and
Set Both.
On new OLED screens, this white dog, Eloise, uses more battery power than a Black Lab or Scottish Terrier.
. . .
If you find inspirational images inspiring:
• Confirm that this is you by looking at your walls. You’ll have at

least one inspirational quote hanging in your home.
• Go browse for killer inspiration (fewer words is better): 39 from

PopSugar, Primer, Pinterest, Brit & Co.
• Save the image to your phone.
• Go to Settings > Wallpaper > Choose a New Wallpaper > Camera

Roll
• Choose the motivational wallpaper. Pick Still (saves battery life)

and Set Both.
One problem with inspirational images is that words often make your
phone feel cluttered. It’s better to have an image, like a mountain or a
person working out, than it is to have a quote or motivational phrase.

For example, here’s a reasonable set of affirmations that just don’t show
up well behind various iPhone icons and widgets.
Nice a rmations, bad background.
If you are going to have affirmation or motivational text, a quick hack is

to make the background yourself in Instagram Stories. Instagram will
let you save the Story to your phone’s Photos.
In this case, try to stick to just a single word, and place that word low
enough that it shows up below your Do-Not-Disturb message. If you
take this approach, consider two things:
1. Try just using this for your Lock screen rather than your Home
screen. Text often works better on your Lock screen than it does
behind the apps on your Home screen.
2. Try creating a new wallpaper every few weeks that has the same
affirmation, but a different background. That way you don’t
become blind to your affirmation.
Here’s an example Jonathan Howard sent me when he was reviewing a

draft of this article:
Credit goes to May Alba who made this for Jonathan Howard
. . .
If you still haven’t found a suitable strategy, pick an image with a

dominant color that tells a color story to prompt one of the below
emotions.
• Red: Passionate, Aggressive, Important
• Green: Natural, Stable, Prosperous
• Blue: Serene, Trustworthy, Inviting
• Black: Powerful, Sophisticated, Edgy
• White: Clean, Virtuous, Healthy
Don’t pick orange (cheap) or yellow (warning). If you’re not sure? Pick
Red. All of these color choices will drain your battery more than a black
background, but you may find the emotional gain to be worthwhile.
. . .
The reality for me is that I alternate between a black background and a

meaningful picture. There’s some possible science supporting the value
of small changes to your work environment to create a boost in
productivity. Unfortunately, I can’t find a citation, although I’m 90%
certain I read this in David Rock’s Your Brain at Work. The theory is
basically that shaking up your environment a small amount puts your
brain on alert (but not so much that you’re anxious).
. . .

The Raise to Wake feature lets you quickly see notifications on your
lock screen just by lifting your phone.
This is a bad idea. You don’t want to accidentally see notifications on

your lock screen when you just happen to be moving your phone
around. You want only see notifications intentionally.
Winners check their notifications on their own schedule.
• Go to Settings > Display & Brightness > Raise to Wake. Turn off.
I’m going to re-use this screen shot two more times when I cover auto-lock and night shift.
. . .
This is yet another setting to make sure you’re the boss and your phone
is your tool.
. . .

The Screen Time widget is new from Apple and it helps show you where
your time is going. Ideally, the Social Media category will be non-
existent. Unsurprisingly, I’m not going to be able to find a screen shot
where that is true.
To install the Screen Time widget:
• Swipe to the Today Screen by swiping right from your home

screen.
• At the bottom of the Today screen, select Edit. This will bring up a
list of apps that have widgets.
• Tap the green plus button for Screen Time to enable the widget,
and then tap and hold on the three-horizontal-lines button to
reorder the widget to be near the top. By the end of this article
you’re going to have three widgets at the top of your Today Screen:
Google Calendar, Weather, & Screen Time.
You’re going to use this widget as a reality check against your own
biased memory.
This article is going to recommend a few more widgets later, and then
recommend that you build the habit of checking the Today View by
swiping right from your home screen (conceptually, it lives to the left of
your home screen).
. . .
It does seem to be roughly true that what gets measured gets done.
There are a number of variants of that quote, but my favorite is “What
gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done
well, what gets rewarded gets repeated.”
A goal for many of the steps in this article is for you to use your phone
less, and to use social media apps much, much less.
This widget is how you’ll know if you’re succeeding. I consider it the

feedback part of the above quote. Then hopefully the reward is an
intrinsic satisfaction in your own life and productivity.
In addition to installing the widget, you should set yourself a goal for
social media usage. Imagine you had a child and were setting a limit for
how much television they could watch each day. Is one hour
reasonable? Probably. Is six hours reasonable? No.
Now, instead of this child, consider instead that you are setting limits
for yourself, and that social media has replaced your television
watching time. How much “leisure” time each day do you think is
appropriate for yourself? If you’re not sure, choose thirty minutes.
That’s enough time to scan your Facebook and Instagram, drop tons of
likes on your friends, tweet once, get the gist of the news, and consume
a huge dose of We Rate Dogs.
. . .
#9. Add content restrictions

Sometimes it’s helpful to block yourself from certain websites. I have
zero pride preventing me from treating myself like a toddler in need of
parental controls. The reality is that we all could use some strict blocks
to prevent our worst habits.
On the iPhone, the feature to block specific websites is hidden inside of

Apple’s Limit Adult Websites feature.
I’m not trying to make any point at all about your adult website usage. I
just want to help you find the feature (and it’s the most deeply buried
feature in this article).
• Go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions >
Web Content and then select “Limit Adult Websites.”
Turning on this feature allows you to then add specific websites, which
don’t have to be adult websites at all.
What you should consider is whether you have any habitual behaviors
around checking specific websites and then use this feature to break
those habits. For example, I used to live in San Francisco and so had a
habit of checking the website for the daily paper. That’s the one site I
block because I don’t want to have that habit anymore.
Additionally, I was a huge Grantland reader before it was shut down by

ESPN. I still type that URL into my browser just out of pure muscle
memory.
Don’t be shy about turning o certain websites. Disabling bad life choices is a great strategy.
. . .
If I were designing content restrictions for productivity, I’d have one

called Google-only, which would allow you to Google any term and
then click any result. But you’d be blocked from going directly to any
sites or clicking deeper into any site.
However, since I’m not the boss at Apple, the solution above is the best
available approach and is probably ideal for most people. I’ll give a
more hardcore solution next.
. . .
#10. (Optional) Use restrictions to turn

off Safari
None of you are going to do this… but I tried a month with no access to
a web browser. If you are up for this, I definitely want to hear from you.
The theory is that the browser is one of the addictive slot machines that
draws your attention and wastes your time.
So I used parental controls to disable Safari.
In practice, I would very occasionally need a web browser, so I’d

download the Chrome app, do my browsing, and then delete the
Chrome app.
If this method of reclaiming your phone at all appeals to you, here’s the
secret:
• Go to Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions >
Allowed Apps and then disable Safari.
This screen shot is only for the hardest of hardcore phone addiction-breakers.
. . .
When I tested this, I used Chrome as my occasional browser because

the path for removing access again was shorter. I trusted myself more to
delete the Chrome app than to remember to find the Safari restriction
option that’s hidden behind five taps.
. . .
#11. Organize your apps and folders

alphabetically
There are four ways to organize your apps: by function, by color, by
random chance, and alphabetically.
You’re going to organize your screens by function, and you’re also going
to organize apps into folders by function. The home screen is for tools
only. The second screen is apps organized into folders. The third screen
is for junk, namely Apple apps you aren’t allowed to remove.
However, on each screen and within each folder you have to make
additional decisions about organizing. You should choose
alphabetically.
• On your home screen, organize all of your apps by name, with

numbers (like 1Password) coming before letters.
• In your folders, organize the apps hidden behind the first screen
alphabetically as well.
• On your second screen, organize your folders alphabetically.
• I’m going to leave it mostly up to you on how to organize apps

beyond the first screen. Probably, they should mostly be inside
folders.
• I think it’s a bad sign if you have apps spilling out into a third
screen. Put them in folders! The only thing on the third screen
should be apps that you can’t uninstall. On the latest iOS, you can
actually uninstall all the Apple apps except for Wallet, Safari, Find
iPhone, and App Store. I put all these Apple apps into a folder on
my third screen, mostly as a precaution in case I need them one
day. In practice, I mostly just use Wallet and get to that through
the right-hand button shortcut (double press).
We’ve barely scratched the surface of why this home page looks the way it does.
. . .
The phrase “your phone is a tool, not your boss” is implying that you’re
the boss. But it’s more subtle than that.
We want to set your phone up so that your rational brain is the boss,
and your emotional, addictive, worst-decisions brain is asleep or
blocked.
The best explanation for this is in the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (or
just read the NYT book review for a good overview). The author lays
out a model for the brain as having two systems.
The Fast system is our default. It’s effortless, instinctual, and functional
for staying alive, but also the source of most of our worst impulses. It’s
the system that likes slot machine apps.
The Slow system is what we think of as our rational brain. It’s

analytical, but requires effort and intention to access.
When I train meditation in my Heavy Mental program, I train a verbal

way of moving the thoughts that come up during a meditation into our
Slow system. That way we can analyze the thought, and then drop it.
The entire trick is that activating your language center always activates
your Slow system.
Here, we’re doing something very similar. When you go for an app, I
want you to have the actual name of the app in mind. That way it’s
easier for you to be acting rationally and intentionally. That’s the main
reason to adopt an alphabetical organizing structure.
The second good reason is that alphabetical is less brittle. Organizing

by function is hard because sometimes apps have more than one
function. Organizing by app name is intellectually trivial in
comparison.
. . .
#12. Choose Gmail

