Speaker 1: Have you ever looked at your mobile phone and wondered
Speaker 1: what else can it do besides doom scrolling and ordering
Speaker 1: Uber eats? Well, today I am sharing some very useful
Speaker 1: phone features that are going to help you get so
Speaker 1: much more out of your mobile device. From identifying that
Speaker 1: mysterious plant in your garden to scheduling text messages for
Speaker 1: a more civilized hour, your phone is hiding superpowers that
Speaker 1: you never knew existed. So stick around to discover how
Speaker 1: to transform your mobile phone into a white noise machine,
Speaker 1: a handwriting decoder, and even a call recorder, no expensive
Speaker 1: additional apps required. These aren't just party tricks, although personally
Speaker 1: they're pretty fun to share with friends, they are genuine
Speaker 1: time savers that will make you wonder how you ever
Speaker 1: lived without them. Welcome to How I Work, a show
Speaker 1: about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Doctor Amantha Imba. Let's get into how we
Speaker 1: can get more out of our phone. Now. I will
Speaker 1: tell you that this is a very iPhone centric episode,
Speaker 1: but I have no doubt that if you have an
Speaker 1: Android phone, it will probably be similar instructions to do
Speaker 1: the same thing.
Speaker 2: Now, with that in mind.
Speaker 1: Let's get started with a feature called text replacement. This
Speaker 1: is actually something that I have been using for a
Speaker 1: long time, and here's the problem it solves. So you know,
Speaker 1: when you find yourself typing the same thing again and
Speaker 1: again put on a phone, I mean, it's like typing
Speaker 1: is tedious. So for example, my email address is Amantha
Speaker 1: at inventium dot com dot au, which is a bit
Speaker 1: of a pain to type out, and I need to
Speaker 1: type it all the time, whether it be on a
Speaker 1: website or to someone texting me to ask for my
Speaker 1: email address. So here's what you can do. In your
Speaker 1: settings app. Go into where it says keyboard and then
Speaker 1: click into text replacement and you will see here that
Speaker 1: what you can do is create shortcuts for things that
Speaker 1: you find yourself texting all the time. So, for example,
Speaker 1: something that I use a lot is a little shortcut
Speaker 1: I created when I need to write my email address.
Speaker 1: So what I've programmed my phone to do is when
Speaker 1: I type the letter A and the AT symbol, it
Speaker 1: knows that that is code for.
Speaker 2: My email address.
Speaker 1: So when I type A AT, it automatically spits that
Speaker 1: out into my email address.
Speaker 2: It is like magic. I use it probably every.
Speaker 1: Day and it has saved me so much time. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's move on to the next tip, and I will say,
Speaker 1: if you happen to be listening to this episode while
Speaker 1: you are driving or maybe going for a run, you
Speaker 1: are maybe going to want to take some notes at
Speaker 1: some stage, So feel free to hit pause if you
Speaker 1: want to write something down, and anyway, we will keep going.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I certainly have found this myself, is that I
Speaker 1: will be in my garden and I will think, hmm,
Speaker 1: this is a flower or a plant that I've never
Speaker 1: seen before, and I wonder what it is. You might
Speaker 1: also wonder that with animals. I know that often when
Speaker 1: I'm going for a walk with my daughter and we
Speaker 1: see a bird, she will ask what kind of bird
Speaker 1: is that? And inevitably, because I didn't study ornithology, I
Speaker 1: do not know. So here's what you can do. You
Speaker 1: can take a picture of the object just using the
Speaker 1: camera app. And in case you didn't know this on
Speaker 1: the phone, if you are on the lockscore and you
Speaker 1: simply swipe to the left, that is a shortcut to
Speaker 1: bring up your camera. Now, what you can do is
Speaker 1: you can take a photo of the plant or the
Speaker 1: tree or the animal and simply tap the info button.
Speaker 1: So this is a little eye button that should appear
Speaker 1: at the bottom of your screen in the middle, and
Speaker 1: if you tap that, what will happen is that it
Speaker 1: will firstly tell you at a high level what it is,
Speaker 1: and then it gives you the option to click on
Speaker 1: that icon, and then it will tell you more specifically
Speaker 1: what this is.
Speaker 2: So I did a little test of this.
Speaker 1: I tried this on my pet kervoodle, Luna, who doesn't
Speaker 1: actually look like a kavoodle. I don't know if there
Speaker 1: was poodle involved. I think it was just a King
Speaker 1: Charles Cavalier spaniel. Anyway, it thought that Luna was a
Speaker 1: cockapoo or a shnoodle, which is prob somewhat accurate because
Speaker 1: she certainly doesn't look like a kavoodle.
