Productivity

The Eisenhower Matrix: Time and Task Managent Made Simple

13 Ideas of Productivity Tools I Would Love to Use (Wishlist)

The ideas

1. The perfect mix between Airtable & Neo4j - An Airtable-like solution to quickly manage from my mobile some dependency/relationships (graoh/RDF) small databases
2. The perfect mix between Trello, GitHub & Jira - A tool that can be both used with few constraints (Trello, GitHub) and do powerful features (Jira) while having as few different entities as possible that are linked to existing stuff like repos, commits, issues, and that works offline (Trello)
3. The perfect mix between GitHub and Google Docs - Having Google Docs review/comment feature linked with GitHub, for instance by automatically creating pull-request
4. The perfect mix between Bankin, Qonto, Revolut, Google Spreadsheet and an AI - a tool that aggregates everything you own (money, loan&debt, salary, patrimony, etc.), allows you to have history and projections, suggestions, but also to simulate what would be the impact of buying, selling a building, having a salary raise, quitting job, etc
5. A smart screen that always displays my calendar schedule, todolist, today’s achievements etc - I would put one in my bathroom to inject my today’s program and one on my offices desk
6. The perfect mix between Franz, Google Inbox, Facebook Feed, etc. - A tool that aggregates every source of inputs I need to follow: emails, slack boards, text messages, monitoring, GitHub events; so you are sure to never miss anything important while being able to stop checking those services every 5 minutes; bonus: transform all those streams in threads in this tool with an “unread” state, so even Slack becomes usable tool for people mostly working asynchronously
7. A tool that allows finding developers based on code instead of their CV (RIP. Sourced Legacy)
8. A tool that makes remote working at least as effective as a local working – bonus: to make it work in hybrid organizations
9. The perfect mix between Git, Perforce, and Subversion: something that allows me to have one big monorepos, that fits well with GitHub (where Perforce fails), that fits well with CI/CD (where monorepos fail), that allows cloning only a subpart of a repo
10. The perfect mix between Neo4J and a self-hosted Wikipedia/Wikidata: A tool that allows to collaboratively define, view and analyze an unstructured, complex, evolutive, and living system (more)
11. A tool that can transform my phone into a comfortable working station – So I can forget my laptop forever
12. An anti-hater/anti-troll filter – Like the Gmail’s antispam for Internet browsing, maybe just by graying-out potential bad messages instead of deleting them completely
13. A tool that anticipates proactively the bad behaviors while using your digital devices – detects unfocus & procrastination waves, when you look too tired, stressed, angry to reply to a mail, maybe not something that actually blocks you, but a visual indicator that motivated to go back “green”

How-to (successfully) make your iPhone boring 📱

Last year, I decided to reduce my time on my iPhone and chose the “Make it Boring” method. My friends are often asking me for some details, so here is a kind of how-to (successfully) make your iPhone boring.

To make it more supportable and avoid switching back quickly, I preferred to use the compound effect and iterate progressively.

What worked for me

Step 1: Uninstall Social Network Apps (Quick win)

Step-by-step instructions:

• Uninstall Facebook
• Uninstall Twitter
• Uninstall Instagram
• Uninstall LinkedIn
• Uninstall insert-social-thing-name-here

Bonus: It’s also a good moment to do some cleanup and remove every useless app.

This easy step removes the most addictive apps and makes your phone very boring ultra-easily.

FYI, it’s not because you don’t have the app that you won’t be able to check-out something on those networks :)

I completely forgot it, but each of those apps has a nice mobile website which is very similar to the app, without the icon on your phone screen, without the icon on your “share using …” widget, and without notifications.

Step 2: Uninstall every Game (Quick win)

Games were for me the easy excuse to use my iPhone while waiting or while commuting; while waiting for my doctor, or during the boring meetings.

Removing all games forces you to use your phone for useful things in these moments (answer emails, read articles, etc.), or just not to use your phone and try to profit from the real world.

Step 3: Reduce Notifications (Quick-win)

This is the easiest and most useful change I’ve made; I can’t imagine returning to a mobile phone with notifications for everything happening in my numeric world (chats, emails, spams, games, ads, discounts, etc.).