For the vast majority of people, the ideal phone setup is to embrace
Google Cloud services (mail, calendar, photos, maps) and pair them
with Apple hardware.
If you’re on some other setup, like Apple email or Outlook, then stick
with that. It’s not worth switching.
You can often configure the Apple apps to connect to the Google
services. But it’s always better to just use the Google-specific app. In
this case, I’m going to talk about Gmail.
Don’t use Apple’s Mail product. Google’s actual Gmail app just works
more smoothly, especially search.
And don’t bother with any app that promises any sort of “smart”
filtering or sorting of your email. Relying on somebody else’s
algorithms is hugely overrated.
• Get a Google account (you probably already have one).
• Download the Gmail app.
• Put the app in that “Messages folder” we created in Step #3.
• And make sure notifications are turned off (also Step #3).
• Then, delete Apple’s mail app. Apple has only recently started
letting you delete built-in apps. Take advantage of it!
• Go to Gmail from your computer and disable your inbox tabs. You
probably think Google is helping you by automatically
categorizing your incoming email, but you’ll be way better off
developing the habit of unsubscribing and manually filtering.
. . .
I hosted a Q&A with Marshall Hughes, who is our most prolific Inbox
Zero coach. Yes, that’s a type of coach — a lot of our coaches zero (do
you like my pun?) in on specific behavior changes.
In the Q&A, everyone wanted to ask Marshall about email automation

tools. And Marshall was adamant that every experience he had with
clients using automation tools turned out badly. Clients who chose
automation were bailing on essential inbox habits. They’d given up on
the most important habit of all, which is to say no to email by
constantly unsubscribing and manually filtering.
So, paired with the settings above, you should be working on your
email habits. That means primarily unsubscribing and blocking
aggressively. I get a lot of extra email too that I consider FYI — for
example, I like having a history of all of the newsletters we send out,
but I don’t need to read each one as they come in to my inbox. I filter
those into folders and only check those folders occasionally.
. . .

Sticking with the Google Cloud theme, use the native Google Calendar
app and ignore Apple’s Calendar app.
• Install the Google Calendar app.
• This is an app where you’re going to keep notifications on and just

turn off badging. Never allow badging anywhere.
• Then enter the Google Calendar settings.
• You can change the start of the week from Sunday to Monday (or
in a few locales, Saturday). I’m a Monday person. I don’t
understand how any person who grew up in a country with a
Christian tradition thinks the week starts on Sunday — it’s literally
the last day of creation. But whatever, lots of people have strong
opinions on this.
• Disable “Show declined events.” You declined the event so that

you wouldn’t have to think about it.
• Disable “Show event illustrations.” That’s a nonsense feature.
• Then, go into Default event duration and set the default to 30

minutes. You don’t need an hour for most meetings. If you’re the
one creating the meeting, you can be in charge of saving your and
everyone else’s time.
• Last, add the Google Calendar widget to the top of your Today
screen: head over to your Today screen (swipe right from your
home screen) > scroll down to the edit button > turn on Google
Calendar > Move Google Calendar to the top.
. . .
The two most important subtleties are trying to shorten meetings and
building a Today screen that’s worthy of a daily habit.
The Today habit is just you starting your day by getting a summary of
what’s planned (and later, what the weather is like). If you can build
this habit, then you can use it to trigger new habits.
In the Tiny Habits method, checking your calendar would be called an

anchor habit. Above in the Screen Time section, I’ve already attached a
new, not-quite-natural habit of checking your Screen Time widget. The
reason I think that will work is because I trust that you will naturally
want to check the calendar and weather, thus triggering the new and
less natural habit of checking additional widgets.
On the short meetings front, this is literally a chance to save yourself

hours each day by making the meetings you go to shorter and more
focused. The key to focus is to have a clear goal, and push directly
toward that goal.
I have one friend, a CEO, who wants the time on his calendar to be as
precious as the time on a U.S. president’s schedule (he told me this
during a different administration). If a meeting only needs seven
minutes, then just give it seven minutes. A different friend, also a CEO,
set a company policy that if a meeting invite didn’t include goals, an
agenda, and pre-meeting preparation, you could skip it. The acronym
there is GAP — no GAP, no need to attend.
Last, in my screenshot there’s a massive amount of time blocked off

called “Reserved.” I’m unapologetic about scheduling time on my
calendar for deep work. You can’t squeeze deep work into fifteen
minute gaps — you need to carve out contiguous blocks of time. For
most office workers, I use what Cal Newport calls a “bi-modal day.”
That’s where half of my day is for deep work and the other is for
shallow work, i.e. meetings, email, phone calls.
. . .

Apple Maps has gotten better, but it’s still not as good as Google Maps.
You’re only going to use Apple Maps when you use Siri (it’s Siri’s
permanent default).
Every other time, you’re going to use Google Maps.
• Install the Google Maps app.
• Add Home and Work addresses to My Places in the app. This will
involve connecting to a Google account. If you have trouble and
are using a custom Google domain, then you may need to enable
some permissions from the site admin panel. In that case, these
are the instructions that helped me.
Not my real address.
• Go to Google Maps Settings > Navigation settings and turn “Keep

map north up” on. This is a power setting for people who actually
aspire to build their sense of direction.
• Add Google Maps to your home screen. This is another one of

those tools-over-drugs apps.
. . .
This is yet another example of preferring the Google Cloud. And the
custom settings for Home and Work are just small time-savers. There’s
not a huge additional productivity explanation.
. . .
#15. Install the Gboard keyboard for

faster typing
This will let you type faster through swiping. The world record for
typing on a phone is set through the swipe method: just swipe your
finger over the letters of the word you’re trying to type. The keyboard
will figure out what you mean.
At first this will feel a little uncomfortable, but it will quickly become
second nature.
Gboard, from Google, also has a bunch more features too like GIF and
emoji search.
• Install the Gboard app.
• Now go to your Apple Settings > General > Keyboard > Add New
Keyboard.
• It’s easy to accidentally cycle back to the old default keyboard, so

delete that (don’t worry, you can get it back). Go to Settings >
General > Keyboard > Edit. Then delete the default one. It’s
probably named as a language, like English (United Kingdom).
• If Gboard isn’t showing when you go to type a message (perhaps

you skipped the above step), then hit the globe icon to switch to it.
• I also set my keyboard to black before knowing that I could delete

the default Apple Keyboard. That helped me know visually which
keyboard was active. You can also set your keyboard theme by
opening the Gboard app and heading to themes.
Gboard and swipe makes me more likely to write things down on my phone. This is me setting my
One Priority for the day.
. . .
I found that I was so unhappy with the Apple keyboard peck-typing that
I’d avoid using it altogether. I’m a fast laptop typist, so I’d always
postpone writing until I got to my desk.
Now, with swiping, I’m just a little bit faster and that’s the difference
between not typing anything and being willing to type a longer
message.
Where that ties into productivity is what a lot of people call the “touch
it once” principle. Especially with email, you want to avoid reading the
same email twice. So if I happen to read a message that needs a
response, I want to give that response right away.
. . .

This is the last of the settings to use the Google Cloud over Apple’s
built-in options.
The main benefit of Google Photos is that the search is amazing. They
use machine learning to categorize all of your photos so that you can
later search them. For example, without any work I can find all my
selfies by just searching for the word me. And I often pull up pictures of
my dogs by searching for dog. I have even had someone pull up photos
of a specific handcrafted greenland kayak paddle.
For photos, take the following steps.
• Install Google Photos app and follow app’s instructions.
• Place Google Photos app on your home screen. This continues our
tools-over-drugs theme.
• If you’ve been storing photos in iCloud, this is now redundant.

Copy your photos over according to these instructions.
• You can try turning off iCloud storage for photos: Apple ID >
iCloud > Photos. However, when I did this, I ran into trouble so
I’ve left it on. This step isn’t crucial.
• Most people will need to pay for Cloud photo storage (this is true
for iCloud also). I’m currently on Google’s $1.99/month plan for
100GB, but am close to needing to upgrade to their $9.99/month
for 1TB.
That’s Eloise, a pure-bred French Bernard, and Eggs, a mixed Aussie Shepard.
. . .
I end up storing my photos in four places: Google photos, iCloud, laptop

and Dropbox sync. That’s because I’m paranoid. I should probably take
them out of Dropbox.
Of those, Google Photos is far and away the best experience for looking
at my photos, thanks to the machine learning behind Google’s search.
This is an example of where a messy-by-design organization structure
beats rigid one. Search is more reliable and faster than you trying to
manually categorize every photo.
. . .
#17. Use Evernote for all note taking, to-do

lists, everything
If you already love your note taking app and to-do list app, then fine,
stick with those. This is a recommendation where habits beat tools.
Don’t switch if you already have strong habits.
However, if you don’t use a note taking app or to-do list app, or are
unhappy with what you do use, let me give you a guiding theory that
will lead you to Evernote: go messy and trust search.
Put your to-do list in Evernote, either by creating one long note that you
edit every day or a new note for each day. Then put all your other notes
in Evernote too. Don’t bother particularly with categorization. Instead,
just trust that you’ll be able to find whatever you want later through
Evernote’s search.
What you end up with is a messy but long-term functional system. The
other approach, constantly switching apps, systems, and categorization
schemes always breaks. Always.
One power of a messy to-do list is that not everything has to be a check
list item. You can mix in quick drafts and longer notes to yourself. Or, as
I’ve recommended in my Interstitial Journaling technique, to live
mindfully, you should literally intermix short journal entries and to-do
list items.
• Install the Evernote app.
• Place it on your home screen.
Here’s an example of mixing todo-lists and journaling. This is called Interstitial Journaling.
. . .
The problem with most productivity systems is that they break. As a

result, a lot of productivity nuts spend a lot of their time creating new
productivity systems over and over again. This, obviously, is not
productive.
For that reason, where possible, I suggest that you choose messy
systems over rigid systems. The ultimate messy system that I know
you’re all familiar with is the paper notebook. A paper notebook gives
you incredible flexibility: you can take notes however you want, write
drafts, sketch outlines, draw pictures, write to-do lists, etc. A to-do list
app just doesn’t allow for that.
The downside to paper notebooks is that it’s impossible (or at least very
hard) to find an old note.
All of that is the argument for merging your to-do lists with your notes,
and then putting them all into a single cloud-backed note taking system
with good search features.
Although Evernote has advanced features that may or (probably) may

not be a pleasure to use, the basics work well and reliably. I recommend
starting with free and then upgrading ($60/year) if you bump into a
limit on bandwidth or offline availability.
. . .
#18. The case for Calm as your go to

meditation app
I learned to meditate from Headspace. That’s a good option. But guided
meditation is something that you’ll graduate from quickly. Most people
I know who meditate don’t still need a daily guide.
Once you graduate to meditating on your own, Calm is the much better
option because of their built-in timer and tracking. I was an advisor in
the early days of Calm specifically because of my experience building
habit tracking apps.
• Install the Calm app.
• Calm is good enough and important enough to pay for. It’s