Speaker 2: So try that out when.
Speaker 1: You want to identify a plant or an animal that
Speaker 1: you have wondered what it is. Okay, let's move on
Speaker 1: to the next tip.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have ever invested in a
Speaker 1: white noise machine. I certainly know that when my daughter
Speaker 1: was a newborn, I definitely did, and there have been
Speaker 1: times where I've actually used white noise when I've been
Speaker 1: doing my deep focused work, and did I've looked for
Speaker 1: apps on the computer or playlists on Spotify? Little did
Speaker 1: I know that this is actually built into the iPhone.
Speaker 1: So if you go into settings and go to accessibility,
Speaker 1: then audio and visual, then background sounds, you can actually
Speaker 1: choose from a variety of beautiful background sounds that act
Speaker 1: as white noise. You could pick the ocean or some
Speaker 1: rain or a stream, and then you can pick the volume,
Speaker 1: and you can pick whether the sound switches off when
Speaker 1: you turn the screen on lock. So essentially your phone
Speaker 1: is a free and portable white noise machine. Now have
Speaker 1: you ever when you have been sending a text message
Speaker 1: thought to yourself, I probably shouldn't reply now because it's
Speaker 1: too late, and if they have not switched their phone
Speaker 1: on silent or do not disturb, then I'm going to
Speaker 1: wake up my friend or family member. And so you
Speaker 1: then think to yourself, Okay, I'll text in the morning,
Speaker 1: and then the morning comes and you completely forget, and
Speaker 1: then you are a bad friend, bad daughter, bad partner,
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be. What I have recently discovered
Speaker 1: is that there is a send later function to solve
Speaker 1: this very problem. How this works is if you go
Speaker 1: into the messages app on your phone and you type
Speaker 1: out a message to someone. You can then tap the
Speaker 1: plus sign on the left side of the message field.
Speaker 1: There are a bunch of different options there, which also
Speaker 1: you might not have noticed any of them. There are
Speaker 1: some call options there for all sorts of things, but
Speaker 1: one of those options says send later, and if you
Speaker 1: click on that, you can then choose a day and
Speaker 1: a time for that scheduled message to be delivered. When
Speaker 1: you do that, the message will appear in your message's
Speaker 1: feed in a kind of draft mode, and you can
Speaker 1: rest assured that it will send at the programmed time.
Speaker 2: I personally love this feature.
Speaker 1: It's something that I use all the time in my
Speaker 1: email program Superhuman, where I do delay sending for all
Speaker 1: sorts of reasons. But I had no idea that I
Speaker 1: could do the same thing with my phone, and I
Speaker 1: am now using that feature all the time. Okay, we
Speaker 1: are going to go to a quick break, and when
Speaker 1: we get back, I am going to take you through
Speaker 1: several more features that I am loving, including how to
Speaker 1: record phone calls without downloading an extra app. The next
Speaker 1: feature that I want to tell you about is very
Speaker 1: helpful if you like millions of others are addicted to
Speaker 1: your mobile phone, and maybe you are trying to cut
Speaker 1: down on the amount of time you.
Speaker 2: Spend on your mobile phone.
Speaker 1: Maybe the amount of times you pick it up during
Speaker 1: the day, which for the average person I last read
Speaker 1: it was about two hundred times a day, and perhaps
Speaker 1: if you want to reduce the time you spend on
Speaker 1: social media. So this is about turning your phone to grayscale.
Speaker 1: So right now I'm imagining and guessing that your phone
Speaker 1: is in full color, which really does make it look
Speaker 1: like a Pokey's machine. And if you're using all those
Speaker 1: addictive apps that love hijacking your attention, it's pretty much
Speaker 1: like a Pokey's machine. It is no different other than
Speaker 1: you can't win money from it. Well, I guess there
Speaker 1: are apps where you can win money, but we won't
Speaker 1: talk about though. So if you want to make your
Speaker 1: phone a lot less addictive, it looks very, very ordinary
Speaker 1: when you turn it to black and white. I have
Speaker 1: done this at several times over the last few years,
Speaker 1: and quite frankly, when my phone is in shades of gray,
Speaker 1: it is not an appealing thing to look at.
Speaker 2: So how you turn your phone to grayscale mode?
Speaker 1: Is you go into settings and then into accessibility, and
Speaker 1: then into display and into color filters.
Speaker 2: There is a little button that you.
Speaker 1: Can toggle off, and when you toggle that button off,
Speaker 1: your phone will turn to grayscale. And I can tell
Speaker 1: you Instagram and TikTok are not addictive when you see
Speaker 1: them in black and white.