How I made it:

1. Disable all notifications; I’m now muting notifications for about 90% of my apps, so it was easier for me just to start disabling all apps first. (System Settings > Notifications > click on each app > uncheck “Allow Notifications”)
2. Re-enable some app notifications; This is where I failed most, but it’s easy to iterate and progressively find your ideal configuration. Today, the only apps that can send me push notifications are: Transportation apps (Google Maps, Air France, Taxi, Citymapper, etc.), Mail.app filtered to VIP only, and Pushover which is an app that I can manually configure using Zapier to deliver me exceptional push notifications (raining day, take umbrella; my website is down, etc.)
3. Disable notification badges; no more “Please, open me, I’ve got things for you.”
4. Bonus: Notification Center: you can let some apps display notifications only in “Notification Center”; those apps won’t make the phone vibrate, won’t have a badge, but will be easily available from the “Notification Center” without opening the app. I choose to do it with my most used non-vital but important apps (Slack, Monitoring app, Gmail); it’s a difficult tradeoff to configure, you need to choose wisely the apps that will allow you to avoid checking notification center manually every 5 minutes while having useful information. If unsure, just don’t use the notification center for boring notifications and disable communication apps completely).

Step 4: Removed Shiny Background Image (Easy)

Easy, just remove the background to make your iPhone less friendly (people say that it’s also good for your battery).

I let a minimalist background image on the lock-screen, mostly to have a discussion topic with peers in real-life.

Step 5: Reorganized my app screens

1. Leave the first screen empty, so when you unlock your phone, you won’t see shiny apps
2. Keep a minimal amount of apps outside of folders to avoid seeing shiny icons; I kept some productivity apps (Notes, Airtable, Gmail, etc.), some utilities (Maps, Citymapper, etc.), and some “smart entertainment” apps (Spotify, Petit Bambou, Medium, etc.); Sort those apps alphabetically.
3. Move the rest of your apps, the ones that you rarely use into folders on the last screen; I’m now opening those apps only using Spotlight and never go back to my last screen.

Step 6: Switch to Black & White (Hard)

This step is hard, but it’s one with the better “Make Your iPhone Ultra Boring” result :)

Step 7: Enable “Do not disturb most of the time” (Bonus)

It’s not so useful as most of the notifications are already disabled, but it allows you to keep the missing ones only available through “Notification Center”, so you can check them when you’re ready to check them in the morning.

Sometimes, I disable it manually if I’m waiting for food delivery or something like that.

What didn’t work for me

• I tried, but I failed to completely disable chat notifications (Slack, Whatsapp, etc.); I was losing too much time opening the apps when someone told me to check something, so I decided to re-enable the notifications for those apps but limit them to the “Notification Center”; I don’t receive any alert but can easily see what happens when I voluntarily want to check them and have only one button to go to the interesting conversation.
• Removing all games; I keep some kid games for my first daughter, it’s particularly useful to keep her calm during a long boring period (Transports, Doctor’s waiting room, etc.), and usefully for me, those games addictiveness are not working on me :)

Some ideas for the next steps

I’ve considerably less feeling in the following ideas, that’s why I keep them at the end, I will probably try them

• Move every app in a single folder, making it impossible to open apps without using Spotlight to search an app by name
• Remove most of the installed apps
• Remove chat apps
• Switch to a long, complex and mandatory password
• Switch to airplane mode most of the time
• Use an old-style phone first and keep a smartphone or tablet in my bag for urgencies, taking photos, listening to music, reading books or articles, sending emails, etc.

Conclusion

My iPhone now has way more battery longevity!

I still have some bad feeling when using my phone for a long time, but a lot less as I now consider that it’s now a tool helping me to do useful things.

I’m less behind my phone, more behind my computer, and more in the real world too.

When I go to a meeting without my computer, I won’t receive notifications and stay focused.

Further reading

For more details, I suggest you to read those excellent articles that inspired me, they are more detailed, and also contain useful feedbacks in the comments:

• https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-make-your-iphone-black-and-white-and-why-you-should-42e70deb92c7
• https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-set-up-your-iphone-for-productivity-focus-and-your-own-longevity-bb27a68cc3d8
• https://medium.com/s/story/six-years-with-a-distraction-free-iphone-8cf5eb4f97e3

🎂 1-year GitHub streak 🎂

Today is my 1st GitHub streak anniversary.

I made at least one contribution on GitHub every single day for the last 365 days.

10 Ideas 💡

As a daily routine, every morning, I find 10 ideas about a specific topic.

Sometimes, I will share the output of this exercice as blog posts here.