Back in the era of 1995-2005, mobile phone’s primary usage is to make voice calls and to communicate using short text messages. For many years, when a company introduced a new mobile phone model, we heard a lot “there is no need for such a phone, my phone is doing okay, as long as I can call people and do SMS.” And for the most part, they were right !

In early 2000s, we began to see few people using a different kind of mobile phone: smart phone. It offers more functionality than just voice calls and SMS. Back then, only few people, tech-savvy ones will even consider to get a smartphone. In 2000 Samsung released the first phone with built-in camera. In 2003, Blackberry smartphones were introduced, and well received mostly by business people. Then, the introduction of iPhone in 2007 introduced smartphone to the general public. Since 2008, Android phones offered lower price smartphones, making them more affordable to the lower level market. And smartphone has became “the new standard” for a mobile phone.

General people adapt the new trend of “smartphone” for different reasons. Some simply happy to see crisp-color screens. Some are happy to listen to music using their phones. Some are excited to watch videos. Some are buying smartphones to play games. Some wants to browse the Internet. Some others use smartphones mainly for social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and internet text messaging (chat services).

But is that all?

Is that all smartphone can offer?

If camera, color screen, music, video, games, browsing, chat and social media are all smartphones can offer, then I would agree to the old saying “there is no need for such a phone, my phone is doing okay, as long as I can call people and do SMS.” All those features are nice to have, but not necessities. They’re desirable extras, but surely not for everyone.

I have used smartphones (different brands and models) since 2007. Ignoring some models with camera, reading email and music playing ability, my first “real” smartphone is a Sony Ericsson. It was big and bulky, still using stylus to interact with the screen. I have tried Nokia’s Symbian. I have used iPhones and Android phones.

Still a lot of my friends buy smartphones today to brag about it. They feel “cool” to have the latest technology. They follow “trend”. Some others want to custom their smartphones to the maximum. Some has greatest satisfaction knowing their smartphones has the fastest processor, the highest screen resolution.

But all they do everyday using their smartphones are the usual: voice call, camera, music, video, games, browsing, chat and social media.

After years of experimenting, I found myself today incapable to perform my everyday life with the same level of productivity without the help of smartphones. For me, today, smartphone is no longer “something nice to have” or “something cool to brag about”. Smartphone is crucially needed for increasing my productivity and time management, helping me to get the best out of my everyday life.

Have you fully optimized your smartphone to get the most our of using it?

This blog post is the first part of 8 posts I will write about optimizing smartphone for smarter life.
I will write this guide based on iPhone. Simply because iPhone is my primary smartphone for now. Most of my tips and guides should be applicable for Android, Windows Phone and other smartphone OS. But you might need to do a bit of more research to find out how to get similar function in that OS.

This guide will NOT teach you step-by-step how to setup or use the features. Rather, I am trying to inspire you with a feature’s functionality and how we can benefit from it to live smarter life. More productive, more time efficient, more organized.

 

 

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Calendar

Calendar feature in iOS allow us to schedule our life. From work meetings, appointments, date, grocery shopping, we can schedule everything. We can choose to maintain offline calendar (only stored locally in your iPhone) or we can choose to sync our calendar with one of online calendar service available. Even if you only have one phone, it’s always a good idea to have our calendar synced. It is a huge convenience to have the same calendar in our phone, in our tablet, in our desktop computer, in our laptop, in web browser. No matter which device you are using at one time, a synced calendar will show the same entries.

There are three online calendar service I can recommend. All can be used for free. The first one is Apple’s own iCloud calendar. The second one is Google Calendar. And the third one is Yahoo Calendar. I use Google Calendar because I have used it long before I started using iPhone. I am too lazy to migrate my calendar entries to iCloud calendar, so I decided to keep using Google Calendar.

