780: Our Home Screens & Focus Modes
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, Stephen Hackett. How are you today? I am good. How are you? I am looking forward to today's show. It's something we've had on our outline for a while. We've wanted to kind of do a home screen and focus mode update.

And I can tell you, gang, I'm already looking at Stephen's screenshots, and I feel like I'm going to be spending some money today. I see some good apps here, so I'm looking forward to this one. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be good. I do, just real quickly before we get started, because we've gotten some notes from listeners. Y'all are okay? Yeah.

fires and stuff in la are not near you at this point because it's confusing right because this is la all right i am south of la and the fires are north of la yeah um but we have had and hopefully by the time this airs this will all be over but we've had just hellish wind storms for the last two weeks we've got one right now i'm looking out the window and um you know i'm just not gonna have to rake any leaves for a while gang they're all gone

Uh, and, uh, but it's just really blowing and I live in an area that is fire, you know, at risk. So during, uh, windy seasons, even though we don't have any fires around us, we're constantly keeping track of whether any new ones pop up. Um, it's just a, you know, it's very dry right now and,

A lot of wind. That's bad. But I do know several people who have been dislocated, and I know a couple people who lost their houses. And we have a lot of friends that work for the Disney Corporation, and they're up in Burbank and

Several of them lost their houses and it's very sad. And, you know, my heart goes out to everybody up in that area dealing with this and hang in there, gang, you know? Yeah. I don't know what to say, really. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's...

I mean, it could be me. I always look at that and think, you know, like where I live, it's a little safer. You know, we, our houses were built to, you know, like we have tile roofs and, you know, the whole community is kind of built in a way to defend from fire. But if we had, we, our wind the other night, Steven was clocked at 79 miles an hour in our backyard. It's like, you got an 80 mile an hour wind. And if there's a fire close, I'm not sure anything can help, you know? Yeah.

It's really something to watch. We don't have those here. We get everything else, right? We got eight inches of snow the other day, which is more snow than Memphis has ever gotten in my lifetime, literally in my lifetime. We get a little bit of everything. Of course, we have tornadoes and whatnot. But yeah, our hearts go out to everybody. It's really sobering. I thought we were going to wake up in Oz the next day. It was blowing so hard out here. I'm glad you didn't. Glad you're still here. Yeah. Yeah.

But everything's good, and we're all okay. And the good news out of L.A., I know it's just terrible news, but there haven't been that many deaths. I mean, when you compare it to what happened over in Maui, the tragedy over there. And I know several people that work in emergency services, and they're all doing a great job. I hate reading articles trying to place blame for this because I think –

When you are dealing with 80 mile an hour winds and there's fires, there's no blame. Just everybody do your best. Everybody does their best. So we're all hanging in. And thanks on behalf of California. Thanks to everybody for the kind thoughts.

Today on more power users, which is the longer ad free version of the show we do each and every week for our members, we're going to be extending our topic and talking about our control center setups. Really, I think one of the headlining features in iOS this time around has been the ability to to customize control center and third party developers can have control center widgets, lots of cool stuff.

And so that's what we'll be talking about at the end of the show for more power user members. Can't wait. I got screenshots. I got evidence. I'm ready. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in the show notes this week for people to check out.

So let's talk about this, this idea of a show on home screens and focus modes. I think a lot of people are carrying around phones and you've got evolving home screens, right? But I do think because the iPhone has come so far that this is an area of your life that a little of intentionality could really help. I mean, I think there's a lot of great tools now. Hopefully Steven and I will inspire you a bit, but

Having your home screen set up properly the way you want it can really make your day more efficient. Yeah, I think so too. I mean, looking at mine over the years, mine hasn't changed radically. But one thing I have noticed is that as the phones get bigger, like the things that I use, the more often than not are kind of in the lower right corner.

side of the phone because that's the way I hold my phones for my thumb reaches and it's like a funny side effect is a part of this I just went through my photo library because I like everybody else like just random screenshots of my home screen in my photo library I just scrolled back looking for them and it's you know it's pretty funny like my RSS reader has been in the bottom right of my phone since there was an RSS reader on my iPhone and

Uh, but that's okay. And you know, things change and evolve, but the size thing I hadn't really thought about until I was comparing these with like screenshots of like, I don't know, like a three GS or a four. It's like, Oh, like I've kind of used widgets to like push things down into the lower right. Yeah. You know, that is makes sense. Like, you know, um, more frequent get closer to the thumb and, uh,

And the other thing about home screens now is you don't have to have just one. In fact, I've got several we're going to share later in the show because with focus modes, you can also have the home screen change depending on what focus mode you're in. I feel like this whole show may end up being a long pull for focus modes. Maybe, I don't know.

I did a survey once of labs members and very few of them are actually using focus modes. And these are some of the most kind of plugged in iPhone users. So I do think there's room out there for people to find this stuff.

