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034: Smartphone hacks
792 Plays4 years ago
This episode will help transform your smartphone into your biggest productivity weapon to make your life admin easier.
Most Australians hang on to their smartphone for more than three years, so it's really worth your while to learn your phone’s features and install must-have apps to minimise and optimise your life admin.
Mia and Dinah’s top hacks are:
- Clean up your home screen so that the apps you want to use the most are on the first screen you see when you unlock your phone, so your environment supports good habits.
- Set up text replacement shortcuts in your settings for your frequently typed information such as your email address
- Use Do not Disturb including the automatic features for turning it off when a meeting finishes or you leave a location
- Use your phone’s camera to scan documents and add them to your cloud storage so you can eliminate paper
- Use Shared albums to collect photos of shared experiences from multiple users to create photo books etc.
- If you use the Reminders app (iPhone) for To-Do Lists, add smart alerts linked to your location or your contacts to nudge you to perform the task when you arrive or leave somewhere, or when you're messaging a certain person.
- Use Screentime (iPhone) or Digital Wellbeing (Android) to limit the time you spend on social media or games, so you can use your time in ways that align with your values.
- Use the Notes app (iPhone) for Reference Lists and to scan documents
- Use the Timer (iPhone) in the Clock app on your phone to set a time limit that automatically turns off music or a podcast when your time is up: perfect for time boxing life admin tasks.
- Set up mobile payment capability, like Apple Pay or Google Pay so that you can pay for things on the fly
- Set up a password manager like Lastpass or Keeper to be able to securely access your passwords on any of your devices, wherever you may be.
- Use the Tripit app to store your holiday itineraries
- Use the Pocketmoney app Spriggy to take the hassle out of managing pocket money
- Customise Google Maps with your frequently visited locations
- Download apps for your favourite catalogues to reduce paper clutter. Mia uses the Loop app to buy books for her kids, which raises funds for their school.
- Apps for To-Do Lists - Reminders (iPhone), Todoist
- Settings to limit your screen time - Screentime (iPhone), Digital Wellbeing (Android)
- Apps for Reference Lists - Notes
- Calendar and Mail App - Outlook
- Password Manager App - Lastpass or Keeper
- App for Holiday Itineraries - Tripit
- Pocketmoney App - Spriggy
- Reci
Recommended
Transcript
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Podcast Introduction
00:00:28
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony.
00:00:40
Speaker
I'm Dinah Roberts, an operations manager who knows there is a very fine line between good and evil when it comes to smartphones. I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer who has a tradey approved, heavy duty iPhone case because I drop it once a day. This episode will give you our top hacks for using your smartphone to make life admin easier. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks.
00:01:03
Speaker
We're going to talk about our top 10 hacks for using your smartphone to make your life admin
Audience Engagement Request
00:01:08
Speaker
easier. This episode is really your iPhone or your smartphone, your Samsung, whatever you might have is probably the biggest productivity weapon that you own. But before we get into that,
00:01:19
Speaker
We would love to ask you to please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcast or Stitcher, whatever podcast platform you're using. If you've gotten any value out of the podcast since we've been publishing, we'd love for you to share your feedback. We're actually writing a book and we've got some interest from publishers, but they seem to be more interested in our audience numbers than our writing skills. So subscribe, follow, rate, review, tell a friend or a family member,
00:01:49
Speaker
Whoever you think could benefit, it really does help demonstrate our following and grow our following. So we'd be really appreciative of
Smartphone Usage and Productivity
00:01:57
Speaker
that. Great, Mia. So today's smartphones, these smartphones have got enormous capability, yet so many people still use them for meaningless activities like scrolling through social media and watching cat videos.
00:02:13
Speaker
Oh, cash videos are pretty good. So the Deloitte Mobile Consumer Survey 2019 said that 91% of Australians have a smartphone. We've got one of the highest rates of smartphone ownership in the world. About 40% market share goes to Apple, 36% to Samsung, and people are hanging onto their phones for at least three and a half years these days. So it's really worth your while before you bother upgrading to get to know your phone's features and to make the most of it because
00:02:42
Speaker
Photos and messaging and phone calls and Facebook scrolling are the tip of the iceberg of what they can do. And it's what interesting fact I also saw was that it's now the preferred way to shop online for a growing number of people and specifically for women. So we're going to talk through a whole bunch of tips and hacks that are going to boost the way you use your phone and really get the productivity gains that they are capable of.
