I Turned My iPhone Into an AI Productivity Machine.

This video is sponsored by Maft. So, I turned my iPhone into an AI productivity machine this week. Not by downloading more apps, but by getting rid of most of them and adopting some new workflows.

Hi, it's Simon, and I've been running this little experiment on my iPhone. I'm going to show you three things you could genuinely try this weekend in an hour or so that might just change how you think about your iPhone entirely. An AI assistant I control with my voice. a custom app I built in an afternoon without writing a single line of code and other on-device AI that ruthlessly guards my attention along with some nice design choices to make this thing feel simpler and do things better.

Here's what I think is actually happening right now. AI has stopped implementation being a problem for a lot of people when you know how to use it. The tools exist. The question now is whether you're going to still be pressing the buttons or whether you're going to learn how to utilize it and focus on the decision making, taste making, and agency that you offer.

Now, the first thing I want to talk to you about is Claude. Claude co-work is everywhere right now, and there's this new feature in it called dispatch. Now, it lets me fire tasks to the setup AI system running as an assistant on my Mac. So, if I click on my Mac screen here, you can see here's a conversation I started with it via Claude. Claude can also use your computer, search through Chrome and open apps and click for you, use browser actions and a bunch of other stuff. And I can even set schedule tasks that always run so I don't even have to message it.

Now, I'm not talking about Siri level requests here. Let me give you a little example. Please, can you go through my projects and tasks database in notion, pull anything due this week or that seems important and draft a summary and drop it in my email inbox. So, this is proper work I can get done end to end. I'm going to let that run and then we'll come back to it.

Now, to make this useful rather than a party trick, Claude needs context. So, I built something called Co-work OS. It's a templated setup system for Claude. co-work folders, instructions, personalized pages, skills, plugins, all inside the Claude desktop app. This means that when I dispatch from my phone, Claude already has information about me, what we've talked about in the past, and can run its own memory. It knows my preferences that context map of all of my information. It even has a voice profile based on an interview with me and anti-AI writing style, so it writes not like every other AI. This is how you structure meaningful responses, not just start from zero.

Now, I built Co-work OS for myself originally and then I realized I could create a onboarding coach that helps other people do the same thing. I launched it in beta last week with a set of PDF guides and systems baked into it and over 150 downloads happened in the first couple of days. I did not see that coming. So, check it out if you're interested in it. But let's see how Dispatch is getting on. So, there you go. It's now written the summary and dropped it into my email as a draft. Pretty cool. And it's looked through my business OS in Notion and Gmail. I can go over to Gmail. And there you go. I've got a full report.

So, that's one example, but why don't we just ask it to do one more thing to show us what's possible. Okay, this is great, but could you please turn this into an HTML presentation and drop it on my desktop on the computer ready for me to look at when I get back to my desk? And this, to be honest, is the closest I found to feeling like you're speaking with a colleague and asking them to do work while you're out the office. It's really cool.

And while we wait for the HTML, here's a couple of tips on how to set up Claude for dispatch more effectively. Click into customize. There's a full video on how to get set up on my other channel. I'll link it in the description below. You can go into connectors and essentially just find connectors within here. So, if you browse connectors, there are hundreds of connectors within here, which mean you can essentially find the apps you use, connect them, and essentially Claude will be able to talk to them, interact with them, read them. It's really fantastic. You can also create custom plugins and skills such as my personal assistant, which turn your co-work into a bespoke worker, giving it much more precise skills tailored to your business and how you like to work. There's loads to talk about on this, but that's for another video.

Okay, so it's created it. What's really nice is it's also given me a little bit of feedback because I'm demoing this and using CleanShot to record the screen. That got in the way of it saving onto the desktop, but it's just shared it directly. We can now get back to our desktop, save it to downloads, and here we go. We've got our week at a glance. I mean, how cool is that? Gives you an idea of what's possible.

Anyway, now AI does on one level help to remove friction, but I found I still create friction when using it, and that's mostly in how slow I type. In the last 2 months, I've been prompting and writing on my iPhone with this Whisper Flow. This is probably my single favorite find of 2026. It's an AI voice interface that sits on top of everything. just speak and it sends perfectly formatted text wherever you need it. And as of right now, I've dictated over 300,000 words in the last couple of months. It's pretty wild.

So, let's do a little example of this. In my phone, I can click on this little button down here. You'll see the Whisper Flow interface allows me to adjust the tone. Then, I click record. Hi, everyone. I'm just writing you a quick email as a demo to show you how great Whisper Flow is. One of my favorite things it will do is it will recognize things like lists. So, I can give you an example of some of the things it does. One, snippets. Two, voice profile. Three, a dictionary to get clear on specific terms that may not be obvious. Anyway, check it out. Use my link and see what you make of it. Thanks, Simon. And there you go. We get a really clearly formatted email written in as you'd want to see it.

