Have you ever looked at your mobile phone and wondered what else can it do besides doom scrolling and ordering Uber eats? Well, today I am sharing some very useful phone features that are going to help you get so much more out of your mobile device. From identifying that mysterious plant in your garden to scheduling text messages for a more civilized hour, your phone is hiding superpowers that
you never knew existed. So stick around to discover how to transform your mobile phone into a white noise machine, a handwriting decoder, and even a call recorder, no expensive additional apps required. These aren't just party tricks, although personally they're pretty fun to share with friends, they are genuine time savers that will make you wonder how you ever lived without them. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm
your host, Doctor Amantha Imba. Let's get into how we can get more out of our phone. Now. I will tell you that this is a very iPhone centric episode, but I have no doubt that if you have an Android phone, it will probably be similar instructions to do the same thing.
Now, with that in mind.
Let's get started with a feature called text replacement. This is actually something that I have been using for a long time, and here's the problem it solves. So you know, when you find yourself typing the same thing again and again put on a phone, I mean, it's like typing is tedious. So for example, my email address is Amantha at inventium dot com dot au, which is a bit of a pain to type out, and I need to type it all the time, whether it be on a website or to someone texting me to ask for my
email address. So here's what you can do. In your settings app. Go into where it says keyboard and then click into text replacement and you will see here that what you can do is create shortcuts for things that you find yourself texting all the time. So, for example, something that I use a lot is a little shortcut I created when I need to write my email address. So what I've programmed my phone to do is when I type the letter A and the AT symbol, it knows that that is code for.
My email address.
So when I type A AT, it automatically spits that out into my email address.
It is like magic. I use it probably every.
Day and it has saved me so much time. Okay, let's move on to the next tip, and I will say, if you happen to be listening to this episode while you are driving or maybe going for a run, you are maybe going to want to take some notes at some stage, So feel free to hit pause if you want to write something down, and anyway, we will keep going.
Now.
Sometimes I certainly have found this myself, is that I will be in my garden and I will think, hmm, this is a flower or a plant that I've never seen before, and I wonder what it is. You might also wonder that with animals. I know that often when I'm going for a walk with my daughter and we see a bird, she will ask what kind of bird is that? And inevitably, because I didn't study ornithology, I do not know. So here's what you can do. You can take a picture of the object just using the
camera app. And in case you didn't know this on the phone, if you are on the lockscore and you simply swipe to the left, that is a shortcut to bring up your camera. Now, what you can do is you can take a photo of the plant or the tree or the animal and simply tap the info button.
So this is a little eye button that should appear at the bottom of your screen in the middle, and if you tap that, what will happen is that it will firstly tell you at a high level what it is, and then it gives you the option to click on that icon, and then it will tell you more specifically what this is.
So I did a little test of this.
I tried this on my pet kervoodle, Luna, who doesn't actually look like a kavoodle. I don't know if there was poodle involved. I think it was just a King Charles Cavalier spaniel. Anyway, it thought that Luna was a cockapoo or a shnoodle, which is prob somewhat accurate because she certainly doesn't look like a kavoodle.
So try that out when.
You want to identify a plant or an animal that you have wondered what it is. Okay, let's move on to the next tip.
Now.
I don't know if you have ever invested in a white noise machine. I certainly know that when my daughter was a newborn, I definitely did, and there have been times where I've actually used white noise when I've been doing my deep focused work, and did I've looked for apps on the computer or playlists on Spotify? Little did I know that this is actually built into the iPhone.
So if you go into settings and go to accessibility, then audio and visual, then background sounds, you can actually choose from a variety of beautiful background sounds that act as white noise. You could pick the ocean or some rain or a stream, and then you can pick the volume, and you can pick whether the sound switches off when you turn the screen on lock. So essentially your phone
is a free and portable white noise machine. Now have you ever when you have been sending a text message thought to yourself, I probably shouldn't reply now because it's too late, and if they have not switched their phone on silent or do not disturb, then I'm going to wake up my friend or family member. And so you then think to yourself, Okay, I'll text in the morning, and then the morning comes and you completely forget, and then you are a bad friend, bad daughter, bad partner,
whatever the case may be. What I have recently discovered is that there is a send later function to solve this very problem. How this works is if you go into the messages app on your phone and you type out a message to someone. You can then tap the plus sign on the left side of the message field. There are a bunch of different options there, which also
you might not have noticed any of them. There are some call options there for all sorts of things, but one of those options says send later, and if you click on that, you can then choose a day and a time for that scheduled message to be delivered. When you do that, the message will appear in your message's feed in a kind of draft mode, and you can rest assured that it will send at the programmed time.