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, and I know a lot of people now only have their phone and they don't even have access to a computer, so it's really great to be able to use it to make your life admin easier. So, Mia, do you want to get us started?
Task Organization with Apps
00:03:20
Speaker
What's your top hack? Yep. All right. We've got 10 hacks. We're going to flip between the two of us and go through them.
00:03:25
Speaker
So, I'm a major fan of the Reminders app on the iPhone. This is essentially to do List Central. And it's just had an upgrade. And when I say just, I think it happened at the end of last year, but I just came upon it, I don't know, a couple months ago.
00:03:41
Speaker
It's hard to stay on top of all these bloody upgrades. So, I use it for my annual goals. I have my to-do list in there. I actually have a list for worries, which is an interesting thing I got from the Anamantha Imba initiative where you just dump your worries into a list and then you can start worrying about them. And interestingly, when I was prepping for this episode, I went back to my worries list.
00:04:02
Speaker
which I think I put together in May this year. There's about 15 things on the list and I deleted 12 of them. So it was actually, you know, that's a whole other episode, but I have another list for bars and restaurants that I want to go to. And I have the gift wish list for my kids and family members. So anything where I want a checklist, where I want to actually tick things off and I don't need it to be evergreen, I use the reminders on the phone.
00:04:28
Speaker
And the upgrade that they've done is essentially there's just some better layout. You can now set icons for the different lists. So there's particular icons that you could have for a family-related list or medicine or finances or groceries or DIY, whatever it might be. As always, you can set it to remind you of a task at a certain date and time, but also as you arrive or leave a certain location, which I find so useful because I always forget, say, to go to the pharmacy
00:04:55
Speaker
or I forget that I need to pick up something on the way to something else. So you can actually set the reminder to pop up when you get in your car or out of your car or when you go into a certain location. The new functionality is that it can remind you when you're messaging a certain person. So if you need to remember, for example, oh, I've got to talk to mum about Father's Day plans,
00:05:16
Speaker
If you put that in your task, in your to-do list, and you ask it to notify you when you're next messaging that person, the next time you start sending SMSes back and forth with mum, the reminder will come up and say, don't forget that you wanted to talk about this. That's amazing. Genius.
00:05:34
Speaker
It just bings in the middle of the texting. I was like, oh my God, this is beautiful. You can now also set sub-tasks. So this is useful if you have a chunky activity like, I need to do my tacks, and you can actually put in the small steps that you can take to get there instead of just having this glaring, do the tacks, make a task that's hard to get over.
00:05:56
Speaker
You can share the lists. You can't share individual tasks, but you can share entire lists. And you can also move your emails from your inbox to the reminders pretty smoothly. Sometimes an email will come through and there's an action that comes out of it. And best practice is to not use your email inbox as your to-do list. You should get the emails out, put the task into your to-do list.
00:06:19
Speaker
So what I just do is I take a screenshot of the email, if it's got details in it that I need to refer to. And then you can just hit share, hit reminders and create a new reminder and it will pop it into your to-do list. And then you can delete the email. I'm a big fan of that, that little powerhouse. Definitely sounds like you love that app. How about you? I think that actually my top hack is to set limits on time wasting apps like social media or games.
00:06:47
Speaker
Mia, I know you deleted all the social media completely from your phone, but I hadn't gone hardcore and deleted that. So I decided that I really wanted to limit myself to five minutes per day. And so I just set that up in the screen time settings in my iPhone. And it means that as soon as the five minutes up, I get my message. And I know, OK, I've spent five minutes. That's enough. And I can move on to do something else. And I think there's an app that you need.
00:07:17
Speaker
If you have an Android phone to do that, but all phones should be capable of setting up some of those limits. And I also use those screen time settings for my kids. So I know that they're not on their iPhones and iPads all day and make sure that they're not using them during late in the evening or early in the morning.