$59.99/year.
• Find your way to the Open Ended Meditation in the Meditation

section. Select one with a bell playing every few minutes (my
setting is for 5 minutes). That way you can sit and meditate for a
set period of time while also being confident that your phone
hasn’t run out of battery.
• Also find your way to the Breathe option in the More section. This
can be a very effective way to reset your body.
• I also prefer not having any background noise from my meditation

app. In Calm, turn this off in the Calm app by heading to More >
Scenes and then adjusting the Background Volume to zero.
The breath function in right-most screenshot is also very e ective
. . .
Meditation is a productivity and performance practice. The explanation

for why is a little long, so I’m mostly just going to point you to longer
articles we’ve published in Better Humans. However, here’s the quick

pitch for why the Calm app is about performance and not just “calm.”
A lot of people talk about meditation as a relaxing or spiritual practice.

That’s fine for them. But you’re reading a productivity article, so I’m
focused on what meditation does for your productivity.
The core concept comes from the world of deliberate practice, which is
when you identify the components of skills that are important to your
success, and then practice those components individually. I want you to
approach meditation as a practice session for a skill that you’re going to
use to help your productivity.
You should read our full article on Deliberate Practice to get a feel for
how to design practice for all important life skills.
With meditation, you’re practicing a two-step process that you will use
outside of the meditation. The first step is becoming aware of where
your mind wandered, acknowledging the thought and then putting the
thought down. Call that Awareness. The second step is bringing your
focus back to your point of focus (usually your breath). Call that Focus.
This Awareness-Focus loop is what you are practicing during a

meditation session. A lot of people feel bad if their mind wanders
during meditation. But you should actually feel good. The more often
your mind wanders, the more times you get to practice this Awareness-
Focus loop. I tell people what they are doing is mental pushups. The
more wandering they do, the more pushups they get in.
Now that you’ve practiced, here’s a way to then apply the Awareness-
Focus loop in ways to be more productive by beating procrastination.
. . .

There are basically two philosophies for how to use a goal tracker. Both
involve picking a set of small goals or habits and marking them off in
the app each time you do them.
In the Quantified Self philosophy of goal trackers, you are tracking your
goals simply out of curiosity because you want to get more information
about yourself. (The word Goal in Goal Tracker doesn’t even come into
play.)
The second philosophy is focused on a goal-oriented behavior-change

mindset where you are using the goal tracker for motivation and
accountability in order to get yourself to adopt a new behavior and
become a better person.
I simply do not understand the Quantified Self philosophy — don’t they

want to improve? Every time I go to a Quantified Self event, I feel like
I’m surrounded by aliens who love data but not growth.
“I got all this data about myself.” > “And then what?” > “Nothing.”
It just doesn’t make sense.
So my goal tracker recommendation is for a goal tracker I built. It is the

foundation of the Coach.me community. Most users and most coaches
started out by forming habits through this goal tracking app.
Install the Coach.me app and consider tracking a few of the 101 most
tracked habits in 2018.
. . .
Obviously, I’m talking from my own book here. This article is the
product of prior work that started with this goal tracker and then
morphed into coaching and personal development publishing. There
are many links out there to projects we built at Coach.me or articles we
published at Better Humans.
So, with the caveat that I’m deeply biased, my position is that I’ve seen
all the other goal trackers and generally they all use similar formulas
and then differentiate just a tiny bit on what graphs they show you.
However, we put every ounce of our design effort into something

different: your psychology and motivation. That includes how we
trigger reminders, how we try to avoid triggering guilt, how we
introduce variable rate rewards for your own good, and how we handle
when a goal is too challenging for you.
If you’ve read this far in the article, I think you will have picked up on
my philosophy, which is that I want to see results.
. . .
#20. Store all your passwords in a password

manager, probably LastPass
Trying to remember hundreds of passwords is a waste of time. Using
the same password for all your accounts is the fast track to getting
hacked.
There are a number of good third-party password managers that are

much easier to use than Apple’s built in Keychain. If you are already
using one, then stick with it. This is a principle (covered also in
Appendix A) that habits are more important than tools. The benefits of
your habits around your current password manager outweigh the
feature benefits of switching to a different manager.
I use 1Password but that’s not what I’m going to recommend to you. I
signed up with them a long time ago when they had a pay-once option.
But now they’ve moved to a subscription model that’s quite a bit more
expensive than other better options.
So, if you are looking to use a password manager for the first time, then
install LastPass. It’s the probably best for most people and definitely the
least expensive at $24/year.
Download LastPass here. You’re going to need to set it up in three

places: as an app on your phone, as an app on your computer, and as an
extension in your computer’s web browser.
On your iPhone, you’ll also need to configure LastPass to fill passwords

in Safari. Select your password manager from iOS Settings >
Passwords & Accounts > Autofill Passwords.
Most people will be happiest with LastPass.
. . .
The theory behind the value of a password manager comes down to

pragmatic security and reduced cognitive load.
Your parents used to memorize people’s phone numbers. Now nobody

does that anymore. It should be the same with passwords — you have
better things to remember. That’s a cognitive load reduction.
Plus, password managers can save time. A common trap is to half-way

embrace unique passwords for each app or site, but then find yourself
constantly forgetting and having to go through a lost-password routine.
This is wasted time.
On the security front, most people who don’t use a password manager
end up reusing passwords. So when a hacker gets your password to one
site, they get it for all sites. Password managers aren’t immune to
getting hacked either, but at least if you use a popular one you’re likely
to hear about it when the hack happens.
. . .
#21. Use Numerical as your default

calculator
After accuracy, the must-have feature for calculators is a history.
Otherwise you’re going to make a typo and not notice.
Unfortunately, Apple’s calculator does not ship with a history feature.

So:
• Install the lovely Numerical app.
• Put it on your home screen. This continues the your-phone-is-a-

tool-not-a-boss trend for your home screen. When you unlock your
phone, you want to feel like you’ve picked up a tool that’s
completely under your control, rather than like you’re on a bender
and have just walked into a casino. You’re going to love Numerical
without obsessively using it.
If the low power % in this screenshot causes you anxiety, we’ll get to meditation apps below.
. . .
Notice the second line of numbers at the top? That’s a history. Having
that history saves you time and reduces your errors because you can
spot when you’ve fat-fingered an entry. Reduce your anxiety and live
longer.
“Even people displaying minor symptoms of psychological distress were

found to have a 20 percent increased risk of dying over the 10-year
study period.” (This is the same citation I used in the section about
turning off notifications.)
. . .

Technically, this is quadruply redundant.
You can swipe down to get the camera from your control center, tap the
camera on the lock screen, or swipe left from your lock screen.
That last, swipe-left from the lock screen is really convenient. Practice
that. But also add the camera to your toolbar.
• Move the camera app to the toolbar.
• While you’re at it, go into Settings > Camera and turn on Preserve
Settings. This means that the app will remember the last mode you
were in, i.e. video or photo.
• Also in Camera settings, if you have enough storage, max out the
resolution on Record Video and Record Slo-mo.
• Last, in Camera settings, most people’s pictures will be framed

better if they turn on grid mode. Do that.
. . .
The camera is a great tool for happiness and gratitude. I’m not talking
about preening in front of the camera all day. I’m talking about
capturing the most interesting moments of your day for posterity and to
share with others.
Using your camera regularly also helps you develop an eye for detail.
The general theme of this article is to set your phone up to be more

present in the world. Looking for pictures to take is one way to be more
engaged with your surroundings. Stopping a meal so that you can
capture your food, however, is not the path to living in the moment.
If you are wanting to post pictures to Instagram and Facebook, you can
consider the placement of the Camera app to be a replacement habit
that allows you to schedule your social media usage. Take a picture in
the Camera app and then post it later, during your allotted leisure
window.
. . .
#23. Install a Doppler Radar app

What does 70% chance of rain mean? Sometimes it means there’s a
70% chance of rain over 100% of your area. But it can also mean there
is 100% certainty of rain, but only over part of your 70% of your area.
That’s confusing. And so the only sane way to check the weather is to
compare it to the Doppler radar. These radars visualize the rain and the
direction that the rain is heading. That way you can eyeball for yourself
if the rain is actually going to affect you.
Download the NOAA Radar app.
This Doppler shows rain in the NYC area, but nowhere near where I live in Brooklyn.
While you’re setting up weather, you should place this Doppler app on
your home screen, and then go to your Today screen and turn on
Apple’s Weather widget.
A big part of productivity is planning. You’ve heard a million people

complain about how inaccurate weather forecasting is. So here’s the
solution: be your own forecaster.
. . .