Now, we were preparing for this, and you sent me a text a few days ago that said, this episode has sent me on a journey. What happened to you? Well, I have really been struggling because you only get 10 focus modes, and I feel like I could use more because I have multiple podcasts and different things I do.

But then I decided to simplify, but it caused me to redo all of my home screens, basically. So I have spent several hours fiddling with my phone to get things just the way I wanted. So the way my home screen and focus mode setup was last week compared to this week is quite different. So you're welcome. I mean, yes and no. I follow the same philosophy, but it's still, there's a lot of work. There's a lot of work getting it set up, but it's worth it.

Yeah, it is. I mean, these are, this is the device I think for most people, you know, we use it all the time. And if I'm not at my Mac and I need to do something like the phone is it, and the phone is also the ecosystem where a bunch of my media takes place. Like it's the one that's always with me. And so it's,

is the one I use one-handed, right? I'm not using a MacBook Pro one-handed. And so there are all these different, like comparing a home screen to the dock on Mac OS, which I think we'll do a dock episode at some point this year. It's been a while since we've done that. The factors that go into it

are just so different, right? I mean, and look, a lot of the apps that are on my home screens are also on the dock of my MacBook Pro, but they're in different places. They're grouped differently. The spatial aspect of the dock doesn't really matter the way it does on the iPhone, in my opinion. Like, it is sort of this unique thing, and Apple has taken it and put it on the iPad and to a lesser degree, put it on the Apple Watch and TVOS and VisionOS or whatever, but

The iPhone home screen is really valuable real estate in all of our lives. And so it's worth being thoughtful about, I think. Yeah, make your life easier. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password. Go to 1password.com slash MPU to get 20% off your plan. 1Password is so much more than just a password manager. It provides you an entire security suite soup to nuts on any Apple device.

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Yeah. So we will look at my home screen. There's an image in the show notes this year. We have settings for the home screen for the, for the first time really. And so I am using the small size icons. I, for a while during the beta process, you know, ran it in large mode while the icons are bigger, the widgets are a little bit bigger and you drop the,

the names, like the titles under the apps and widgets. It's a really clean look. And I like it on the iPad, like on my iPad mini, um, I've got large mode on, but on the phone, it just didn't sit with me. Right. And so I've gone back, uh, I've gone back to the, the small size on the, well, look, Stephen, everybody's entitled to their own opinion. Yeah. Even if it's wrong, you know, yours is objectively wrong. Yeah. We'll see what people say.

Yeah. How long have you been using the iPhone? Do you need it to say phone under the little green icon with the handset? It's not the names. It's honestly not the names. It's just the sizing. I don't know. Something about it. Maybe it's because I went down a size in phone this year. I went from the Pro Max to the Pro, like maybe that. And then the icons get big. It's like, ah, so much stuff. I don't know.

It's I am as my maker made me. I don't get it. I don't get it. I'll give it another shot. That's the first thing I noticed. It's like, what does this guy have all the names under? I mean, this is like, come on, man. Yeah. It's like, Oh no, which one's overcast. I haven't been looking at it for 11 years. Does Steven even care? I mean, what's he doing? How else can I flex my betas, you know, on my, yeah. Um,

I also use automatic mode. So I do that anyway. So light mode in the day, dark mode at night. And I have the widgets fall or the which sorry, I have the app icons follow that. So the app icons are dark at night. That is better than it was earlier in the iOS 18 cycle. A lot of icons had not been updated or had some weird ideas or the system can also do it.

I will say Notion in particular has a truly horrendous dark mode icon. It's like a ghost. It's like black and the cube, the little cube with the letter N on it is white. It's really bad, but you know, it's what we do for Notion, right? Yeah. Doesn't Notion always have an asterisk of one sort or another attached to it? Yeah. You and I were just talking to a friend of ours who,

Has a new business venture. And anyways, wanting to know about organizational tools like Notion's great, but dot, dot, dot. You can hear all these things. There's always a but. There's always a but. And then my wallpaper is actually the Mac OS X Panther wallpaper. So if you're not familiar with my wallpaper collection on 512pixels, there's a link in the show notes to that.

If I squint my eyes, I notice that the names kind of disappear. So I'm going to do that for the rest of the show. Yeah. Maybe I need to get my glasses checked. Okay. Can I have a sidebar real quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I recently went to the eye doctor and for the first time in years, my vision was worse than it has been. My prescription has been very steady for years. And I really only have correction in one eye. It's because I have astigmatism and that you need a little bit more correction this time. And so order glasses and I,

If you wear glasses or contacts, you've experienced this where the first few days are like kind of weird, right? It's like, oh, everything is super. You feel like Superman. I was like, I can see for miles. Leaves. I can see leaves on the tree. So my experience was, oh, I'm dizzy and like I feel super tall, like looking down, like my depth perception was all messed up.