00:07:36
Speaker
And that really makes sure that we're using the phone productively rather than just for social media or late into the evening. Yeah. So I think there's a digital well-being app for Android phones. And on the screen time, I was checking it out last night. I think, yeah, it's worth talking about in terms of top ticks for your phone, what apps don't you have? Because
00:07:59
Speaker
social media apps, games, you know, if you're frustrated about how much you're getting done on the things that are important to you, it is worthwhile setting up these limits or just deleting them completely. It also shows you how much you pick up your phone. And I was shocked to see that yesterday I picked up my phone 65 times. Oh my gosh.
00:08:20
Speaker
That's a lot. Yeah, I was just like, whoa. And there's a little graph, a little chart that shows you the time of day when it is suddenly using it more. That's because it was Friday night and I'd like knocked off for the week and I, you know, jump on the phone while I'm watching TV or whatever. And so it was peaking, but it can, seeing some of those stats can really make you question your behavior and really get upfront with how much you're actually wasting time and using it.
00:08:46
Speaker
So Mia, what's your next hack? OK, the notes notes app. You can share the notes. You can have them as live documents or other people can change them and you can see the changes straight away. I use these notes for my evergreen lists. I use them for checklists for things that are happening every year. So things like set up for Christmas or things to do on the weekend when it's raining. It's like.
00:09:13
Speaker
COVID, non-crazy making things to do with the children where you can't go anywhere, stuff like that, grocery lists. You can pin them to the top, so if you do have something like the grocery list that you always want to have at the top, it will be there. You can scan documents, you can annotate them, you can add tables.
00:09:29
Speaker
They're very, very useful. You can also turn notes into reminders. So recently, I had all my, initially I had my gift wish lists as notes, and I realized I wanted them to have the checklist, and as I bought something, I could just tick it off instead of having to delete it. And you can do that by simply going to the note, you hit share, you choose reminders, and it will create a reminder in your to-do list, and then you can delete it from the notes.
00:09:56
Speaker
Easy peasy. Great. What's your next hack? So my next one is around thinking about the apps that you have on your home screen when you first unlock your phone. So that, and I guess it's related to my first hack, but if you think what you want to use your phone for,
00:10:13
Speaker
You know, what's the main functions? Is it your calendar? Is it your to-do list? If you want to have social media or games on there, just make sure they're buried away a little bit so that as soon as you open your phone, you see the things right in front of your face
Convenience of Mobile Payments
00:10:26
Speaker
that you actually want to use it for, not the time wasters. Yeah, great idea. In preparation for this episode, I was looking at what I have in my home screen. I don't think my home screen's changed for years because it really is just the essentials. If I download other things, I flick it off to other screens or other folders.
00:10:43
Speaker
OK, my next tip is about using the timer. So there is some additional functionality that again launched late last year where you can actually use the timer to stop music or podcast or whatever audio or video is playing instead of it just chiming some random ringtone.
00:11:02
Speaker
I know lots of people use this when they go to sleep, and they want to listen to some music or a podcast when they're going to sleep, but they don't want it to keep on playing after they've dripped off, so they put a timer on it. But I actually do it when I have to do something life admin-ish, like if I have to declutter, or if I'm doing, I'll give myself, I'm going to do this for 10 minutes, go through paperwork for 10 minutes, I want to set a timer because I don't
00:11:25
Speaker
10 minutes is all I can bear. So I will listen to the podcast for 10 minutes. I'll put on some music for 10 minutes and you set the timer to stop the audio at the end of that timer. And then once the podcast goes off or the music stops, I'm like, okay, my 10 minutes is up. I can stop decluttering now. I can stop doing my little task. So again, it's a good productivity tool when you need to set timers for things, but you want to also play some kind of audio or video during that time.
00:11:53
Speaker
I had no idea that at the time I can do that. I'm going to have to investigate that today. My next hack is to think about whether you actually want to use a mail or a calendar app rather than the native apps that are on your phone. So I use the Outlook mail and calendar app because it can easily show both my work calendar and our shared calendar.
00:12:15
Speaker
And it also can easily integrate with cloud storage like your Google Drive. And also it can actually bring some of the things over from Facebook like birthdays. I know that's one thing that people love about Facebook is that it reminds you when it's someone's birthday. So you can integrate your Facebook account into that Outlook app and then it automatically shows up people's birthdays in the calendar.