I personally love this feature.
It's something that I use all the time in my email program Superhuman, where I do delay sending for all sorts of reasons. But I had no idea that I could do the same thing with my phone, and I am now using that feature all the time. Okay, we are going to go to a quick break, and when we get back, I am going to take you through several more features that I am loving, including how to
record phone calls without downloading an extra app. The next feature that I want to tell you about is very helpful if you like millions of others are addicted to your mobile phone, and maybe you are trying to cut down on the amount of time you.
Spend on your mobile phone.
Maybe the amount of times you pick it up during the day, which for the average person I last read it was about two hundred times a day, and perhaps if you want to reduce the time you spend on social media. So this is about turning your phone to grayscale. So right now I'm imagining and guessing that your phone is in full color, which really does make it look like a Pokey's machine. And if you're using all those addictive apps that love hijacking your attention, it's pretty much
like a Pokey's machine. It is no different other than you can't win money from it. Well, I guess there are apps where you can win money, but we won't talk about though. So if you want to make your phone a lot less addictive, it looks very, very ordinary when you turn it to black and white. I have done this at several times over the last few years, and quite frankly, when my phone is in shades of gray, it is not an appealing thing to look at.
So how you turn your phone to grayscale mode?
Is you go into settings and then into accessibility, and then into display and into color filters.
There is a little button that you.
Can toggle off, and when you toggle that button off, your phone will turn to grayscale. And I can tell you Instagram and TikTok are not addictive when you see them in black and white.
Now, the next tip I have for.
You is sometimes you might like scribble something down on a sheet of paper and.
Then you want to file that away later.
Or maybe you see a book review in the newspaper and you want to grab the title for that book, but typing it out is a bit of a pain. You know. Maybe you there's a recommendation that you've read in the newspaper and you don't want to forget it.
So here is what to do.
Open up the camera app and point your phone lens at the block of text. Now you can take a photo, or you can just hover over the block of text. What you'll see is a little icon that has three little lines in an outlined square, and this is going to appear at the bottom right hand corner of that image. Now, if you tap on that icon, what it does is it cap which is the text, and there's an option
to copy, select or look up, translate or share. So I have found this so useful when particularly for handwritten notes, when I actually want to get that as text and put that in a digital notepad for example, or pop it into a word document. I found this feature so incredibly useful. So just tap on the little icon that has a square with three lines within it. It will appear at the bottom right hand corner of your camera. All right, have you ever been on a call and
you wanted to record it. Maybe you wanted to record it because it was a sales call and you wanted to get a transcript of that call and.
Use it to help you write a proposal.
Or maybe it was just an important call from the doctor where you wanted to write down or capture all the specific results that your doctor was taking you through. There are all sorts of reasons why we might want to record a call, and in the past there have been various apps that cost money to do this, but now iPhone has released a feature that allows you to record the call without downloading any apps. So how it works.
After placing a call in the phone app, just look in the top left corner of your screen and there is a little symbol that says start call recording, so it looks like a series of vertical lines. A voice is then going to announce that the call is being recorded, so nothing dodgy is going on. And when you're done recording, just hit the red stop button which is located in the middle of the screen or hang up the call.
Very very useful.
If you want to record a call and you have not downloaded an app, or you don't want to pay for a call recording app. Now what can you do.
With that call that you've just recorded?
You can actually access a transcribed version of that call in the call of recordings folder in the notes app. Now something else that you can do that I have started using a lot. I am a big fan of the Voice Memos app. If you have never used the Voice Memos app on your phone, you can just search for Voice Memos and it will come up. It is basically like a dictaphone on your phone and is an app that has been around for years. But what they
have recently added is a feature called view transcription. This is so helpful because quite often I will record voice memos where maybe I want to capture an idea on the go or a thought on the go, or perhaps I'm recording a meeting or a conversation, and in the past I would have to use little workarounds to get
a transcription of that recording. What I can now do is simply click on the options button, which I believe is there, and I can go down and select view transcription, and love and behold, there is a pretty accurate transcription of that voice memo that I've just recorded. So that is it for my tips for you on how to get more out of your phone. I hope that you
have found this episode helpful. And hey, if you know someone who you think, hmm, they could do with some tips to get more out of their phone, someone who you think would enjoy this episode, then I would love you to share it with them, and thank you if you've already done so. If you like today's Joe, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was.
Recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part of the Cooler Nation. A big thank you to Martin Nimber for doing the sound mix.