This is what it looks like on desktop. We can look at my snippets. I can edit them and it will drop them in. You can address things across personal messages, work messages, email. And I really enjoy this. It kind of cleans up things as you work.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. Why not just use Mac dictation or iPhone dictation? When you scatter your voice inputs across five different systems, there's not a single place where it's learning your voice and preferences. They're all starting from scratch. And to be honest, I think Whisper Flow are doing it better than anyone else right now. It's a single source of truth. It keeps your snippets, shortcuts, context all in one place. And it gets better at understanding how you speak the more you use it. My voice, my phrasing, my weird habits. It adapts. That matters more than people realize because if voice is going to be the first layer of how you interact with your work, then picking one system that really lets you get this nailed down is completely different to what's built into an app. It's the difference between an assistant who knows you and shouting at a stranger every time, if you know what I mean. I even heard a little rumor that Apple may have acquired Whisper Flow. Maybe that is just a rumor. But if that's true, and it does look like it could be, then yeah, I think we're on to something. Link in the description.

And speaking of always having a phone to hand, more and more in 2026, our phones are increasingly becoming the backbone of our entire productivity systems. It's where I speak to people, but increasingly it's where I interact with AI systems, keep notes, ideas, manage workflows, literally everything. So, the way you physically interact with your phone starts to matter a lot more because if there's friction there, then it kind of breaks the whole system.

Now, this thing is the Moft Trackable tripod wallet. It's still the same thin MagSafe tripod I've loved using for 2 years now, but with some brilliant upgrades that have just been released. This is a thin trackable tripod wallet with built-in Find My and a Bluetooth capture button. It holds two cards. It has different stand modes, but now it's part of my Find My ecosystem, which means you can basically outsource the mental load of keeping track of things. Always a good idea.

Now, I've always loved this to help me switch seamlessly between different interface modes depending on how I'm using my phone. Floating mode is the perfect option for video calls, Face ID, anything hands-free whilst working. There's a stand mode, which works really nicely with Apple's Standby. No more desk stands needed and Apple's Live Dashboard while you're charging. And since the Bluetooth button is also a shutter button, it's a great for easy filming in vlogging mode to snap photos or start recording instantly without having to touch my screen. But it's also a super frictionless way to easily capture context and references to add into Claude sessions seamlessly. As with all Moft products, it feels premium, it's durable, and the battery lasts around 6 months. This is hands down my favorite iPhone accessory that I've ever used and I genuinely use it and it's hard to lose. Link in the description if you want to check it out. Thanks to Moft for sponsoring this part of the video.

All right, this one's fun. What if you could just build your own iPhone app, describe what you want, and let AI write you the whole thing? I'm going to test this with Claude code in front of you right now and we're going to create a really simple app. So, if we go into code and we're going to drop in here and I'm going to go to down the bottom here, plan mode. We're going to do this in two simple steps. Here's a brief I want you to try and achieve in one pass. A simple app for my iPhone that can be accessed via a simple link online. I would add a home screen bookmark to it. And I want it to show a daily summary from my scheduled tasks in co-work of my weekly brief and daily brief that has a beautiful summary of my week and my day depending on when those scheduled tasks happen and a Pomodoro timer that I can actually use to get things done. That's it. make a plan for how to create this as a simple app that I can access from my phone. I want this to be the cleanest, easiest route to doing this. And I'd like the style of it to be in other things we've designed, particularly a kind of Apple Swiss aesthetic with a black and white design, maybe a light and dark mode. So, that's a single prompt. We're going to ask it now to plan that out. Let's see what happens.

Now, the thing about coding something these days is you don't have to go as far as you think. Simply by loading the Claude code desktop app, asking for something simple like a basic HTML app that's online and can be accessed from your phone. You can do this super quickly. So, certain things that you might need, my colleague has one that tells them when to take the bins out, can be easily made. So we can see that it has done a bunch of exploration running a load of separate agents all at once. All right. So it's made itself a plan. Here are the two screens on the tab bar the data flow and what we're going to do. Now I can either approve or I can revise it. And I'm just going to say to it is there a way to avoid using Superbase to do this? Is there a simpler route? So I'm using two quite common places to do this. One is Superbase, which is essentially a database storage system online, and Vercel, which essentially hosts your website for free and deploys it. Both of which I didn't really know about, and I just asked Claude Code to set me up with. You could also try some of the existing vibe coding apps that are out there like Lovable or Base 44, but I'm really enjoying using it all in one place. Great. So, I'm just going to click accept and allow the edits.

Wow, look at this. I'm just watching it build and it's completely brilliant. It's created a light and dark mode. There's refreshes. There's timer. It's really beautifully done and like I've just not said anything to it. Admittedly, I do have like brand colors and style stylistic items that I have already given it which you can do. It's it's really solid. Now, I don't personally fully understand how this works, but that's kind of the point here. In 2026, you don't need to understand code. You need to understand how to brief, how to task someone clearly and to have clear instructions and preferences, taste setting, agency, clarity about what you want and you can kind of do what you want to do. What I also like about this is it lets me easily just add in little notes as it works and I can watch it happen on the right. And I've just told it to add an app logo and adjust the design a bit. and that I'd love to be able to see um previous reports so it's not just the current day and it's going ahead and doing that. Now admittedly I am on a max plan and I think that probably would be needed for something like this but it depends how simple you keep it. If you just want a Pomodoro timer it will probably do that for you on a pro plan.