00:12:38
Speaker
I feel like we played around with Outlook in the early days and we just couldn't work out how to get it to show the Google. Maybe we're trying to get two Outlook calendars to talk to each other and that was our trip up. But the Google Calendar integration is smooth, huh? I was super smooth and I find that Outlook Mail app so much better than the native app or even the Google Gmail Calendar or Google Calendar or Gmail apps.
00:13:04
Speaker
So I don't need to have any of those on my phone anymore. Ooh, okay. I might have to check that out. I think at the moment with home learning, I need to be able to see when my kids have Webexes in the middle of my workday. Yes. And I don't want to put them in my work artwork calendar, but okay, good. That could work. Okay, Mary, what's your next hack?
00:13:25
Speaker
Most of us probably have banking apps on our phone. It's pretty useful if you're doing mobile banking. But I also have mobile payments on my phone that tap and go using Apple Pay. So you scan your credit card with the phone, it pulls in the details, you add your CVC number. And that means you can use it to tap an F pass, you know, contactless payment when you go to stores. And this has come in handy when I have to make spontaneous payments or I guess an adjusting case scenario where I don't have my
00:13:55
Speaker
my wallet with me. It's not my preferred way to pay, but it has increasingly become a very convenient way to pay if I'm, especially if I'm out doing exercise or with the kids and I've just got my phone and suddenly we decide we need a donut or, you know, a milkshake. It has come in handy. So I know some people prefer not to carry around a chunky wallet and they might just have their phone with a couple of credit cards slipped into the case, but you might not even need those credit cards if you put the payment details into your phone itself.
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah definitely I've been using that I really think it's so much better than having a card as well. Next from you. So next is the app that changed my life.
Importance of Password Managers
00:14:38
Speaker
Which is LastPass so my password manager that I use both on my phone and on my work computer and my home computer.
00:14:47
Speaker
And that ability to have those passwords seamlessly across those three devices has really made it so much easier for me to move everything online without having any paper for our live admin. So I used not only the password manager, but also the form filling functionality within LastPass, which makes filling out any forms or online shopping so much easier.
00:15:12
Speaker
also gives me the payment info and a secure vault for storing copies of documents like our passport and driver's license. And it's amazing how often that comes in handy to be able to get that information really to hand without having to dig around and keep those important documents. So they're with me wherever I go because they're on my phone in the LastPass app.
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, I have to second how life changing having a password manager is. So I use a keeper password manager. And similarly, having the passwords on my laptop, my work computer and my phone and credit card info and the form filling data, it just, yeah, it's very useful.
00:15:50
Speaker
This week I used it, I had to do it a hundred point ID check and I could just do it then and there because I had the passport, Medicare, the license, marriage certificate, all of that stuff just ready to look at the details and upload photographs and the person I was dealing with couldn't believe it.
00:16:08
Speaker
It was so convenient. I also just say I do use Google Drive a lot, so I have some frequent form-filling data in there, in a sort of spreadsheet, which has things like Centrelink numbers, private health insurance numbers, all those kinds of details, what I use a lot for, usually filling out forms related to the kids.
00:16:27
Speaker
But I also use it to save bills and any documents from providers. So if I get an email that comes in and it's got, you know, this month's electricity bill, I can just tap on the bill, save it straight into my Google Drive, into the relevant folder, delete the email, and that's supporting that whole paperless system. So I can refer back to that bill in the future if we're doing budgeting or tax time. But Google Drive and both, and Keeper,
00:16:54
Speaker
in terms of accessing some of those frequently used documents or references and saving things are just essential. Yeah, I don't know how I ever survived without either of them, to be honest. Oh, I know how I survived. I had a risky little situation where I had all my passwords written in a little book. My identity theft ratio would have been ridiculous. Every day I was probably resetting a password for something because I'd forgotten it.
00:17:21
Speaker
It was a nightmare. All right. Your next hack. It's actually an app.
