- I'm gonna be honest here.
When it comes to my work,
if I were forced to choose between my laptop and my iPhone,
I would absolutely choose my laptop.
This is where the majority of my high-quality,
high-intensity work gets done.
That being said, my iPhone has become
a bigger part of my workflow in recent months
and it's definitely a big part of my lifestyle.
So, given that, and the fact that
you guys have been asking me for an updated
what's on my iPhone video.
Since I did one, I think about three years ago,
and haven't really talked about it since then,
I figured we should revisit the topic.
The first thing that I'm gonna mention here
is that my home screen really hasn't changed
in the 2 1/2 years since I did that last video.
I'm still using the four folders at the top of the screen,
Work, Play, Go and Sift,
which is where I keep everything,
except for the most important apps that I use
most often in my workflow.
So, let's just go through the apps here.
There's a couple that are definitely
not all that interesting,
like Clock and Safari and Messages,
so I'm not gonna talk too much about those.
But the first one we are going to look quickly at
is Notion.
This is the app I have been looking for
for a really long time
because it is the Evernote replacement
that I have always wanted.
I'm a big fan of Evernote.
I definitely still use it for certain things,
but, for a long time,
Evernote has been lacking some features
that I have really been wanting,
such as markdown support,
such as collaborative editing in real time
and many other features that I'd just really been wanting.
And no other app really could fit the bill either,
because I am both a Windows and a Mac user
and I needed the app to be available on the iPhone.
So, I'd been stuck on Evernote for basically
all of my research, scripting and many other needs
until I found Notion.
Notion fits the bill for, basically,
everything that I want to do
when it comes to writing videos,
when it comes to organizing a lot of my work-related stuff,
because it does all the stuff that Evernote doesn't do.
It lets me write in markdown.
It lets me use databases like Airtable or like Excel.
And it also lets me collaborate with my team in real time.
So this definitely earned a place on my home screen.
Next up is Pocket.
So this is a great app for saving articles on the web
that you want to read later.
And the great thing about this app
is it can actually save articles
for offline reading automatically.
So, if I come across an article on the web,
I don't have time to read it,
I can save it to my Pocket.
My phone will download it.
And then, if I'm on a plane
or if I just find myself with a bit of downtime,
I can open it.
I can read those articles at my own convenience
and I don't have to worry
about the internet being available.
Next up we've got Google Calendar.
This has been a mainstay on my home screen for many years
and I definitely don't see it leaving anytime soon.
I do have a video on how, exactly, I use that.
So, if you are curious,
I'm gonna have that in the description down below.
Next to that we have Google Drive,
which I have, basically, switched over to
almost entirely from Dropbox.
I think Dropbox and Drive are pretty identical
in terms of most features,
but the reason we switched over to Drive
is that we use the Google Docs and Sheets apps
quite a lot,
and I actually think Drive
is a better option for students as well
because they have a $2-per-month plan
that gets you a hundred gigabytes, whereas with Dropbox,
I believe you have to go straight up to
that $10-per-month plan to get the terabyte
if you outgrow their free tier, which many people will.
Moving down to the second row of apps here,
first we have Tide, which is my favorite Pomodoro app.
If you haven't heard of the Pomodoro technique,
essentially it is a productivity technique
where you set the timer for 25 minutes
and during that 25 minutes,
you do absolutely nothing but one task
that you have decided to work on.
Now there are lots of Pomodoro apps out there
on the App Store.
This is definitely not your only choice,
but it is my favorite one because it, actually,
plays ambient music or rain or nature noises
while the timer is going.
Next up, we have my to-do list mainstay, Todoist.
I've been using this for quite a long time.
Now I actually use an app called Asana
for a lot of my professional to-do work,
but I find the Asana app on the iPhone
to be kind of a pain to use.
So I generally stick to using that on the desktop.
With Todoist, I'll often build packing lists
for if I'm traveling, or, I think the most frequent use case
for this app is actually our grocery list.
So anytime me or my girlfriend
run out of something in the kitchen,
we can just tell our Amazon Echo
to put it on our shopping list
and the Echo app actually has an integration with Todoist.
Its shopping list can sync with Todoist,
so whenever we tell it to put something on the shopping list
it's gonna show up on Todoist as well.
And that brings us over to an app called Front,
which is my email app of choice.
Now there are a ton of email apps out there,
just as there are a ton of to-do list apps out there.
Front is, specifically, a team-based email app.