The idea behind Pomodoro is to be fully focused for a set period of time,
usually twenty-five minutes, and then have a five minute break.
This is a way to train yourself to avoid procrastination. You end up

constantly pushing yourself a little bit harder to make it to the end of
your work period, knowing that you’ll get a short reward after.
The rules of Pomodoro aren’t complicated, but it’s still nice to have a
dedicated app. There are two good ones, but I prefer BeFocused Pro for
$2.99 because it can easily categorize your Pomodoros. For example,
I’m currently in a Pomodoro that I marked for the Writing category.
• Install the BeFocused Pro app and put it on your home screen.
When do you use Pomodoro? It’s useful for when you are doing
individual work, like checking your email or working on a project. You
wouldn’t use this method during a meeting.
This is one of a handful of strategies in this article for beating

procrastination. My intention is that you use all of them at once. For
example, the Meditation section is mostly focused on meditation as
training that allows you to catch and overcome the feelings that lead to
procrastination.
Pomodoro comes at procrastination from a different perspective. It

makes for a smaller, more achievable goal. A lot of people get down on
themselves if they can’t go an entire 8-hour work day without
procrastinating. Pomodoro helps you set a more achievable goal, say 25
minutes. And if that’s too long, make your Pomodoro even shorter. You
can always start small and build up to your final goal.
(The third main strategy for beating procrastination is next — using

Brain.fm for background noise.)
. . .

A lot of people have trained themselves to listen to music while they
work. But almost all research says that performance is poorer in the
presence of a background sound.
One obvious benefit, though, of music is social. You put on your

headphones and people know not to bother you. I often wear
headphones with no sound just to indicate to my coworkers that I’m
busy.
The research, however, on music as a background noise is that it’s

tricky — there are occasional benefits to productivity but also many,
many pitfalls. There is another approach: an emerging field of auditory
science used to boost focus and reduce mind-wandering.
Brain.fm is the best of these brain music options.
• Download the Brain.fm app.
• It’s free for a week and then $49.99 per year.
• Use their focus music while you work if you’re suffering from lack
of focus or procrastination.
Since I come from the world of coaching, I spend most of my time

helping people apply behavior changes. As a result, I often end up in a
place where I think I see certain advice working, but I don’t necessarily
understand or trust the scientific explanation for why that advice
works. That’s the case with Brain.fm.
My experience with Brain.fm is that it’s amazing and works exactly as

advertised. Sometimes, without sound, my brain will have a tendency
to wander. With the Brain.fm focus music, it some how shuts down that
wandering during any dead spots in my work (like if I’m waiting for an
app to load). As a result, I have more sustained periods of focus.
However, I find their explanation of the science to be inscrutable. It

sounds exactly like the type of pop-culture brain science that lots of
people spout. This doesn’t bother me, as long as it works.
The music is designed to have effects on neurophysiology via unique

acoustic features woven into the music (Brain.fm holds patents for key
aspects of this process). Examples include modulations optimized to evoke
entrainment of neural oscillations, filtering to exclude distracting sound
events, or smooth movement in virtual space to direct attention or avoid
habituation.
However, Brain.fm have run studies funded by the National Science

Foundation that back up my experience, which is that Brain.fm is better
than silence and silence is better than music.
I need to emphasize that this is a corporate-run study that magically

ended up with a self-serving result. So, more than the science, I just
want you to take my word for it enough to try it out for yourself
(remember, there’s a free trial).
. . .

Your podcast app should be on your home screen and you should train
yourself to listen to podcasts during your commute, while cleaning, and
during light cardio.
If you listen to podcasts on the bus or subway, here’s an important,

little-known fact. It’s preferable to just listen! You don’t also have to be
playing games and scrolling Instagram. Be a single-tasker.
The below are where most people should start when it comes to
productivity and health podcasts.
Of course, Tim Ferriss is on this list. But I rounded him out so that you
get a diverse set of ideas and approaches.
• By the Book. These two hosts buy a self-improvement book and

then test the advice for an entire month. This speaks to my heart: I
don’t trust anything in personal development until I’ve seen it
tested by a third party.
• Found My Fitness. Dr. Rhonda Patrick pushes my understanding of

the science of health, with the goal of improving your energy,
focus, health and longevity. She’s very focused on explaining new
research.
• Happier with Gretchen Rubin. I find her approach so much more

realistic and human than most other productivity and habit
experts. Plus I’ve used a lot of her tactics with our coaches and the
results were amazing.
• Jocko Podcast. He’s a former Navy SEAL with a face made for
frowning. Don’t follow his Instagram — that’s just daily pictures of
him waking up at 4am and rubbing it in your face. Paired with
Gretchen, I feel like you’ll get the full emotional range of how to
approach life. Jocko’s a no nonsense guy and sometimes you need
to just quit debating and go take an action.
• Unmistakeable Creative with Srinivas Rao. Most of his interviews

have a productivity or personal development angle. He gets great
interviews of people I haven’t heard from before. I often pull ideas
from his podcast.
• Tim Ferriss. Of course you should listen. I thought episode #2 was

life-changing and have been hooked ever since.
Do not approach your podcast subscriptions as if you need to listen to

every episode. Instead, pick and choose the most recent episodes that
feel relevant to you.
. . .
I’ve never heard anyone who shares my reasoning for why and how to
listen to productivity and health podcasts. Most people just think
having more information is inherently good. That’s not my reason.
Information is never enough for making important changes. You need

to get emotionally hooked, amped up and committed. The podcast
format gives you a chance to connect with advice at an emotional level
and really feel the social proof. That matters.
Second, most advice only works for some people some of the time. I’ve
written before that you should approach personal development advice
as if it only has a 10% success rate. The obvious implication is that
you’ll always be needing to try lots of approaches until you find the one
that works for you. Given that observation, it feels entirely natural to
me that you would listen to both Jocko Willink and Gretchen Rubin.
Guess which one of these authors wrote a NYT bestseller about happiness?
. . .
#27. Install the Kindle app, but never read it

in bed
Do not bother with cliff notes. There’s more value in being a slow
reader, where the stories in the book can work on your emotions, and
where your brain can roam freely to make connections between the
words and your own world. So skip book summary apps like Blinklist,
and embrace reading on the Kindle.
So, yes, install the Kindle app. This would be a good app for your home
screen. Try to replace mindless social media usage with deep learning
via either reading or podcasts.
But you’re probably not done.
Do you like to read before bed? Do not bring your phone to bed. That
kills your sleep, bad sleep kills your health, and eventually your bad
health is going to kill you. For the “Human Longevity” promise of this
article, buy a Kindle Paperwhite and put that next to your bed. If you’re
an iPhone owner, you can afford this second device.
. . .
Do you want a book recommendation to go with this section? I’ve got

one you’re not going to hear anywhere else. Go buy the sci-fi book Dune
and read it in the context of personal development.
• The lady-witch advisors, the Bene Gesserit, are what happens

when you have fine-tuned mastery over habit.
• The human computing Mentats are what’s possible through

extreme brain training.
• The Gom Jabbar test of humanity? That’s the mind-over-matter

possible through meditation. An animal gives in to the illusion of
pain; a human can see through that illusion.
• The Butlerian Jihad where humanity overthrew and then banned

all artificial intelligence? That’s what I keep saying here about
making your phone a tool, not your boss.
Also, two behavior design notes:
I’m absolutely positioning the Kindle to be a replacement habit for

Facebook and Twitter. How much smarter would you be if you replaced
half of your social media usage with reading?
Second, I have a not-very-well supported theory that’s paired with the

book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The behavior design implication of that
book is that you need to speak to two systems of the brain. Speaking to
the rational, Slow System is easy. Just lay out the facts.
Speaking to the emotional Fast System is much harder, namely because

it’s so hard to see or introspect on what’s going on in there. But if you
accept that difficulty (and this is the part of my theory that feels like
pop brain science), then you realize that you need to start looking for
ways to rewire your emotional core.
Then, having accepted that rewiring your emotions is part of most

behavior design, I’ve started to notice things — like that most self-
improvement advice is not very rational. That’s by design. A self-

improvement book is mostly emotional rewiring. That is exactly why
you need to read the entire book rather than cheating with a
summarized version.
. . .

I’ve tried and like Firefox Focus and Google Chrome, but there’s a
problem. Either you’ll end up cutting and pasting URLs that auto-
opened in Safari or you’ll end up having to manage individual app’s
preferences about how to handle a URL click.
Skip those complications. Safari is good.
There’s a secret, super rad option in Safari called Reader mode. This
mode strips out all of the in-article ads, clutter and junk. I find that it
does a great job and saves me from fat-fingering ads that have been
placed inside the body of the article.
Here’s the before and after on an article in Reader mode.
Good bye Car Ad, Hello Steph Curry Article.
To turn on reader mode once, there’s a little four line icon at the top left
of Safari. I’d managed to find that on my own.
What I hadn’t realized was that if you long press on that icon, you’ll get
an option to turn on Reader mode permanently for that site. This is
amazing and completely changed my experience of reading articles on

my phone.
Long press on the Reader icon on the top left. Then turn it on for the current site or all sites.
There are two things that you’re setting up here.
One is that you’ll flat out save time by not seeing or accidentally
tapping any ads. That’s a small productivity gain each day.
The second is related to being in charge of your phone. You don’t want
to see ads because you don’t want your phone telling you what to buy
and when. Advertising on your phone breaks the tool-not-boss rule.
. . .
#29. Organize your home screen for deep

learning over shallow learning
You’ve hidden all of your shallow social media experiences in a folder
on your second screen. Now, build a replacement habit for those dead
times in your day when you would be tempted to be on Twitter or
Facebook.
Pick the media that actually makes you smarter and then put apps for
that on your home screen.
My apps are Medium, Kindle and Podcast. Maybe you include the
Washington Post (although that’s probably an anxiety producer that
doesn’t actually need to be checked all day).
These are your deep learning apps and you just need to make sure they
are easier to find than your old, shallow, addictive apps.
Spotify is hiding on this screen. When do you listen to that? My recommendation is to do deep
listening, i.e. pick an album and listen to it while single tasking.
Replacement habits are a very common strategy in behavior design.

