Mobile Applications

The smartphone is a time-honored tool for getting work done. We have long relied on it to help us get through an endless list of tasks. But the challenge with smartphones is that they don’t come with a user manual.

Once you’re used to using their many features, it’s hard to imagine life before smartphones. But whether you use your smartphone to get things done or to check in with social media, it is worth learning how to use it to get the maximum productivity from it.

A good day starts with a good plan. Earlier phones, like the Palm Pilot, were useful, but they didn’t allow you much control over how you got things done. The iPhone and its clones entered our lives as pseudo-personal digital assistants, but they lacked the power to create routines that organized your life.

Now, with iOS 10, Apple has introduced the ability to plan your day. It has built powerful calendar and reminder features into its operating system, and iOS 10 also supports third-party tools. But planning your day is tricky. Your plan will be useless unless it fits with your actual life. These tips will help you create an effective plan.

The smartphone is a valuable tool. But it also has some awkward side effects. First, smartphones are good at organizing your time. One day you open your calendar and see that you have a packed schedule. No problem, you type in some tasks, hit save, and you’re done. But the next time you open your calendar, you have more tasks than before.

What has happened? Your smartphone has created new tasks. But it also created a bigger capacity, so now you’re scheduling things that weren’t there before. And the bigger capacity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means you can schedule more. But on the other hand, your smartphone is good at scheduling. It learns what you like, and the more you schedule, the more it schedules.

Smartphones are good at scheduling, but they are bad at creating free time.

Second, smartphones are good at distracting you. You open your calendar and see that a colleague invited you out for a drink after work. You tell her that you already have plans, and you click “accept”. But your smartphone disagrees. “Hey,” it says, “there’s an email alert from ABC. Open it.”

So you open the email. It is from a colleague at ABC, and he wants to invite you to a happy hour after work. You say no, and he gives a polite response. But your smartphone has the last word. “Hey,” it says, “there’s an email from ABC. Open it.”

You open the email from ABC. It is from a colleague at ABC, and he wants you to come to his office to “discuss the results of your meeting”. You say no, and he gives you a polite response. But your smartphone has the last word.

Work While Eating

The most common complaint I hear about smartphones is that most of them have a terrible alarm clock. They either wake you up at precisely 6 a.m. (too early) or don’t wake you up at all (too late). There is a simple way to fix this. Use your phone’s alarm feature to program an alarm that wakes you up at 7 a.m. every day. Then go to work. When you get home, turn the alarm off.

This turns your smartphone into an alarm clock. With it, you can wake up at 7 a.m. and go to work. When you get home at 7 p.m., you can turn the alarm off. Then you are free to eat dinner, hang out with friends, or take a nap.

The alarm is an alarm clock because it is set for a specific time. It is programmable because it is set up to tell the phone what to do when the alarm goes off. The way we wake up every morning is a function of what time we went to bed and what time we wake up. If you go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up at 6 a.m., that means you sleep for 12 hours. If you go to bed at 11 p.m. and wake up at 7 a.m., that means you slept 10 hours. But if you go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up at 7 a.m., that means you slept 11 hours.

We arrange our lives around our sleep schedule. If you go to bed at 11 p.m. and wake up at 7 a.m., that means you go to work in the morning. If you go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up at 8 a.m., that means you work in the afternoon.

Productivity on the Phone

Think about how you use your phone. Almost none of what most of us do on the phone has a productive use. We use our phones to check Facebook, to chat with friends, to play games, to watch video clips. But what if you tried to make your phone into a tool that made you more productive?

How about an app that helped you organize your to-do list? Or one that allowed you to keep track of your friends’ birthdays? Or one that noted which stories you marked to read and which you’d forgotten? Maybe it wouldn’t look much like the current apps. Maybe instead of apps, you would just install a program on your phone. Just something for you to use.

If you did, would that make a difference? In a recent study, a group of researchers tested the idea. They asked 44 people to use a new to-do list application, either on their iPhones or on their desktop. The desktop version was free. The iPhone version cost $1.99, which the researchers figured was about what it would cost to buy a cup of coffee.

The researchers found that the iPhone app was four times as productive as the equivalent desktop app. The iPhone version’s users completed twice as much work, they earned 26% more in their day, and they were 15% happier with their lives.

Work While Flying

One thing people seem to discover when they start working at home is that they need to do work. It’s surprising how tough it is to get work done at home. Most people with a job are working in an office, where other people are doing something, and where if you sit too long you are likely to get shouted at or yelled at. But at home, if you sit down, you are likely just to sit.

In part, this is just a matter of habit: when you don’t go to work, you don’t go to work. But it’s also a matter of distractions.

The first thing you notice when you work from home is that, even when you are not working, you spend a lot of time thinking about work. If you have kids, you have to think about getting them to school, and when you get home, you have to think about dinner. The second thing you notice is that, even when you are not working, you spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with work. E-mail, for example, is a terrible productivity tool. People freak out about it, but it’s amazing how few people actually use it to get work done.

E-mail instead becomes a repository for random thoughts and questions. You find you’ve spent an hour one-mail, but do not know why. E-mail is also a terrible communication tool. When something comes up in your work that you want to talk to a co-worker in, you’re supposed to know something is up, so you call or e-mail. But e-mail is not a suitable replacement for talking. Even traveling is a problem. When you work at home, you often find yourself either taking a nap or watching TV or surfing the web. But you can’t just work or watch TV or surf the web; Work, and watch TV, and surf the web. If you work at home, your only genuine option is to work. It’s tempting to just.