I use this now because I actually have somebody
who helps me go through
my main Thomas@collegeinfogeek.com email address
just to help me save time.
I didn't wanna give them access to my Gmail inbox.
I didn't wanna give them a password.
So the great thing about Front
is you can actually create a shared inbox
and then you can assign team members to specific emails.
Another really nice feature of this app
is you can actually have comment conversations
within any email thread
without actually replying to the person who emailed.
So, if the person going through my email has a question,
they're like, I don't know how to deal with this
kind of question or this kind of an email,
I can tell them.
They can start getting smarter over time
and that actually saves me a lotta time in the long run.
If you are not running a team,
I don't really recommend Front
since it's about 15 bucks per month per team member.
So if you are just a solo person
wanting to find an email app,
I would recommend either the default mail app on iOS,
or the Gmail app.
Unfortunately, there's not an app that can make me lattes.
Next up we got Twitter and Instagram.
Not a whole lot to say about Twitter and Instagram
other than the fact that I am on them
and I'm especially active on Instagram.
So if you have not followed me either platform yet,
I am tomfrankly on both of them
and I will have links in the description down below
and I will especially encourage you
to follow me on Instagram
because I will be doing a lot more content on IGTV,
which just launched,
as well as the stories and the normal feed.
Next up we have
one of my absolutely favorite apps in the world, Habitca.
This is my habit tracker of choice.
It is the subject of
one of my very first videos on this channel,
and it, essentially, gamifies habit building.
You actually get a little character,
and as you check off your daily habits every single day,
you get experience points, you level up,
you can go on quests.
And my favorite part of the app
is that you can actually team up with other people,
put them in your party, and then go on quests together.
The best part about this is
if you don't do your habits on a certain day,
you're gonna take damage, but your friends' characters
in your party will take damage as well.
So there's some nice accountability built into the app.
Speaking of accountability,
one way that I keep myself accountable with my daily habits
is I actually post a screenshot of my habit streaks
every week on my Instagram Story.
So there's another reason to follow.
Next up we have Strava,
which is an amazing app for cyclists and runners
who want to track those stats and get better over time.
I am not a runner, but I am a cyclist
and right now my goal, at least for the summer,
is to cycle 50 miles every single week.
So I use Strava to track that.
Basically, just bring my phone with me on each bike ride.
It can show you where you went.
It gives you kind of a map view of your entire route.
You can actually pre-build routes
and then have it give you directions
if you want to go on a specific route in your city.
And it gives you tons of stats,
including your average speed, your distance traveled,
your elevation change, all kinds of great stuff.
In addition to Strava,
I do have one other fitness-related app on my home screen,
which is called Fitbod.
This is the app that I use to track my lifting stats
whenever I go to the gym.
There are tons of these out here,
but the reason I selected Fitbod is,
it is one of the only apps out there
that actually integrates with Strava.
The reason that I wanted to do that is,
I want Strava to be kind of like a central hub
for all of my workout data.
So, every time I go to the gym
and I track my fitness stats with Fitbod,
it ports that data over to Strava
and it shows up in my feed, along with my cycling routes.
In addition to that Strava integration,
Fitbod is pretty cool, because it actually has some
artificial intelligence built into it
that can use the data you give it
to generate workouts for you.
So if you're the kind of person
who wants to get some variety into your gym schedule,
and you don't wanna
build your own manually-structured workout program,
then this can be a pretty cool app to use.
That being said, it does have a monthly subscription cost.
There is absolutely no free tier.
So, if you are looking for something that is free,
I would look into something like Fitocracy instead.
Fitocracy is a little bit like Habitica.
It has some gamified elements.
But it's also free and it is just a great way
to track your workout stats.
Next up, Google Maps.
Not a whole lot to say about that.
It's Google Maps.
But, the one after that is pretty interesting.
Scanbot has been on my phone for quite a while,
because it makes
keeping track of my receipts and other documents
really, really easy.
As a business person,
I have to keep all of my receipts for tax reasons,
but, I don't wanna be shoving them into a folder
and having to keep them physically at all,
and I also don't wanna have to take out a picture
or use a scanner or do something that they did
back in the 1980s.
So, with Scanbot,
you can actually just point your phone at any document.
It will automatically detect where the document is,
and it will take a scan of it,
then automatically upload it to,
basically, wherever you want.
In my case, Evernote.