The underlying brain science is that it’s easier to create a new habit
than to delete an old habit.
In fact, you don’t ever really delete old habits. You might stop using the
neural pathway for your old habit, but the neurons are still there,
waiting for a moment of weakness. Eventually those cells will die out.
But there isn’t actually a way for you to train them to death.
That’s why we use replacement habits so often. You can train a new,
strong habit that supersedes your old habit. In this article, we’ve come
at social media usage in a bunch of ways, all of which work together.
We’ve tried to short circuit your existing habits by moving the apps,
we’ve added accountability through Screen Time, and in this section,
we’ve finally introduced the replacement habit that you’ll do instead.
. . .

Skip this step if you already have a way you track steps. Lots of you have
Fitbits or other ways to do this.
If you aren’t already using a pedometer, your iPhone will automatically

track steps for you in the Health App. However, you don’t want to have
to open that app in order to see your step count.
So, you’re going to need to install an app that comes with a Today
screen widget. My recommendation is Pedometer++.
Widget and in-app views.
• Go to Settings > Privacy> Motion & Fitness and make sure that
Fitness Tracking is turned on.
• Then install the Pedometer++ app.
• Add the Pedometer++ to your Today home screen.
. . .
You’re building up reasons now to check your Today screen daily. That’s
good.
Also, I went looking for some research to include here on the benefits of
10,000 steps. Unsurprisingly, the pleasing roundness of that number
owes more to marketing than to any particular science (9,901 steps is
practically just as good).
There is quality research on the health benefits of even tiny amounts of

walking (much less than 10,000 steps): trading two minutes of sitting
per hour for two minutes of walking per hour reduced mortality by
33%.
That’s not a justification for doing a full more-is-better 10,000 steps

though. The science for doing more walking is mixed, and requires
piecing together your own projections. For instance, this 2004 Arizona
State paper classifies people who walk 10,000 steps as active and
people who walk 12,500 as highly active. But they leave it up to you to
cross reference other studies on the health benefits of being in either
activity category.
So, my recommendation is to wait on the science and trust your gut

instead. For most people, walking feels good. It’s a chance to use your
body, to build up pride in a consistent amount of activity, to listen to
podcasts, to see your town or city. Those should be reason enough.
. . .
#31. Prefer time restricted eating over

calorie counting
You’ve heard losing weight is calories in, calories out (CICO). And then
you might have also heard this is wrong or at least misguided.
The official position in the Better Humans publication is that CICO is

just the wrong framing. Rather, instead, you need to think: to lose
weight, I need to burn fat.
Our position is that weight loss is all about putting your body into fat-
burning situations.
Calorie restriction, it turns out, is not guaranteed to lead to a fat-

burning situation. It can instead lead to a lower metabolism.
What does lead to fat loss then? Low carb diets and fasting. And the
most common form of fasting is time-restricted eating, where you fit all
your eating into an 8 hour window and then fast for the next 16 hours.
People refer to this as 16:8.
Additionally, my experience watching people diet (I ran a 15,000

person diet study and have had more than 100,000 dieters come
through Coach.me), is that time restricted eating is an easier behavior
change. Basically, it’s easier to train your body to skip breakfast than it
is to give up carbs, not for a month, but for the rest of your actual life.
Of course, you can combine both approaches. But if you had to pick
one, I’d start with time restricted eating.
If you absolutely want to go Low Carb, download MyFitnessPal and

upgrade ($49.99/year) so that you can track macros. You want to keep
your carbs below about 50g. If you don’t pay for the upgrade, you’ll
only be able to see calories and I’m telling you that’s not effective.
But really, where I want you to start is just to skip all of that food
restriction stuff and start with time restricted eating. As an example, I
try to stop eating before 8pm and then don’t start again until noon the
next day.
To track all of this, use an app called Zero and put it on your home
screen.
• Install the Zero app.
• When you stop eating today, open the app and start your fast.
• Don’t eat again until your fasting counter hits 16 hours.
Most of my fasts end up being 14–16 hours, and then there are always a few 20 hour fasts. The
longest I’ve ever fasted is 46 hours.
. . .
The best explanation why fasting leads to burning fat and why simple
calorie restriction leads to lower metabolism comes from Dr. Jason
Fung.
Consider that your body has two primary sources for fuel. One is
glycogen, i.e. the carbs you eat. And the other is stored fat. Your body
uses insulin to switch from one source to the other.
Specifically, when you are in a fed state, i.e. you ate recently, your body
releases insulin, which inhibits your body from burning fat. Dr. Fung’s
uses a train track visualization below and I always try to keep in mind
which track I’m intending to be on.
. . .
#32. Schedule Night Shift starting 4 hours

before you normally go to bed
Night shift “shifts” the colors of your display away from the blue
spectrum and toward the warmer (redder) spectrum. That’s supposed
to help you sleep better.
• Go to Settings > Display & Brightness > Night Shift.
• Schedule Night Shift starting four hours before your normal bed
time.
• Move the warmth slider all the way to the right (More Warm).
The standard advice seems to be to avoid screen time and blue light
starting two hours before your bed time.
However, my experience with sleep coaching is that people are often

going to bed much later than they should, often because of a phone
addiction. Starting Night Shift four hours earlier gives you an
opportunity to both go to sleep more easily and also to shift your bed
time up. If you find yourself going to bed earlier, then just get up earlier.
Congratulations, you’ve become a morning person.
. . .
The case against screens is strong. Here a quote from one study:
We found that the use of these devices before bedtime prolongs the time it
takes to fall asleep, delays the circadian clock, suppresses levels of the sleep-
promoting hormone melatonin, reduces the amount and delays the timing
of REM sleep, and reduces alertness the following morning.
All bad.
The science for the red shift as a solution to all of the above negative
effects is much more iffy. In fact, Night Shift is a pretty silly feature. The
studies say blue light is bad. But at the time the Night Shift feature was
built, nobody had done proper testing of red light. It turns out red light
is also bad.
So, the reason I like this feature is because it’s a prompt to start working
on your evening routine to head to bed. Basically, it’s just a color coded
reminder. That’s it.
. . .

The Medical ID feature makes key medical information available to
strangers when your phone is locked.
If you are incapacitated during a medical emergency, a stranger can go

to your power-off screen (long press right button and volume up on
modern iPhones). That’s where your Medical ID info will be.
• Go to Health App > Medical ID > Edit
• Everyone should add an emergency medical contact.
• Your medications and medical conditions would be public to

anyone who picks up your phone. If that worries you, put a note
instead: “Call emergency contact for medications and medical
conditions.”
• Knowing your blood type doesn’t appear to be very helpful in an

emergency situation. Paramedics aren’t carrying blood — they
pump you with fluids instead. Then when you reach the hospital,
they’ll give you the universal donor, O-negative.
• I labeled myself an Organ Donor and went through Apple’s

DonateLife integration. Then I tweeted about it. The more people
who sign up for Organ Donation, the more likely your own life is
going to be saved. So the selfish step here is to use your own organ
donation status to encourage other people to become organ
donors.
. . .
I see Medical ID as having three practical benefits to you, in order of

likelihood.
• A kind stranger finds your lost phone and calls your emergency
contact.
• You have a life-threatening situation, and the doctors call your

emergency contact.
• You influence someone else to become an Organ Donor and then

they end up donating an organ to you. The literal likelihood of this
is very, very low.
. . .
Product designers consistently choose female voices for services like

Siri and Alexa because culturally we’re more comfortable with bossing
around women.
Put aside that that’s gross for one second.
You’re a productivity nut. You’re going places. Don’t you think at some
point you’re going to have to get comfortable bossing around men?
Should I run a study of the productivity bene ts of each accent?
• Go to Settings > Siri & Search > Siri Voice. I chose Australian
Man.
. . .
This is going to get weird and darkly introspective.
Originally, I’d looked into changing Siri’s voice because somebody had
told me that men are more likely to be cruel to a female-voiced AI. You
know what I mean about getting frustrated when Siri or Alexa makes a
mistake. Alexa, especially, likes to butt in and is just begging to be told
to shut up. I’m constantly having to tell Alexa, “Alexa, stop.” but how
close am I to cracking and yelling “Shut up, bitch?”
I don’t treat any woman in my life that way and I don’t want to start
with a robot.
I couldn’t find any research at all to back up this idea of gendered

cruelty to robots, although I did find published anecdotes:
When Jeremy barked orders at his personal assistant, she didn’t flinch, but
I did. Something about the sound of his sharp, commanding tone —
directed not at me, but still, at a woman — repulsed me. In the few weeks
we had been dating, he had never spoken to me this way. But could he?
Hearing Jeremy make ungrateful demands didn’t make him seem powerful
or important. He sounded entitled and difficult, like someone who enjoyed
commanding for the sake of commanding. He would ask her to do things
he could easily do himself, almost as if to prove that he could. Surely, it
would take less time to reach out and hit the light switch by the door than
to bark “ALEXA. LIGHTS ON” every time he entered the apartment.
Not finding more established research, I backtracked to to the person

who’d originally told me this. Her sources were multiple backchannel
discussions from people who work on these AI products. People, not
just men, say the rudest, cruelest things to female AIs, much ruder and
cruder than they do to male AIs. If I can get one of these AI product
people on the record, I’ll add it to this post.
Our relationships to robots is so weird and interesting and scary —

there’s deep cultural conditioning, new robot etiquettes, power
dynamics, etc.
At heart, I’m worried about developing patterns with my female AIs

that I don’t have with my female friends, peers and colleagues. And
what if those AI patterns transfer over to my human interactions?
You might think the opposite, why can’t I practice treating my female
AIs with respect and grace? I don’t have a good answer. I just know that
this dynamic is worth examining in yourself.
Was this too weird of a tangent? This is honestly the type of shit I think
about all day.
. . .