All right so it's about an hour and a half later here's what we've got. So if we go onto the website there it is. It's a very lovely Pomodoro counter that you can click start and stop on, pause, reset. We've then got a brief and what I really love, it's built in dark and light mode for me. Very, very simply, nice kind of simple Apple aesthetic and a list of what's going on. This is being pushed. And if you want to see where it's coming from, these are my scheduled tasks in co-work on the computer. We've got a weekly brief which links to this view, the weekly brief. It will tell me the last week in review and the week coming up, priorities and tasks to get done. It's really comprehensive, incredible. And these briefs are just custom task instructions scheduled in co-work which have instructions to go and read all of my files, look through the calendars, the week ahead, create the brief, and then send it to this app. Now, this sounds complicated, but I just asked Claude to make it all, and it's done it for me. And the same is true in scheduled tasks for the weekly triage. It does a weekly triage of tasks in Notion, projects, emails. The weekly one even checks my Slack and it and it feeds everything into here. Totally fantastic. So that is the app. We've got a morning briefing. We can look at previous versions. Uh there's demos of that. It will keep the last seven days on there for me to have a look at. And I believe it also saves it as a file on my computer if I want to look back at it from the past. All that's left to do is add it to the home screen. And that's really easy. We're going to click on the menu. We're going to click share and we're going to go down to add to home screen. Open as a web app and click add. And there it is. Brief buddy is on my home screen.

So yes, this is what people are calling vibe coding. Describing what you want. AI writes code. Sounds ridiculous. Kind of is. Works. Here's how far it can go though. Earlier this year, I made a video about an app called Editor. And this is an app that was built by Francisco Martinez to my brief with Revenue Cat. This is a decision-making app. You open it up, use AI to think through decisions, and it's really quite beautifully made. Now, this thing is there's no feed, no engagement loops, no reason to stay. that started as a vibecoded experiment and became what we're hoping is going to be a real product on the app store very soon. You can add context and goals. You can set what your next actions are and it records your sessions and artifacts. It even connects to Notion and there's an iCloud backup on it. We'll see how it goes.

Things are moving so fast, right? I guess the point is here that your phone doesn't have to run apps designed by other people for other people's purposes anymore. you can build exactly what fits how you work. And I think once that clicks, you look at this thing very differently. Let me know in the comments if you'd actually try building your own app if you've done it already, how it's gone. I dare you.

Okay, last thing, and this ties everything together. If you're rethinking what your iPhone is actually for, the home screen has to change, too. Step one is visual. I use my own custom icon packs, minimal, often monochrome designs. The reason I like this is not only it looks cool and is nice to interact with, but there's no notification badges, no red circles guilt tripping you into apps you didn't mean to open. My phone looks like a tool, not a casino. That's a terrible line. It's a simple change. It does have a proper impact on screen time.

Visual calm only gets you so far if your phone is still buzzing every 3 minutes. Icon packs are at bettercreating.com, link below if you want them. Which brings us to step two, and that's about a bit more of a cognitive calm approach to this. And this is genuinely, I think, one of Apple's best use cases of on-device AI so far, because let's just not talk about Siri right now. It's probably too soon.

Now, instead of manually blocking specific apps and hoping you don't miss an urgent email, I use Apple's reduced notifications. So, if we swipe down, I've created a focus mode for this look and feel. I've got a video on customizing your iPhone if you want to do this stuff. It's linked down below. I can go into settings for that and you can turn on here intelligent breakthrough and silencing. That means that when this mode is active, intelligence allows priority notifications to interrupt you and silences other notifications. You can also specify the apps you want to choose to allow and not allow and the people you want to choose to allow and not allow. It acts like a ruthless AI bouncer for your attention. It reads the context of your incoming notifications on the device. And if the team Slack is just debating lunch plans, it won't give it to me. If my editor's message says, "This video is corrupted and we can't publish it," then it may just get through. Well, that's the idea. Give it a go and let me know what you make about it in the comments.

And well, that's the thread here, right? Can you use your iPhone in 2026 as something intentionally rather than something that just happens to you? AI in 2026 isn't about new capabilities. It's about rethinking what our phones are for. Your iPhone can be a remote for an AI assistant. You can build your own tools as an app in an afternoon and strip the whole thing back to what actually matters. Let me know what you make of my experiments in the comments. This is just a first fun experiment. But it is the first time in a while that I've picked up my phone and thought, "This is helping me rather than eating my time and my life." And I reckon that is worth paying attention to.

If you want to set up Claude Co-work properly and give all that stuff a go, then you need to watch this video right here over on my second channel, Systems Made Better. Hit subscribe here, too, if that's your kind of thing. And uh I'll see you on the next one. Bye.