If online calendar is new for you, iCloud calendar might be the easiest to set up. When you first activated your iPhone, the device will ask us our Apple ID. Apple ID is needed to use most of Apple’s online services. We can register our email to become our Apple ID for free. This Apple ID is our iCloud account, used for syncing email, contacts, calendars, reminders, browser bookmarks, notes, passbook, photo stream, documents & data across our Apple devices. This might sound trivial, but believe me, it’s not. Having our entries automatically synced, readily available in all our devices actually simplifies things. We do things easier, faster, allowing us to have extra time for other things.

The hardest part of actually using Calendar is our self-discipline. For our calendar entries to mean something, we have to develop a habit of checking into our calendar regularly. I have developed the habit of planning my day in the morning by checking the calendar. And it’s quite useful to avoid missing something.

We can create multiple calendar set for different purposes. For example, I have “Personal Calendar”, “Work Calendar” and “Special Days” calendar in my iPhone. You can create whatever you need. We can even set to share a calendar set with others. For example we can have a calendar set named “Project A”, and share it with our colleagues in Project A. Every time there’s anew entry in the calendar, everyone will automatically get it. Revisions and deletions are also synced. We can set that everyone in the project can add, edit or delete calendar entries, or we can set only project managers or team leaders can add, edit or delete, the others only get read-only view. This is a very powerful coordination tool. Especially that the calendar entries will follow the team members wherever they go.

Reminders

Reminders are basically a to-do list. In calendar we need to define the date and time of an activity. In reminders we can write anything we don’t want to forget.

Just like we can create multiple calendar sets, we can also create multiple reminder lists. Some ideas of how to use these lists: we can create a separate list for things related to work, related to boss, related to personal matters; we can create list of things I need to buy, including grocery list; we can create a list of cooking ideas; we can create a list of movies we want to watch (and we can tick a title when we have watched it); we can create a list of vacation ideas; we can create separate lists for each project at work.

Again, we can also use this feature for collaboration. We can share specific lists with other people. If one add an entry to the list, it will appear in others’ list. Adding, deleting, editing and ticking actions are synced. This is very useful for me and my wife, especially in managing our grocery list. Every time we remember that we need to buy something, we add it to the list and both will see the entry. Whoever has time, or happen to pass by a store, can directly buy the items and tick them off the list. The others will see that such items are already bought.

Similar to calendar, we can also set a reminder entry with push notification that will alert us on certain time. Apple’s Reminders app has an interesting option to alert us when we are at certain location. I have tried this feature. Interesting, but it drains my battery. So maybe it’s not ready for prime-time, yet.

Notes

As the name suggest, we can write notes using our smartphone. The concept is similar to our small paper-notebook/organizer we used to carry everywhere. When we need to write down something, we write it there. If we remember, we can deal with it later, probably add it into our schedule, add it into our writings, etc. But if we forget to do anything, the note will remain there just as random writing.

Digital note in smartphone is just the same. We write things. But we need to do something about it later. If we leave it, it will just stay there and nothing will get done anyway.

There are plenty of note-taking apps designed for smartphones and/or tablets. We can choose any of them which fits our need. With the correct and productive app, we can use our smartphones (and/or tablets) for note-taking in a meeting, in a conference, in a job briefing. We can organize the notes by project, by subject, by importance, by dates. Plenty of possibilities here. But we need to choose a style and be consistent with it. Otherwise we will be confused reading our own notes.

Using Camera to remember something

It is worth to mention that there is actually another method of remembering something: by taking a photo of it. For example, we go to a restaurant and want to remember the business hour of that place. When we find the business hours listed in their door, we can just take a quick photo of it. Another example is taking a photo of bus schedule. Basically we can take photo of anything, so we can use it to remember anything as well. Thanks to Rudy for pointing this out.

 

 

 


Optimizing Smartphone for Smarter Life, list of topics in this series:
1. Calendar, Reminders, Notes
2. Maps and Trip Planning
3. Communication and Collaboration
4. Reading and Learning
5. Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation
6. Content Creation
7. Personal Database
8. Saving Money
*. Epilogue

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Apple and/or Google and do not receive any financial benefit from writing this article.