The default is something like, “Tony Stubblebine’s iPhone.” That
exposes your privacy when you have your hotspot turned on, and
advertises to the entire world that you don’t know how to customize
your phone.
There are three strategies for choosing a new name:
1. Entertain the people around you. For example, “Pretty Fly for a
Wifi.”
2. Advertise your services, “$15 off coach.me w/ HOTPROMO”
3. Inspire yourself with positivity. I got this idea from an old Hippie
Cafe in San Francisco that named everything after an affirmation.
To order the enchiladas you’d end up saying something like “I Am
a Glamorous Goddess.” You can browse their old menu for
inspiration, or just take my recommendation. I chose “I Am
Focused” and now my phone shows up as “I Am Focused.”
Here’s how to set this yourself:
• Go to the Settings app and then navigate to General > About >
Name.
NSA-car-on-the-corner is someone using strategy #1.
. . .
Positive self-talk is actually surprisingly effective. I always thought it

was too woo-woo, but then I tested it out with some people at work.
They all said it was more effective than anything we’d ever done,
including journaling, meditation, sleep, priority setting, and morning
routines. People have a lot of negative self-talk that they don’t like, but
which they haven’t taken the time to train theirselves out of.
If you’re interested in positive self-talk, I got my start with this By the

Book episode, where they read and tested a book about changing your
self-talk.
Of course, training yourself to be more positive isn’t as simple as

changing the name of your phone, but it’s a start.
. . .

If you turn off advertising tracking, then the ads you see won’t be
specifically targeted to you and what advertisers know about you. The
point here is that getting less targeted ads is good. You want to spend
money on your own terms.
This is a variant on “your phone is a tool, not your boss”. When you
want to spend money, you want to use your phone for research and
then make a purchase based on that research. You do not want the
other way around, where your phone is telling you or brainwashing you
what to buy. You are the boss.
• Go to Settings > Privacy > Advertising. Turn on Limit Ad

Tracking.
You’re still going to get advertising in some places, but almost all of the
advice I’ve given here includes paying for the ad-free version of the
apps you use.
Paying for ad-free apps probably saves you money, as you’re less likely
to buy something you don’t want.
. . .

When you stop using your phone, it’ll auto-lock to prevent some
stranger from grabbing your phone and digging through your private
info. That’s basically a good feature, but most often the result is that
you end up locking yourself out.
Most people keep their cell phones on their person — so keeping your
phone locked is not a huge security risk. We’re only talking about five
minutes — that’s the maximum auto-lock setting. If you check your
phone on the way into your gym, walk to your locker, put your phone in
your locker, change into your workout clothes, lock your locker and
walk away, your phone has probably already locked itself. (Plus, most
of you actually take your phone out to the gym with you!)
So the strategy here is to save yourself the few seconds it takes to

unlock your phone by extending the auto-lock time.
• Go to General > Settings > Display & Brightness > Auto-Lock.
• Max out auto-lock to 5 minutes.
“Never” would be too aggressive.
My take on the value of saving time here is that those few seconds of
waiting for a phone to wake up is when you are at risk for getting
distracted. So, worst case this setting saves you a few minutes of time
(research says you check your phone 25 times per day). But best case, it
saves you from 30 minutes of goofing off.
. . .
#38. Set your personal hotspot password to

a random three-word phrase
Sometimes you need to share your hotspot password with a close friend
or loved one. A random three-word phrase is something you can say out
loud that they won’t have trouble spelling.
This is also a more general trick for creating quality passwords that are
easy for you to say or remember. Think about your router’s password
for example and how you’re always having to share it with guests.
Sharing a three-word phrase is so much easier than a string of random
letters and numbers.
The debate about the security of this strategy for passwords ranges
from very positive to just slightly positive.
• Go to Settings > Personal Hotspot. Set the password to something

like appleduckmovie.
I did an edit pass to try to remove my private info from this article — so this is not my actual
password.
. . .
I spent a summer driving all over the United States, totaling 9,000 miles
while working from a campervan. I know a thing or two about internet
access from weird spots. In almost all places, using my phone as a
hotspot beat out trying to find local wifi. My phone was faster and more
convenient. This setting is about making your hotspot even easier to
use, especially when you are connecting new devices to it or sharing it
with traveling companions. That can actually be a real productivity
win.
. . .
#39. Turn on Control Center everywhere

Swipe down from the top-right of your screen and you’ll have access
your Control Center which contains toggles for wifi, bluetooth,
flashlight and more.
Apple wants to give you the option to turn this behavior off when you’re
inside of a different app. That’s a mistake.
The main reason to have always-on access to the control center is so

that you can toggle wifi on and off. Direct, manual toggling of the
source of your internet is an important way to control the speed of your
app experiences.
• Go to Settings > Control Center. Enable Access Within Apps.
• While you’re here, go to Customize Controls. You might want to

add some more options. I put my alarm and timer here since I use
both and want shortcuts.
Isn’t Orientation Lock the weirdest, feature-bloatiest, least-Apple option? Does anyone unlock their
orientation for any reason other than videos? And then does anyone remember to turn it back on
afterward? IMO — this feature should be removed and full screen videos should always play in
portrait mode.
. . .
There have been dozens of times where I’ve wondered why an app was
slow and then realized the culprit was either the wifi or the cell signal.
As someone who travels a lot, I often find that I get the best internet
speeds when I’m willing to take direct control of switching between wifi
and cell service. Sometimes one of those is much stronger than the
other.
When you are using your phone as a tool, then fast internet is a direct
link to productivity. That’s the main reason to have access to the
Control Center.
. . .

This setting used to clog up your bandwidth and kill your phone
battery. But we’re in a new era of fast bandwidth and better batteries.
So turn it on.
The upside is that you’ll have one less thing to manage, and all of your
apps will stay updated automatically.
• Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and make

sure everything is toggled on.
No special discussion here other than referencing saving your cognitive

budget. When automation works well, you’re saving your brain cycles
to do something better. That’s the case here.
. . .

GarageBand was 1.8GB when I went to check my installed apps. On a
new phone, I’m not planning to do a lot of managing my storage, but
1.8GB is enough to get my attention.
• Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage.
• Tap through to any large apps you aren’t planning to ever use.
There will be a delete option there.
Don’t worry, you can always reinstall these apps.
Never used Uber? That’s how you can tell this is a new phone.
This is the sort of thing that’s better to do now, while your focused
attention is on setting up your iPhone. You’re saving yourself time down
the road when you run out of storage at an inopportune time.
. . .
#42. Develop verbal memory for talking

to Siri
Some people take right away to talking to Siri, and other people don’t.
The problem is the mental version of muscle memory. If you’ve never

talked to Siri, then it’s hard to muster the new behavior in those
occasional times where it would be useful.
Here’s what I suggest: go through the script below a few times and see
if anything sticks. You can turn on Siri by long pressing the button on
the right of your iPhone. In parentheses, I’ve listed the phrase that will
reverse the alarm or reminder that you just set.
• Set alarm for tomorrow at 8am. (Turn off alarm)
• Remind me to check the oven in 35 minutes. (Remove reminder to

check the oven)
• How old is Malcom Gladwell?
• Timer for 10 minutes (Turn off timer)
• What is 20% of 46?
Now do something to make calling people easier. Set a nickname for a

loved one, like your mom.
• <Person’s full name> is my mom
• Text my mom love you
. . .
What we just did here is a tactic called deliberate practice. When most
people read about an iPhone trick, they will try to store the trick away
in their memory, hoping that they will remember that trick down the
road.
I want you to consider a much more effective approach. If you ever

think you want to use a new trick or behavior later on, try practicing it
first. The practice makes later recall so much more likely.
This is really a life philosophy to build in practice time for all of your life
and work skills. For a very deep dive, see Jason Shen’s Complete Guide
to Deliberate Practice. This is the same article I recommended in the
Meditation step.
. . .
#43. Set up these Text Replacement

shortcuts
There are basically two keyboard shortcuts that everyone should have.
One is for your email address and the other is for your home address.
Once you get used to the power of shortcuts, you’ll probably start
adding more.
Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement
• Add your full address. I used the shortcut: ma
• Add your full email address. I used the shortcut: em
It’s easy to make the mistake of getting the phrase and shortcuts reversed. You should test these
right after adding them.
Now when you type either of those shortcuts, you’ll get an option to
autocomplete to your full text replacement.
This is a pure and simple productivity hack. No discussion necessary.
. . .

