Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:22):
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
(00:43):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
the same thing.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Now, with that in mind.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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.
(02:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
My email address.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
So when I type A AT, it automatically spits that
out into my email address.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It is like magic. I use it probably every.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
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
(03:17):
some stage, So feel free to hit pause if you
want to write something down, and anyway, we will keep going.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
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
(03:49):
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
(04:10):
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,
(04:33):
and then it gives you the option to click on
that icon, and then it will tell you more specifically
what this is.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
So I did a little test of this.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
So try that out when.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Now.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
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
(05:37):
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
(05:57):
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
(06:21):
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,
(06:42):
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
(07:03):
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
(07:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
I personally love this feature.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
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
(08:01):
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
(08:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Spend on your mobile phone.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
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
(08:57):
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
(09:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
So how you turn your phone to grayscale mode?
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Is you go into settings and then into accessibility, and
then into display and into color filters.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
There is a little button that you.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Now, the next tip I have for.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
You is sometimes you might like scribble something down on
a sheet of paper and.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Then you want to file that away later.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
So here is what to do.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
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,
(10:55):
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
(11:17):
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
(11:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Use it to help you write a proposal.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
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
(12:14):
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
(12:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Very very useful.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
With that call that you've just recorded?
Speaker 1 (13:03):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:44):
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,
(14:05):
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
(14:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
How I Work was.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
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.