hello and welcome back to the bliss bean a couple of months ago i did a phone tour where i showed
you a couple of tricks that i use like making my phone grayscale or minimizing my notifications
in order to improve my relationship with my phone since then i've discovered a couple
of new tricks to help me trick myself basically and change my behavior when it comes to my phone
my question was how can i make my phone a useful tool but only when i need it because i don't think
there's anything inherently wrong with having a phone but you have to make sure that you are
using your phone and your phone isn't using you so let us begin on the home page i was really excited
for widgets to come out in ios 14 and then i was very disappointed by their execution you can't
do anything with the widgets they just show you information and then you have to go to the app to
see more i was very excited about the possibility of a spotify widget where i could have shortcuts
to my evening playlist workout playlist monthly playlist but unfortunately this is all they came
up with and this is pretty useless so the only widgets that i am currently using are a brief
calendar my activity rings and then the smallest weather widget that you can get if i swipe left
then i get a full weather forecast just for five days not a full week for some reason and then
predictions from my cycle tracking app so comment your predictions below so the first step i have
in my dock is the done habits tracker and i like this particular habit tracker because it's just so
simple and colorful if you watched my video last week where i showed 17 different daily and weekly
habits that i have you might be thinking this is not 17. so i try to keep this app really nice and
simple because i don't want to be in this app all day long trying to meticulously track every aspect
of my life even though that is my tendency i try to avoid it but like the exercise habit i just use
my activity rings to track that weekly routines like organizing photos or doing weekly planning
that just lives in my to do app i have the camera app because you can't be a blogger without taking
photos of yourself the day one app is a journaling app my paper journal is kind of boring and tedious
to read through so in here what i want to do is just write a couple of sentences about what i did
each day attach a photo and i think eventually it'll be a really cool record of how my day-to-day
life changes this is my time tracking app and if you are a veteran viewer of the bliss bean you
will know that i was a really big fan of this app called now then pro for time tracking i still do
have it on my phone just because i'm too lazy to export the data it's a great app but tragically
it does not have an apple watch app and so i went looking for an app that does have an apple
watch version and this one called a tracker was my favorite honestly i've liked it a lot
maybe even more than now than pro so i might just have to redo my entire time tracking video but
it has a lot of features that now then pro does it like being able to record simultaneous tasks being
able to apply different tags to tasks or creating goals other apps i have on my home screen this
is that same period tracker photos app daily aloha is like a little daily journaling prompt
this icon is a shortcut that i created that takes me to a note with all of my hashtags for instagram
posts normally it opens up instantly i don't know why it's showing the shortcut screen maybe because
i'm doing a screen recording right now and it can't handle doing all this stuff but yeah then i
have my to do app things three spotify this is my sleep tracking app i actually slept really really
well last night look at that and then i have my bank app because i try to check that every day
and that is it that is the only page that i have on my phone so at first when this app library
feature was announced i did not understand it so i didn't use it which i do not recommend just
because you don't understand something doesn't mean you shouldn't check it out but i was very
set in my old ways and so i had like four pages of apps and one folder on each page basically my
idea was to try and hide everything away i had the distracting apps on the very last page so i had to
swipe all the way to get to them now i finally looked into what the app library actually does
and i realize it kind of achieves the same purpose i have no small number of apps so i don't want to
go and call this like a minimalist phone because i don't know what the cutoff point for number of
apps on a minimalist phone is but it's probably not what i have i do go through them and delete
stuff that is no longer useful to me but for example apps like uber or hostile world or
hotels.com those are not going to be useful to me anytime soon obviously but i also don't really see
the point in deleting them if they're not getting in the way so here's what we're gonna do the app
library organizes all of your apps into these automatically suggested folders so we're just
gonna go through one by one i actually really like the design of these folders good job apple
so safari i actually considered disabling safari and then i realized just how much stuff i look
up throughout the day so i'm keeping it for now but it is walking on eggshells juice watch is
an app that shows you how much battery you have left on your watch and on your phone it can also
send you notifications when the battery gets too low or when it gets charged to a certain percent
productivity and finance i recently started using the bear app instead of google drive or the notes
app just trying to consolidate everything into one place i've been trying a lot of new tools and apps
lately and i did a newsletter a couple of weeks back where i listed them and the reasons why i'm
trying them so if you're interested in that the link is in the description i mainly only use bear
on my computer but i have it on my phone just in case i need to reference something idealista is
an app for looking for apartments in spain which is not really currently that relevant to me but
revere is a cool app for keeping track of personal contacts i'm not going to open it up because
pretty much everything on there is personal information but instead of like an app that lets
you scan business cards for professional contacts this one helps you to keep track of information
about friends so like friends birthdays notes about your friends like gift ideas or their
favorite foods going back up to the apple mail app i don't like the apple mail app i use gmail like
everyone does and so i used to have the gmail app on my phone but i've decided that
i don't want to have easy access to my emails on my phone so having a mail app that i do not
enjoy creates a little bit of friction it's there if i need to find some piece of information or
reference something but it doesn't send me notifications it's clunky and i don't like
opening it there is this feature however that i learned about where you can set contacts as vips
so if i am expecting some important email like i remember one time i needed to upload a video but
it hadn't gotten approved but i needed to upload it that day i had other stuff to do that day so i
didn't want to be on my email all day just like refreshing and refreshing and waiting for that
email to come so i set that person as a vip and i only got notifications when they emailed me i used
to keep youtube on there because well my excuse was that it would be really easy to copy the
link for a video and then share it in my stories when i was trying to promote it i can do that on
safari it's just a tiny bit harder but the problem with having the youtube app on my phone was it was
a huge distraction because i was able to kind of wean myself off of other social media apps i would
find myself clicking on the youtube app just to scroll through my recommended feed i wouldn't even
watch anything i would just look at the titles and thumbnails and use that as entertainment so
that had to go because that was kind of sad i deleted the youtube studio because i know that
checking the numbers is not good for me pinterest i had reinstalled it for my room makeover but as
soon as i was done with that that was gone and then twitter i'm a very passive user of twitter
i don't tweet i don't like i don't comment i just watch and read and consume so when i want
to use twitter i have to go through safari and i'm not even logged in so it is a much less engaging
experience instagram is kind of the necessary evil and then facetime messages phone and whatsapp
i consider those to kind of be the basic functions of a phone so those get to stay
i do have notification badges for everything except instagram because i don't want to have
to click on these apps to see if there's anything new but the notification badges don't really like
stress me out because they're not immediately on my home screen for entertainment i have spotify
soundcloud apple podcast and my gyms app i don't know why that is considered entertainment the only
reason i have apple podcasts is because spotify doesn't let you add a custom rss feed and i am
subscribed to the minimalist private podcast which you can't just find through searching on spotify
in creativity i have this app called eight millimeter which makes it look like an old
camera i often will use this as an effect in my videos this app is constantly trying to sell me um
a premium version and then it shows me ads but whenever i have something that i want to share
on my instagram stories for example and there's some sort of private information on there this
is my go-to app canon camera connect and nikon snapbridge are apps that let you control your
camera remotely so i'm using the nikon one right now i love adobe lightroom for editing photos
usually if i take photos with my camera i'll edit them on my computer and if i take them with my
phone i edit them on my phone a lot of people have asked me about what presets or filters i use on my
photos they are presets that i created myself i did at one point attempt to package them up and
sell them but i was getting really frustrated with the fact that i just could not make them
look good on all photos and i didn't want to feel bad or responsible if they didn't make your photos
look good and so i kind of gave up on that but might pick that project back up again someday
perfect video is my favorite app for editing quick videos for instagram stories and stuff like that
okay sorry i'm back i had to do a zoom call the pixart app i think i've only ever made one collage
with it the main thing that i use it for is say i have an instagram post and i want the second slide
to be a landscape photo i have to add borders to it in order to make it a three by four ratio
and so far pixar is the only app that i know of that does that i don't think lightroom does that
but if i'm missing something please let me know and then we have story lux which is for designing
instagram stories i don't use it that much anymore but if you're looking for something to
design aesthetic stories i like that one a lot and finally unum however it is pronounced this is the
app that i use for feed planning so i don't really plan out my feed in advance that much but when i'm
about to post a photo i upload it here just to see how it'll look against the rest of my feed
and then make tiny adjustments if i need to all right the next category is health and fitness so
the seven minute workout app is the first app that i started using when i basically first started
doing any sort of exercise outside of gym class at school so this is the app that i credit with
any level of personal fitness that i have today i really like this affirmations app i have it set so
that i get 15 affirmations to my watch per day inside timer is a really great app for finding
guided meditations or just a timer with some relaxing sounds in the background if that's what
you want shift is a cool app that i recently got if you want to go running and alternate
five minutes of running with three minutes of walking it'll automatically switch between playing
music for five minutes and then podcast for three minutes sweat deck you assign an exercise to each
suit of a deck of cards and then you have to try and get through the whole deck basically and then
finally this is a simple mood tracking app i like that it takes the data from your health app to
import how much water you drink how much you exercise how much you slept and so then that
can help you find correlations travel apps looking at this makes me kind of sad so let's close out of
that the games folder is pretty small i try to focus on games that you play with other people
especially if you play them in person so heads up is a great example of that oh my gosh i just
noticed that she has a mask the information and reading folder i think should be combined with the
education folder i don't know why they did that but libby is where you can borrow ebooks with your
library card i've known about it for a long time but i didn't start seriously using it until covid
started it has been a lifesaver papago is for translating korean and then i have spanish dict
for translating spanish and then great courses plus form learning about stuff in the final other
category i have costar for the brief astrology phase that i had i want to be the type of person
who is interested in and believes in astrology but so far i've not been able to convince myself
but it's a fun app um and then finally i have the philips hue app for controlling the three
philips hue light bulbs that i have in my room and then the i light show app connects to your
spotify account and then it analyzes the music so that the lights flash in sync with the music
which is really really cool some apps that i don't have anymore i used to have netflix
and hulu but i deleted those partly to prevent myself from watching it on my phone but also
if i want to stream it to the tv it just adds a little bit of friction i either have to go and
get my computer to stream it or redownload it on my phone i used to have zillow i like looking at
studio and one-bedroom apartments in random cities around the united states but i can do that on the
computer and also not a super productive thing to do considering i'm not moving anytime soon
but it's fun to see what the market is in my last video i talked about how i set my phone to
grayscale that was something i used to do a lot and people would ask me a lot about it as well
i definitely still recommend that feature but one of the problems for me was that it was a triple
click shortcut and i would bring my phone back to color whenever i needed to post a photo or edit a
photo or watch a youtube video or just anything where i needed color and i would often forget to
switch it back to grayscale just because it was so easy to turn grayscale off i've just found
that hiding my abs or using my watch to replace a lot of the functions of my phone has been a lot
more effective in reducing my phone usage than the grayscale trick or trying to set individual time
limits on different apps but basically the moral of the story is you just have to find what works
for you so if you haven't tried the grayscale trick try it out maybe it'll work better for you
than it did for me i hope you got some ideas for how to organize your phone from this video maybe
some app recommendations thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next week bye
you