There are at least (at least) five places where your phone will pull your
home address.
If you went through the Google Maps section, then you added a home
address there.
If you went through the Text Replacement section, then you set a
shortcut for your address.
There are still three more places to set:
• Go to Settings > Apple Id Etc. > Payment & Shipping.
• Go into Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay and check your Shipping
Address option.
• Also, Siri pulls your home address for your personal entry in your
contacts. Go into Contacts and then edit your own entry in order
to make sure it’s current.
Boom. Now you’ve saved yourself some typing down the road. That’s
productivity.
. . .

Yes, you should have backups even though practically every app you
install stores your data in the cloud. But backups do make it much
easier to set up a new phone when you upgrade (or lose it).
I strongly suggest iCloud backups — they’re cheap. I’m on the

$10.99/year package for 20GB and creeping toward the next level
which is just another $0.99/month for another 30GB.
• Go to Settings > Apple ID > iCloud.
There should be options there to manage your iCloud storage and

which apps get backed up. You should back up most of them given how
cheap storage is.
I used to resist paying for backups, but the math on the time savings
alone is great. You’ll pay a few tens of dollars to save yourself hours of
work when you upgrade your phone. And then you’ll save yourself a
huge headache if you actually do lose your phone completely.
. . .
Appendix A: Principles
Below are the principles that come up over and over again in this
article. Where possible, I’ve tried to cite science.
However, many of these principles come through my work at

Coach.me. We started as a gamified habit tracker, and through that
experience, we helped a few million people form a few tens of millions
of new habits. The vast majority of those people were motivated by
productivity or health.
And then, also through Coach.me, I ran a brain training group that
worked individually with 2,000 people and, separately, started a
behavior design coaching certification that’s produced coaches who’ve
worked more than with 20,000 clients.
So, the principles that don’t have citations are, well, just, like, my
opinion, man.
. . .
#1. Your phone is a tool, not a boss

No need to lead with science here — this starts as dead simple
philosophy. What’s the point of life? Abdicating your life to be a servant
of your phone is a shitty approach.
Moreover, a lot of research points out that your phone is not a very
good boss. See Tristan Harris’ How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind
or Linda Stone’s Email Apnea.
. . .
#2. Shave seconds to break procrastination

There are a handful of exercises in this article that have very small
surface-level productivity gains. Does it really matter if you save one
second every time you open your phone?
I say yes. In my experience training people to break procrastination or

enter flow states, those pauses are prime times for you to get distracted.
In those cases, a two second pause can turn into a 30 minute break.
If any programmers are reading this, what is the honest answer to how
long it takes to run your automated tests? Is it the literal time that the
tests run, or the time of the break you take while the tests are running?
. . .
#3. Conserve cognitive budget

From my piece on Superhuman Cognitive Stamina:
Every decision, big or small, every moment of mental focus, and every act
of comprehension is part of your day’s cognitive stamina. Let’s call that
your cognitive budget.
Many people look at this as the Steve Jobs turtleneck story. What did he
wear to work every day? A black turtleneck. So while you were
spending your cognitive budget getting dressed, he was saving his up
for when he got to work.
So, on your phone, you want to look for places to eliminate

decisions ,because you’ll use those decisions somewhere else.
This NYT piece is the right primer on the research that says willpower is
limited. This other NYT piece is the right primer on Carol Dweck’s work
that points to the opposite conclusion, that self-belief determines if
willpower is a limited resource. Science is so frustrating — two
seemingly opposing views. I believe willpower is limited, but trainable.
. . .
#4. Messy systems beat rigid systems

When you spend time in the productivity world, you start to realize
how much time people spend playing around with productivity
systems.
Part of this is that a lot of productivity nuts are pursuing productivity as

a hobby — essentially, they are role-playing a world where they are
more successful. So for them, it’s fun to constantly tweak systems and
try new tools.
However, the other reason people spend so much time changing tools
and systems is that rigid tools and systems break. When they break, it’s
almost always easier to just start over from scratch with a new system.
So, where possible, try to use a messy system. Those will tend to be less
fragile. In this article, the most common messy systems were backed by
a strong search feature.
. . .
#5. Habits beat tools

A strong habit is a case where you can do something automatically and
effortlessly. That’s so valuable. It’s very rare that a new tool has a
feature that’s more valuable than your old habit.
Many productivity reviews say the opposite. They say you should
definitely try the newest and latest thing.
They’re wrong. If you have a habit based around an old tool, then you
should be unapologetic about sticking with that tool.
If any programmers are reading this, a good tool to examine would be

your text editor. I alternate between Sublime and Vim. I want to be a
Sublime user, but my muscle memory around Vim shortcuts is so good
that I still find I’m much more productive in Vim which was publicly
released in 1991 and which I’ve been using since 1996.
. . .
#6. Optimize for deep work & deep learning

I’m strongly influenced by Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work and Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow.
Cal comes from the perspective of deep work often being your most
productive and valuable work. Mihaly’s research was actually just
focused on happiness. Deep work is when people report the deepest
levels of satisfaction.
Both of them recognize how difficult it is to do deep work or deep

learning. Those moments don’t come by accident, and when they do,
they are easily disrupted.
A lot of the advice in this article is meant to make it just a little bit easier
for you to focus, to get into flow, and to achieve deep thinking and deep
accomplishments. The main strategies are to eliminate interruptions,
replace shallow behaviors with deeper ones (reading vs. tweeting), and
schedule leisure activities and shallow activities so that they don’t
interfere with your deep work.
. . .
#6. Yes, your phone does impact your longevity

By default, your phone is set up to create anxiety. I referenced a study
about how mild anxiety leads to increased mortality twice in this
article.
You paid too much for your iPhone to let it kill you — that’s an
outrageous side effect. So instead, eliminate the anxiety.
I gave a few examples of how your phone can change your diet and
activity patterns in order to help you live longer. Use Coach.me, Zero &
the Pedometer.
. . .
Appendix B: Budget & Costs

The bare-bones budget for the advice in this article is as follows:
• $24/year. LastPass.
• $11/year. iCloud backup.
• $24/year. Google storage.
Bare-bones budget: $59/year
. . .
The mid-level budget for the advice in this article adds:
• $120 for Kindle Paperwhite
• $2.99 Pomodoro Pro
• $70/year for Evernote
• $60/year for Calm
Mid-level budget: $122.99 up front and then $189/year
. . .
The max-level budget for the advice in this article is
• $50/year. Brain.fm
• $1,000/year. A pet dog for your wallpaper (estimated from

PetFinder).
• $130 for two months of productivity coaching. I recommend a

coach for forming a new habit picked from Inbox Zero or Set
Priorities.
• $10 for the Kindle version of Dune.
Max-level budget: $262.99 up front and then $1,172.99/year.
. . .
Appendix C: Case study

#1. Turn OFF (Almost) All Notifications.
Zero badges anywhere. No notifications for messaging, email, Slack.
My most notable deviation for notifications is for Coach.me.
. . .

I don’t have the Facebook app installed although I do check the web
sometimes. Facebook bullied me into having the Facebook Messenger
app installed because they won’t show me messages on the mobile
website.
. . .

I do see text messages on my home screen from a small handful of
people, namely my family and my dog walker. I look at everything else
during scheduled inbox time.
. . .
#4. Disable App Review Requests

Done.
. . .

Done, but just for leisure and sleep time, i.e., 6pm to 9am.
. . .

I went with the built in black-with-rainbow.
. . .

Done.
. . .

Done.
. . .
#9. Add Content Restrictions

Just sfgate.com for me, which was a website that made more sense to
visit when I lived somewhere else.
. . .
#10. (Optional) Use Restrictions to turn off Safari

I did this once in the past. I would do this again temporarily to break
any new web browsing habits.
. . .
#11. Organize your Apps and Folders alphabetically
This is how I did it. You probably won’t have a TV folder like I do — most
of those apps are just ways to watch Warriors basketball games.
. . .
#12. Choose Gmail

Yes. I get to Inbox Zero every day, practice “Touch it Once” where I
never read an email more than once, and unsubscribe/mute/filter so
that I have as little email in my inbox as possible. I don’t use any built-in
smart filters.
. . .

Yes.
. . .

Yes. I only have a Home set, since I work from home.
. . .
#15. Install the Gboard keyboard for faster typing

Yes, with black background and Apple keyboard removed.
. . .

Done.
. . .
#17. Use Evernote for all note taking, to-do lists, everything
Yes. It’s in my toolbar.
. . .
#18. The Case for Calm as your go-to meditation app

Done. It’s on my home screen.
. . .

Yes, Coach.me, and more than 11,000 check-ins to my habits. I
personally track:
• Wake up early. This is the most popular version of several wake-up

goals in Coach.me. My definition is more focused on waking up at
the same time every day, 8am. If that actually sounds late to you,
then I’m sorry.
• Morning routine. It starts right after taking the dogs out. Pushups
& planks, pet both dogs, hygiene & grooming, get fully dressed
(which feels optional when you work from home).
• One priority. This is my version of prioritization, which is to pick a

top priority and make sure it gets done.
• Interstitial journaling. I mark this off as soon as I open my laptop

and create a journal entry for the day. Then it becomes a mix of
journal and to-do/task tracking.
• Intermittent fasting. I mark this off if I can make it until noon

without eating.
• Exercise. Usually some mix of long walks, running, biking or

swimming.
• Meditation. Most often this is in the sauna post-workout.
• No caffeine. Not necessary when I’m getting quality sleep.
. . .
#20. Store all your passwords in a password manager, probably

LastPass
I use 1Password, but if I were starting from scratch I’d use LastPass.
. . .
#21. Use Numerical as your default calculator

Yes.
. . .