Efficient Travel Planning
00:17:26
Speaker
So one that I have talked about before on the podcast, but Tripit, which is so easy to use to keep everything for your holiday plans in one place. It is one of those apps where you need to invest a little bit of time upfront, getting to know its features, including how you can email. So when something arrives in your email over booking accommodation,
00:17:48
Speaker
It actually automatically will pick that up and bring it into the trip. But you need to spend a little bit of time getting everything set up properly so that it works. But it really has made keeping everything together in terms of flight bookings or accommodation bookings, car hire. It plays so easy. I used to manually add things into our Google Drive.
00:18:10
Speaker
but Tripit makes everything so much better. I think when you first mentioned this app, I was thinking, oh, Diana, I would love to have a holiday that involved a complicated, where Tripit will come in handy and that aspiration lives on, especially now that we're in lockdown and we can't even go five kilometres away from where we live one day. But it's also good even for a simple holiday like camping,
00:18:35
Speaker
in terms of having the dates easily to hand with the confirmation from the campsite and just know where to book rather than having to manually add that in to, you know, somewhere, you know, whether it would be Calendar or Google Drive. It has all of my little trips in it, even your weekend away and things like that. If there's any kind of booking, it automatically adds it from your email, makes it super easy. OK, thank you for making me feel better.
00:19:03
Speaker
OK, what's your next hack? Oh, I have a little hack. This is a little one. So this is a little hack so that you never have to write your email address in an email or a message ever again. If you've got an iPhone and you go to settings, then general, then keyboard and then text replacement, you can add a little shortcut. So you might just want to write, you know, your name and then the symbol or some random thing.
00:19:26
Speaker
And that means that every time you write your name in the app symbol, it'll just put in your whole email address. And I can't tell you how often this saves me just a couple of extra strokes every time I have to message someone or fill in a form or facially type my email address, whatever it is, just one of those little bing done. It just pops up automatically for me. Awesome. I have actually got a few text replacement things that I'm going to make.
00:19:50
Speaker
typing messages super fast as well. It's actually- I've got the, I'm five minutes away is another one, or on my way, or I'll get back to you soon. Certainly fine. Someone's ringing me and I can't get to them. I'll get back to you soon. Okay. Your next hack.
00:20:08
Speaker
My next one is another app called Spriggy.
Teaching Kids Financial Management
00:20:11
Speaker
It's something I use for my kids to manage their pocket money and also comes with a debit card, which is really great because it's something that kids can't easily get from a bank until they're much older. So that app allows me to easily manage paying their pocket money and adding money to their debit card.
00:20:29
Speaker
So I can actually send them to the shops to buy things certainly, and also easily add the money each week without having to have complicated, you know, having cash on hand or, or things like that. Um, it also allows them to have a copy of the app on their own device so they can set up savings goals and things like that. So rather than having to have a bank account, which is, you know, a bit unnecessary when you're talking, you know, small amounts of money.
00:20:54
Speaker
way easier to manage their pocket money. So with Spriggy, when you download the app, can you set up the whole thing from the app? Do you need to get onto a laptop to order the debit card and everything? It was all driven from the app.
00:21:08
Speaker
I feel like you might have to join on the web. I did it ages ago now, but something that has really, it was a process that was a life admin burden for us in terms of making sure that that happened. Kids were always complaining that I owed them money because I hadn't paid them pocket money. So being able to sit down, we have our, you know, sort of ritual of when the pocket money happens on a Sunday evening.
00:21:32
Speaker
We talk about it, whether they've achieved the things they need to achieve to get their pocket money. And I just use the app to quickly transfer the money. And then they can easily check their balance at the same time. So I find it really easy to use. I'm going to download that this weekend. It's time. We're having lots of conversations now about access to birthday money and how much money have I got in the bank. And we have the accounts for one of them in a bank and the other one thinks they've got the account that they don't.
00:22:01
Speaker
And they never get to use it because, as you said, they don't issue the debit cards, so I'd be happy to send them up to the shops so they can buy whatever ridiculous they want with their own money and learn some lessons. I kind of love having the debit card too. It's a big win. Yeah, so grown up. Okay, another little hack from me about the do not disturb on your phone.