Beyond just receipts,
another great use case for Scanbot, if you're a student,
would be to scan your notes
and send them to Evernote,
because, since Evernote has optical character recognition,
you could hand write your notes in class,
send them to an Evernote Notebook
and make them searchable.
Next up we have Slack, which, in my opinion,
is probably the best team communication app out there
that exists.
We've also got Audible, which is where
I personally get all of my audiobooks.
I would say that audiobooks actually
make up about half of my quote, unquote, reading time.
And we have Snapseed.
So, because I am using Instagram a lot more often now,
I'm also finding myself editing photos on my phone.
I'm actually gonna talk about Snapseed and Splice,
the app right next to it, kind of together.
So, Snapseed is just a more-capable Instagram editing tool,
I would say.
Instagram has editing tools,
but Snapseed has better editing tools.
So I use that for a lotta the photos
that I post on Instagram.
Splice is what I use to edit Instagram Story.
So if you guys see me playing guitar in an Instagram Story,
I definitely didn't put the hands-free mode on
and get a perfect take in 15 seconds.
I probably recorded for two or three minutes at least
and then I bring the video into Splice.
I can zoom in.
I can add the edits to it.
It's just a little bit better of an editor
with more capabilities than the standard iOS Photos app.
We've also got an app called Guitar Tuna on here,
which is a guitar tuner.
I do have a real tuner on my good guitar,
but I also have a cheap guitar
that sits on a stand in my living room.
It's really easy to pick up and play at all times.
I don't have a tuner on that.
I also don't have tuners on guitars at friends' places,
that I like to pick up and play sometimes.
So having a guitar tuner on my home screen
is just really convenient.
All right, so we got Clock,
we have Safari, we have Messages.
All of those are boring.
You probably know what all of those do.
This app right here is called Pocket Casts.
This is my podcast player of choice.
I know that iOS has a built-in podcasts app
that does actually work quite well,
but I've been using Pocket Casts for many years,
and they keep upgrading it, keep adding new features,
and I really like how your main podcasts screen
that shows all the shows that you are subscribed to,
is just this really cool-looking mosaic of shows there.
So, I keep using this one, though,
if you don't wanna pay for a podcast app,
and I don't blame you, I would just use the default one.
And, of course, if you're getting into podcasts,
and you were looking for shows to subscribe to,
I actually have two of my own,
the College Info Geek Podcast
and Listen Money Matters,
which is a personal finance podcast
and I'll have those linked in the description down below.
And last, but not least, on the home screen here,
we have Spotify.
I'm sure all of you know what Spotify does.
The one thing that I will mention on here
is that I've been building out a few playlists
that I'd like to share with you guys.
So I do have a Spotify version
of my Ultimate Study Music Playlist
along with a Work Vibes playlist,
that is, not really quite tailored for studying,
but is tailored for just getting work done,
work that doesn't require
a whole lot of intense focus or creativity.
And I also have my workout playlist on Spotify.
One app that's not on my home screen on this phone
that I do wanna talk about is one called Frame.io
because I've, just recently, started working with an editor
in my videos and this app is making my life
so much easier because
it enables just incredible collaboration with video editors.
And, since I will be hiring an animator for my channel,
at some point in the near future, as well,
it's about to get even more useful.
Speaking of animators,
I am definitely not the only person out there
who is looking for one.
I know lots of businesses and YouTubers
who are looking to add animators to their team,
so this is a great skillset to learn in 2018.
And, luckily, it's actually a skillset
that you can pretty easily learn on your own.
A great place to start would be this motion graphics course
over on Skillshare, which is actually created by
one of the senior motion designers
at the Kurzgesagt channel here on YouTube.
Skillshare is also just a great place
to learn lots of other skills,
from marketing to web development to photography.
They've got over 20,000 courses in their library,
most of which have hands-on projects
that you could use to build your skills actively
and submit for feedback within the class.
And Skillshare is also a lot more affordable
than most of the other online learning platforms out there,
with unlimited access to the library,
costing about as much as a Netflix subscription,
but, of course, a lot more useful.
What's best, you can actually get a two-month free trial
with unlimited access to their platform
by going to the link in the description down below
and signing up.
And doing so, will also help support this channel.
So, if you wanna start improving your skillset today,
whether it's in animation or in anything else,
definitely give that link a click and sign up.
And I do wanna give a big thanks to Skillshare
for sponsoring this video
and being a big supporter of this channel.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
a like is definitely appreciated.
You can also subscribe right there
if you don't wanna miss out on future videos.
Otherwise, you can click right here
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Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.