Yes.
. . .
#23. Use this Doppler Radar app

Yes.
. . .

Yes.
. . .
Yes.
. . .

Subscribed.
. . .
#27. Install the Kindle app but never read it in bed

Yes. I charge my phone in the kitchen and use my Kindle Paperwhite in
bed.
. . .

Yes. The option to automatically turn on readability-mode for certain
sites is one of my favorite features.
. . .
#29. Organize your home screen for deep learning over shallow
learning
Yes.
. . .

I also get steps from a Garmin watch, but I find I’m more likely to have
my phone on me than I am to be wearing my watch. So my phone has
the more accurate count.
. . .
#31. Prefer Time Restricted Eating Over Calorie Counting

Yes. Love the Zero app and I generally try not to eat before 12. I also
own a KetoMojo blood tester ($60) to measure when I’m in a fat
burning mode.
. . .
#32. Schedule Night Shift

Yes, mine is set for 8pm.
. . .

Yes, mainly so that I can share my emergency contact. I don’t actually
know my blood type.
. . .

I’m using the Australian Man voice.
. . .

Yes, “I Am Focused”
. . .

Yes.
. . .

5 minutes.
. . .
#38. Set your personal hotspot password to a three word phrase

I’m not telling you what it is.
. . .
#39. Turn on control center everywhere

Yes. I also have quick access to my timer and alarm from here, although
I’m most likely to set those from Siri.
. . .

Yes.
. . .

For me, just Garage Band.
. . .
#42. Develop verbal memory for talking to Siri

Yes, for all the ones in the list plus calling and face-timing people.
. . .
#43. Set up these text replacement shortcuts

I use three: my address, my personal email address, and the URL
coach.me.
. . .

Yes, in all five places.
. . .

Yes, I use iCloud, with multiple redundancies since my photos get
backed up to other places and all of my important individual services
are backed by cloud storage.
. . .
Appendix D: Updates
Do you have anything to add or correct in this article? Let me know and
I’ll make an update.
• October 13, 2018: Added a strategy to create affirmation-style

wallpapers in Instagram Stories and then rotate them through
your Lockscreen. Credit to Jonathan Howard.
• October 16, 2018: One, otherwise very smart, reader suggested

dropping Evernote in favor of Google’s Keep app given that I’m all-
in on Google Cloud everywhere else. Unfortunately for Keep, it’s
built with rigid note types that don’t let you insert todo-list items
into a regular note. That makes it ill-suited for Interstitial
Journaling.
• October 16, 2018: A number of people pushed me to try

Superhuman as a GMail client. It’s currently invite-only, so I’m not
going to make it the default advice yet. In early testing, I think
their unsubscribe feature fits neatly with my advice to get hands
on about what email you receive rather than hoping that other
people’s algorithms filter it correctly. Their unsubscribe feature
works with a simple keyboard shortcut and then takes the best
available unsubscribe route, which ranges from clicking the
unsubscribe link to just blocking the sender.
• October 17, 2018: On Twitter, Lucas Diez made the case that
anger toward an AI is a sign you should go to a therapist and also
that it would be better to leave Siri with a female voice so you can
address your anger/bias problems head on. I think gendered
behavior toward an AI is common and socially implanted, and that
you should start by just being aware of it. That’s not to say you
shouldn’t go to a therapist — more I’m predicting that you should
go to a therapist because you actually have much bigger problems
that a therapist would help with. I am sympathetic to the idea of
addressing your bias head on and just learning to treat the Siri’s
and Alexa’s of the world with polite respect. I’d love to hear more
from other people about the case for a female voice.
• October 18, 2018: A number of people have asked for an Android

version. Here’s the best guide we’ve published in Better Humans:
How to Have a Zen Experience on Your Android Phone by Chris
Jennings
• October 18, 2018: A number of people have asked for a Mac

version. Yes, we’ve covered a lot of these angles (all written by
Niklas Göke): How to Save 10 Minutes Per Day While Browsing

the Web, How to Move Around Your Mac at the Speed of Light,
Which Browser Will Make You More Productive, How to Set Up
Firefox for Productivity, How to Set Up Your Mac for Focused
Work.
• October 18, 2018: Reddit and some of the responses below poked
the whole idea of the Google cloud. Here are a couple additional
notes. Moving to the Google cloud is generally not more valuable
than your existing habits. If you have a system you like that uses
other services, then stay put with those services. Moving to the
Google cloud does trade privacy for productivity. Google will use
your data to advertise to you. However, this is a productivity
article. If you wish it were a privacy article, then use Protonmail.
Last, it’s not consistent that I have you turn off Apple’s ad tracking
while then making yourself fully available to Google’s ad tracking.
This is a tradeoff. You can turn off Apple’s tracking with zero
downside, so do it. With Google, I think it’s worthwhile to use
their services and then fight ads in other places. The Reader
feature in Safari basically hides most Google ads that you’d see on
your phone. On your computer, try an ad blocker.
• October 18, 2018: Reddit suggested Bear over Evernote. This is a

very good suggestion and is, I think, a close call. Bear appears
better in every respect but one. The don’t make any versions for
non-Apple products. Evernote is so key to me, that I want it
available on times when I happen to have gone Linux, Windows or
Android. Over the last ten years, I’ve only been a 90% user of
Apple products. However, if you are confident that you’ll be a
100% user of Apple products, Bear looks better than Evernote.
• October 22, 2018: Reader Steven Zhang pointed me to John

Zeratsky’s concept of Infinity Pools: “always-on, effectively infinite
sources of information and entertainment.” I think this is an
excellent, maybe superior, description of what I was called “slot
machines” in the sections above.
• October 22, 2018: Several readers asked about using Apple’s

Keychain instead of a third-party password manager. I thought this
Macworld article covered the answer pretty well. One of many
convincing points against Keychain:
But while [Keychain is] broadly useful in OS X, as more developers have

adopted it and there’s Keychain Access for direct lookups and retrieval, in
iOS you have to drill down to Settings > Safari > Passwords to view, edit,
or (swipe all the way to the bottom) add passwords. Further, you can’t
invoke Keychain in Apple’s non-Web login dialogs, making it useless

for common purposes. And while you can make up a password when you
need one, it’s awkward to get to and can only be retrieved easily on a
corresponding Web page.
• December 7, 2018: A few readers asked me about the Shortcuts

app which allows for you to do some custom scripting of steps on
your iPhone. The best place to hear about shortcuts that other
people are writing is on the shortcuts subreddit. You may have
noticed during this article that I was a stickler for trying to find
advice that had been tested. Since shortcuts were knew when I
published this, I hadn’t yet found anyone that was definitely using
the feature productively. I’m actually still in that situation — the
feature sounds promising, but I want to see that verified in the
wild (possibly by you responding with your own use case).

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6/24/2019 How to Conﬁgure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You

How to Con gure Your iPhone to

Coach Tony Follow

In addition, because this is a long post, I’ve written it in a way to make it

1. Level 1 — Casual. Read the headlines — figure out the details

2. Level 2 — Tutorial. Read the steps underneath the headline. I’ve

3. Level 3 — Productivity Nerd. Below the tutorial steps, I’ve included

Also, for convenience, here is a clickable table of contents. (The links

Optimize First for Single Tasking

#1. Turn OFF (almost) all notifications

Switch to Google Cloud to Work Faster

#12. Choose GMail

Install These Apps for Productivity

#17. Use Evernote for all note taking, to-do lists,

Use These Apps and Configurations for Deep Learning

#26. Subscribe to these podcasts

Use These Apps and Configurations for Longevity

#30. Track steps this way

Make The Finishing Touches with These Configurations

#34. Change Siri to a man

Appendix B: Budget & Costs

Appendix C: Case Study

#1. Turn OFF (almost) all notifications

Go app by app, turning off all notifications.

No badges, almost all noti cations o . See below for exceptions.

There are only a very few reasons to leave notifications on for a

• For all delivery apps, leave notifications on. These notifications

Never allow badges!

• Leave notifications on for your calendar app. Not missing

• Leave notifications on for Maps and Google Maps. These apps

• Leave notifications on for phone calls. Although, consider turning

#1: Notifications are uncontrolled interruptions from your real goals.

#2: The brain science behind learning requires sustained focus to

#2. Hide social media slot machines

• Move Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest,

This last trick comes from Tristan Harris.

Source: Tristan Harris

This second-screen-of-folder-on-second-screen strategy requires that at

#3. Hide messaging slot machines

• Move your mail apps, Slack, Messages, WhatsApp and Facebook

• I call my folder Messages. The default iPhone folder name

The productivity secret for inbox management is to decide when you

#4. Disable App Review requests

So disable these unwanted Review Requests.

• Go to Settings > Apple ID > iTunes & App Stores.

Is it crazy how we think of computers as productivity devices but then

Apps with more positive reviews get ranked higher by Apple. As a

Do you care about the morality of opting out of this partnership? A

When you or I do take advantage, we’re basically stealing. This sort of

Religious Americans are reported to have more robust immune systems,

If you’re worried about the effect of morality on your longevity, here a

#5. Turn on Do Not Disturb

Do Not Disturb is not as severe as you might think, thanks to a sub-

If, however, you do want strangers to be able to contact you (for

• Go to Settings > Do Not Disturb

• Do Not Disturb works a little differently on your Mac versus on

• There’s a Repeated Calls option to allow repeat callers to get

The justification here is similar to the steps above. Limited

What the above Do Not Disturb setting allows you to do is to take a

#6. Be strategic about your wallpaper

• Go to Settings > Wallpaper > Choose a New Wallpaper > Stills.

Simple background that looks good in all cases.

There are other options: