How to use your phone the right way. “Minimal mode” for your iPhone.

It’s been a couple of months now that I am using my phone the new way, a ‘Minimal Mode’ way. The way it makes me feel free from some of the “noise” it makes. I started to feel that the use of my iPhone more is under my control. I don’t get distracted by Instagram or Facebook when I don’t want to. You know how it happens, you aim to open dropbox app to look at the newly shared doc, but while swiping screens you notice a red circle in top-right corner of Instagram app, ok will just check it and wow, 30 mins are gone. Does that sound familiar? The main idea is to remove these distractions by getting rid of almost everything from your screen and get the raw feeling of stone age phone while still having all the powers. It looks something like this:

Yes, it looks empty. When I show it to friends and colleagues they either love or hate it, my wife hates it, she can’t find almost anything she wants. But there are some techniques that help you get to the right app most times much faster than in normal use, no matter how many apps you have installed.

Search Feature

When you pull your home screen down, you get a search bar, which I almost have’t used previously, now is the most frequent action. Just pull it down and start typing the name of the app you need. At first it feels awkward and long, but later you will see that it’s much quicker. Normally when you want to open some app, you try to recall where it is on your screen and on which page. It is not a complicated process but mostly I just mechanically swiped screens back and forth to find the app I needed, sometimes got distracted by those shiny icons and notifications that just want me to check them. In the ‘Minimal Mode’ the path to any applications is same: pull down, type and tap.
TIP: make sure to place “Applications” on top of other items in result page, to make sure you get to app names before emails, contacts, notes and other searchable items. You can do this in Settings > General > Spotlight Search

Control Centre
Another powerful feature is the Control Centre, which could be accessed by pulling down a bar from top of your screen. Both tabs “Today” and “Notifications” are pretty useful for “Minimal Mode”. “Today” provides some information and features from the apps you set in settings. “Notifications” gets you right to the information pushed from an app. It comes handy to go directly to an app you need.

Conclusion

There are about 1.4+ million apps on the App Store with an average of ahundred installed per phone and 27 used on monthly basis. Smartphones have a great impact on our lives with no doubt. But as any great power there is a great responsibility, and we should take it into account. Focus on your goals makes things happen. Take the most advantage out of technology, and don’t let technology take advantage of you.