Transcription
This video is all about the iPhone apps that actually make you more productive. I've tried over 50 this year and these are the five that I think are absolutely game-changing to anyone's way of work. And stick around because number five, well, I personally think it's gamechanging. It brings everything all together in one place.
[Music]
Hey, I'm Tom. And let's be honest, many of us have got 100 plus apps on their phone, but spend a lot of time switching between one or the other trying to find the right thing. In fact, 56 minutes a day on average is spent wasting your time searching for the right app or being distracted by another one you didn't mean to go on. And for me, that's Bellatro. I should never have downloaded Bellatro.
So, first up, it's Forest. This is your digital focus coach. Set a timer, plant a virtual tree, and while you work, it grows. If you break that focus, jump to Instagram, for example, or Bellatro as unlikely to do. That tree dies over the weeks, you actually grow a genuine forest of focus. Well, not a literal forest of focus, but you understand what I'm saying. So, every Monday morning, I run a forest session while planning my week. It's how I build the right to-do list before any other distractions keep in. It's got a beautiful gamified Pomodoro Road timer with some gorgeous ambient music, which helps me focus, dial in, and make sure I'm not distracted.
But really, focus is just half the battle. What if you could have things get done without you ever having to pick up your phone? In fact, while you are asleep. Let's talk about automation. I tried a couple such as NA10 which is really popular right now but Zapia is the ultimate automation tool. So I use it to draft email responses automatically. I have this automation set up with Zapia and it's inbuilt OpenAI integration. It reads my Gmail inbox for my YouTube channel and I have it set up to read the context and then draft appropriate responses to sit in my draft folder. So it's not sending them for me. I'm still going in at the end of the day and I've got a little reminder on my phone to remind me to go in and just double check the spelling, the details, the context, is it all right, who it's going to, and if it's all good, which it typically is, I can then just send that straight out. So, before I even wake up in the morning, overnight, I get a lot of these overnight, my whole inbox is ready to respond to without me having to lift a single finger, massively reducing my screen time and massively improving my productivity.
But before you decide to actually spend money on to do this, you need to obviously ask yourself, is automation actually going to save you any time at all? And how much is that time worth to you? Because it's not right for everybody. It's right for me because I have to juggle these two. My my normal work life and also my YouTube professional life. So that's automation.
But then there's the opposite problem. There's things that you will never want to automate. So let's talk about notes.
>> Oh, hey. Thanks for watching. Um, hit subscribe. Love to see you next time.
>> I can almost hear your groans from this screen, Apple Notes. But trust me, I don't think that any of us are really using Apple Notes to its fullest extent, particularly on our phones. So, here's some of the best features that I want you to make sure you're using. The first is quick capture from the lock screen. The next is smart folders. Smart folders allow you to set tags on different notes. You can just take any note and as long as you've got the right smart folder set up, it's just going to instantly organize it for you. It means that you don't have to set up a very intricate, detailed folder system, you can have other apps to do that. This is just for your very quick notes. It's excellent. And the fact that it syncs across iCloud means that you can actually send the same note like a shopping list. Okay, this is a genuine example for me. My wife and I, we have a shared note for our shopping list, which means that when I go shopping, she can update it in real time, and I'm more I'm less likely to forget things like milk. Now, I remember the milk, but then I do forget other stuff. But I'm getting better. I'm getting better and this app is helping. So, cool. And I want to know, do you use those Apple Note features? And have they helped you? Because if you're someone that does, I reckon you're in the top 10% of Apple Notes users. Congrats.
But that is only surface level planning. If you want to do real planning, then this next app is absolutely legendary for it. Things 3 is still the cleanest planning app I've ever used. Daily tasks, long-term goals, and even your someday projects. Things like this YouTube channel used to sit on a some days project. And you know what? It is a one-off payment that is so refreshing this day and day and age. pay for it once, have the app, and get it updated with new features and capabilities that keeps itself relevant. What I particularly love about the app is the fact that it allows you to have that long-term goal set up alongside the things that you're working on today.
But all these tools, they live separately. So, what if I told you that there was one app that could bring them all together? So, introducing you to Craft. Now, I've spoken about this on a few other videos, but it has replaced at least three other apps for me. It is now my notetaker. It is my task manager. It helps me plan. It helps me track projects. And it's all done in a single dashboard interface that is beautiful and aesthetic and customizable to an unbelievable level. It is much simpler than things like Notion and Obsidian. And it is aesthetically pleasing, which always helps. They've recently listened to customer feedback and added new things in like tagging. seems simple, but you can just now search for one tag and find any thing you've ever written relating to that tag. So, I recently moved all of my channel planning to craft. So, I have all of my scripts. I've got all of my research. I've got all of my doodles for the YouTube thumbnails that I want to make. I've got my thoughts and ideas I like to scribble out using its easy integrated canvas. It is a capability and an app that lives, yes, on your iPhone, but also seamlessly on any of your other devices and natively adapts the way that you can engage with it on each of them. For example, the Apple Pencil integration on the iPad is beautiful, but equally, the way that you can tap in and explore and add depth into anything on the iPhone is excellent. It's got in-built AI that helps you query and question things, improve writing right in the moment. although personally I still like to use an external AI for that because it's got to learn my tone of voice over the years but is all built natively into the app itself.
So those are just five apps that you can use today that can turn your phone into an incredible productivity powerhouse. And thank you so much for sticking around and watching. If you want to see how I actually turned my phone into the ultimate productivity machine with focus modes, automatic settings, take a look at this video here. And for everything else, I'll see you next.