00:22:23
Speaker
I use this more and more, especially when I'm on Zoom calls or increasingly it seems I need to get my phone to be silent. When you actually flick it on, you can hold the button down and it will actually give you options for when to automatically turn it off. And you can actually have it so that it will turn off when you leave that particular location. So if you're at the cinema or you're in a particular meeting and then you leave that location, it will turn itself back on.
00:22:50
Speaker
Or you can set it so that it will turn it off on at the end of that event. So it'll show you, you know, the fact that, okay, when I turn it on, we were recording the podcast, it knew that I'd set two hours for this. And so the Do Not Disturb will automatically go back on once this event is over. So it's just very convenient.
00:23:07
Speaker
Awesome. So my next hack is again, it is a bit of an iPhone one, but I have started using the shared albums function for my photos on my iPhone.
Sharing Photos Easily
00:23:19
Speaker
So it really makes it easy for me to get the photos from my husband and my daughter who both have iPhones as well, so that we can collect all the photos related to a particular event as we go. So we've recently just created a Corona album, so we've been adding everything
00:23:37
Speaker
you know, some of the photos of what we've been doing while we've been in lockdown. We often then take a photo and talk about, oh, well, we can add that to the Corona album and then it will make it really easy to either scroll through that album just simply if we want to be able to scroll through it digitally or to be able to create something like a photo book because all of the photos are stored in the same place. So really easy way to continue to sort photos that you share with others as you go.
00:24:05
Speaker
Huh. So, so is this sharing on an album by album basis? So they can't see, you can't see all of their photos, just the ones that are going into a certain album. You just create a shared album and then you add photos to it and other people can add. Cool. And I think there's a similar way of doing that using the Google photo app, which I understand has improved a lot. So I think if you have, want to use Google photos, that's another option to do similar things.
00:24:29
Speaker
My next app is around Google Maps. So I have downloaded the Google Maps app because the native app on the iPhone is less than to be desired. And I have set up specific destinations for home and work and school and a partner's workplace, family destinations.
00:24:47
Speaker
And I can't tell you how much time this saves when I'm either using my phone and I need to send a pin to someone of where they need to go and I can just flick it from Google Maps or when I get in the car and I plug it in and CarPlay kicks in.
00:25:02
Speaker
and it pulls those destinations straight into Google Maps. So if I'm at a different location, I need to get home or get to work or get to school. It's literally one click to put in that address. And again, it's something that I probably use every second day. Take some time to customize your Google Maps so it can work a bit harder for you.
00:25:20
Speaker
Awesome. So my next one is again about photos, but really just thinking about how you can best use the camera app on your phone. I do also have a scanning app on my phone, but I mostly just use the camera app to scan documents and easily and quickly add them to Google drive on the go. So.
00:25:38
Speaker
It means that I can immediately get rid of any paper that might come into the house or, you know, out and about. So if someone gives me a piece of paper, I usually immediately snap a photo of it, save it to Google Drive and then throw out the piece of paper so that it really, you know, makes life simpler. No filing ever required if you scan documents as you go. Don't save them up. Do it straight away. It's, you know, a couple of clicks and you don't have to worry about the document anymore.
00:26:07
Speaker
Nice one. Oh, photos. It's still a holy grail. It's an intervention. My last hack is around school admin, school kid admin. My school has a parent portal and I downloaded the app onto my phone. And again, it has made keeping up to date with all the newsletters and updates and announcements and parent teacher interviews.
00:26:31
Speaker
a lot more convenient. The other kid admin thing I have on my phone is the Loop Scholastic Book Club. So this is a book club, the fundraising book club where if you order books, the school gets a little kit of a little bit of commission. And I use this because it reduces the paper clutter. Sometimes the kids lose the catalogs that come home. We don't order by the catalog, the paper catalog. We jump on Loop on the phone and plug in the orders that way.
00:26:58
Speaker
And so especially during this time when we can't get to bookstores, bookstores are open, we've actually been ordering all sorts of books through that app diner. Awesome. Finish us off. Finish us off. What have you got? So my last one is the Todoist app. So I used to use the Wunderlist app on my phone to have my todos, but sadly it got discontinued.