Speaker 2: Now, the next tip I have for.
Speaker 1: You is sometimes you might like scribble something down on
Speaker 1: a sheet of paper and.
Speaker 2: Then you want to file that away later.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you see a book review in the newspaper
Speaker 1: and you want to grab the title for that book,
Speaker 1: but typing it out is a bit of a pain.
Speaker 1: You know. Maybe you there's a recommendation that you've read
Speaker 1: in the newspaper and you don't want to forget it.
Speaker 2: So here is what to do.
Speaker 1: Open up the camera app and point your phone lens
Speaker 1: at the block of text. Now you can take a photo,
Speaker 1: or you can just hover over the block of text.
Speaker 1: What you'll see is a little icon that has three
Speaker 1: little lines in an outlined square, and this is going
Speaker 1: to appear at the bottom right hand corner of that image. Now,
Speaker 1: if you tap on that icon, what it does is
Speaker 1: it cap which is the text, and there's an option
Speaker 1: to copy, select or look up, translate or share. So
Speaker 1: I have found this so useful when particularly for handwritten notes,
Speaker 1: when I actually want to get that as text and
Speaker 1: put that in a digital notepad for example, or pop
Speaker 1: it into a word document. I found this feature so
Speaker 1: incredibly useful. So just tap on the little icon that
Speaker 1: has a square with three lines within it. It will
Speaker 1: appear at the bottom right hand corner of your camera.
Speaker 1: All right, have you ever been on a call and
Speaker 1: you wanted to record it. Maybe you wanted to record
Speaker 1: it because it was a sales call and you wanted
Speaker 1: to get a transcript of that call and.
Speaker 2: Use it to help you write a proposal.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it was just an important call from the
Speaker 1: doctor where you wanted to write down or capture all
Speaker 1: the specific results that your doctor was taking you through.
Speaker 1: There are all sorts of reasons why we might want
Speaker 1: to record a call, and in the past there have
Speaker 1: been various apps that cost money to do this, but
Speaker 1: now iPhone has released a feature that allows you to
Speaker 1: record the call without downloading any apps. So how it works.
Speaker 1: After placing a call in the phone app, just look
Speaker 1: in the top left corner of your screen and there
Speaker 1: is a little symbol that says start call recording, so
Speaker 1: it looks like a series of vertical lines. A voice
Speaker 1: is then going to announce that the call is being recorded,
Speaker 1: so nothing dodgy is going on. And when you're done recording,
Speaker 1: just hit the red stop button which is located in
Speaker 1: the middle of the screen or hang up the call.
Speaker 2: Very very useful.
Speaker 1: If you want to record a call and you have
Speaker 1: not downloaded an app, or you don't want to pay
Speaker 1: for a call recording app. Now what can you do.
Speaker 2: With that call that you've just recorded?
Speaker 1: You can actually access a transcribed version of that call
Speaker 1: in the call of recordings folder in the notes app.
Speaker 1: Now something else that you can do that I have
Speaker 1: started using a lot. I am a big fan of
Speaker 1: the Voice Memos app. If you have never used the
Speaker 1: Voice Memos app on your phone, you can just search
Speaker 1: for Voice Memos and it will come up. It is
Speaker 1: basically like a dictaphone on your phone and is an
Speaker 1: app that has been around for years. But what they
Speaker 1: have recently added is a feature called view transcription. This
Speaker 1: is so helpful because quite often I will record voice
Speaker 1: memos where maybe I want to capture an idea on
Speaker 1: the go or a thought on the go, or perhaps
Speaker 1: I'm recording a meeting or a conversation, and in the
Speaker 1: past I would have to use little workarounds to get
Speaker 1: a transcription of that recording. What I can now do
Speaker 1: is simply click on the options button, which I believe
Speaker 1: is there, and I can go down and select view transcription,
Speaker 1: and love and behold, there is a pretty accurate transcription
Speaker 1: of that voice memo that I've just recorded. So that
Speaker 1: is it for my tips for you on how to
Speaker 1: get more out of your phone. I hope that you
Speaker 1: have found this episode helpful. And hey, if you know
Speaker 1: someone who you think, hmm, they could do with some
Speaker 1: tips to get more out of their phone, someone who
Speaker 1: you think would enjoy this episode, then I would love
Speaker 1: you to share it with them, and thank you if
Speaker 1: you've already done so. If you like today's Joe, make
Speaker 1: sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be
Speaker 1: alerted when new episodes drop.
Speaker 2: How I Work was.
Speaker 1: Recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part
Speaker 1: of the Cooler Nation. A big thank you to Martin
Speaker 1: Nimber for doing the sound mix.