00:27:23
Speaker
Really? Yeah. And it was replaced by Microsoft to do, but it was nowhere near as good. It didn't have the same functionality as the... Did Microsoft acquire Wunderlist? Yes, they did. So I actually did... This is, I guess, an example of where I then did quite a bit of research to make sure that I picked an app that had the functionality that I wanted. And in particular, for me, the reason why the reminders, the native iPhone reminder app doesn't work for me,
00:27:50
Speaker
is I really like to be able to allocate individual tasks to different members of the family within the list so that I can give things to my husband and my daughter to do and they know that they're responsible for them and get reminders and things. So I've did quite a lot of research about the functionality that I wanted in that app and to do estimate all of the requirements. So that's the one we've been using.
00:28:15
Speaker
That's probably my other most used app in terms of making sure that I add everything there that needs to get done around the place. Nice one. And Diana, do you have a bonus hack for us to do with recipes?
00:28:26
Speaker
Yes, I think I might have talked about this one before, but Paprika, it's a recipe app and it is a paid app. So normally I would pay for an app. You said that in such scandalous terms. No, it's funny because you really don't expect to ever have to pay for an app. Please do these days. But it's a really amazing app for saving recipes that you find online. It's a bit like Tripit, you just forward the recipe to the app.
00:28:54
Speaker
And it automatically populates it beautifully with all of the method and all the ingredients. And then you can use it to, for example, automatically have a recipe or double a recipe. So you don't even have to worry about any of that maths. So such a great way to be able to save recipes that you find online and be able to then rate them. If you've enjoyed the meal, you can put them into categories. My daughter and I both have a copy of the app on our phones.
00:29:22
Speaker
So also a great way for her to be able to suggest recipes and you can manually add some of your old favorites as well. So we sadly very rarely use a recipe book anymore because everything we need.
00:29:35
Speaker
and so much easier to use. Yeah, wow. I have to say, when I moved house, I brought some recipe books over. They were literally dusty. Either flicking through on my phone or the laptop and looking at just-in-time recipes or going back to bookmarks, I very rarely dip into a recipe book these days.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah, we used to have them as bookmarks too, but paprika is so much easier to find what you're looking for. So that's one that's really made cooking much easier in our house. Brilliant. And so, Diane, when do you do all of this? When are you looking at the apps and deciding what needs to be deleted and what you need to add and what you should be customizing? Is this something that you do regularly or is it kind of an ad hoc thing?
00:30:19
Speaker
Yes, I often do do a bit of a phone tidy up on, you know, when I'm sitting on the couch watching something bad on television. I think that I used to often use that time for social media scrolling. And now I do find that I use that time for photo sorting and phone tidying up.
00:30:36
Speaker
It's a really effective way. In the non-corona days, I often used to do it when I was waiting to pick the kids up from something. So, you know, when you arrive a bit early at a sporting event, I really found that you could do quite a lot in 10 or 15 minutes. What about you, ma'am?
00:30:51
Speaker
Well, this is the kind of thing where I sort of dedicate an hour of power to every now and then. It's usually if I have had some kind of major trigger like we've started using a new app at work or I have had to download an app for a specific occasion and then I just go in there and clean up a whole bunch of things while I'm fiddling around with the folders. Probably only like twice a year I would go in there and set things up and really take a look and scrutinize the settings of things and customize things.
00:31:21
Speaker
Oh, I think the other trigger is when I start getting notifications that I need extra cloud storage because it's trying to back up, but it's too many apps and too much data. Actually, that's probably the main trigger. So if you're getting these annoying setting issues, we're getting messages saying this needs attention. That's a good trigger to go in there and spend some time customizing and optimizing.
00:31:41
Speaker
So in this season, we're focusing on quite a few little steps you can take to optimize things in your day to day life admin approach. And we hope these hacks contribute to using your phone as this productivity weapon. Our top hacks are get rid of those time wasting apps off your phone, just delete them or use some settings to limit time wasting. Realize that sometimes you need to invest a little time to set something up and that short term pain is worth the long term gain.
00:32:11
Speaker
If you'd like to join us on our life admin journey, please head to our Facebook page, life admin life hacks to follow us and share your thoughts on what we're doing and feel free to post any comments or certainly post suggestions that we might be able to use. We hope to see you there. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at life admin life hacks.com. If you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app.