And so I called the eye doctor. I was like, Hey, you know, I'm really struggling here. And like, Oh, come back in, let's check and make sure your, your glasses were like made correctly. It turns out they, and it's not my eye doctor. The glasses are from another company who remained nameless. The right and left lenses were swamped. So, so like when they made the glasses, they like read left eye and right eye and got them backwards. Uh,

And so I gave them to the people at the eye doctor's office and they have like a machine. I don't even know this. They have like a machine where they're like,

it can read the prescription through the lenses, I guess. Apple's got those in the store now. That's right. I could have just gone to the Apple store. Yeah. And I hear them laughing in the back room. I'm like, oh no. Like, am I just being overly sensitive? Like, these are reversed. Like you should, you should, anyways, it's all fixed now and I can see normally and I have depth perception again. Anyways. You know, I would have, the problem is I would have just thought it was me and just,

I would have worn them for like a year. Yeah. Well, because I have very little correction in one eye, it was really noticeable. Like I said, I talked to the office, I talked to the eye doctor. He's like, yeah, like a couple of days and a little bit of a headache, but like I gave it like a week. And I was like, when I look down, the only way I could describe it is I feel like I'm 30 feet tall. Like my depth perception is so messed up. He's like, yeah, you need to come in. I'm like, sure enough. I'm swapped. Anyways. Yeah.

That has nothing to do with home screens, but it's been on my mind. No, it doesn't. But it allows you to see them. That's good. Yeah. And now that I can see again, you know, my small icons make sense. Why is this text all fuzzy? So the going kind of from left to right, a kind of overview, I have two home screens. After these two, it's just the app library.

When the app library came out, I tried going down just to one home screen, and I just found myself searching a lot more than I wanted to. And honestly, I'm fine with two screens. Like, yeah, it's still pretty good. So kind of have primary and secondary. And then, of course, we have the today view, which is.

is kind of a like the today view is a weird leftover from like a previous ancient version of ios but it remains as a place to put widgets and you can see they're kind of top to bottom i have uh these are just sort of like i call these like sort of like status widgets like i don't go over here very often to like do things but it's like can i just need to get like a quick bit of information so

At the top, I've got a time zone app, a time zone widget that I built in WidgetSmith. And disclaimer, these are going to come up. I work on WidgetSmith, Pedometer++, and Sleep++ with David Smith.

I use this before we hired me, whatever. So we just met at the top with, can I just say that is the best time zone widget I've ever seen. I like, I'm going to, I'm going to build one too. That's like, I have to do that. It's lots of great views. And I did the six color background because these are people that I work with. So I have a LA slash SF for you and Jason and,

Um, and then you may ask, like, why do you have your own time zone in it? I find it really easy to like skim across this and if I have to like bounce up to the top to see my time and then go back down, I just find a little bit easier to have mine in line. And if I'm traveling, then I know what time it is in Memphis through the, through the same widget. So I don't have to like make a separate one for when I'm in a different time zone and the New York, London and Rome. Um,

I have coworkers in all these time zones. And what I like about this is that Widget Smith also lets you put the day and date at the bottom of it because as you see in this screenshot, which I took on Sunday afternoon, getting dangerously close to Monday morning for Federico Vatici in Rome. So I've got that at the top and then some fitness stuff. So an activity, Apple activity widget, and then a pedometer plus plus step count widget going up to my goal of 5,000 steps a day.

Under that are another two small ones. So I have another Widgetsmith one that just looks at... I just have some select photos of my wife, Mary, and it just rotates through them on its own. So this one, she's sitting next to a stuffed llama somewhere. I don't know the context of this picture. I didn't take it, but it's funny. And so every once in a while, I'll just go over there, and it's like a different picture of her, which I really enjoy. Yeah, nice. And the next to it is the Apple Batteries widget. And I...

unrelated to preparing for this episode, I came across, I think it was in our, our forums. Someone was saying is like, why is the Mac not show up in the battery widget thing? I was like, yeah, that's actually a really good idea. Like if I've got a Mac book or a MacBook air or something like, why can't I see it's battery level here? Yeah. I don't know. It would be cool. Well, Tim, when you're listening, call somebody up, get, get on that please.

Make it happen. So there's that. And, and then at the bottom, I have my reminders widget just showing my today view. And so you can see that I needed to water my plants, which I did. Reminders widget is a nice, really attractive widget. I like that one. It's really good looking. And we didn't, I kind of realized this after the fact, we didn't really talk about widgets very much in our recent task manager episode, but,

But I think both Reminders and OmniFocus both have really good widgets. And like Todoist and some others don't. So I think both Reminders and OmniFocus are good examples of that. Native apps, you know. I guess Todoist really is more web service. But it is a native app on the iPhone. Yeah, it is. It's just their widget is just – it could be nicer. Yeah.

Um, and that's my today view. It doesn't scroll. Like that's one thing I wanted as sort of like a status board. Like I want not to scroll and none of these widgets are stacked. And so I can just see everything at once and then go back to my home screen. My idea was like, get in, look at the thing and get out. And that's worked really well. Thankfully. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah.

My main home screen, a couple of widgets here as well. I've got calendar at the top and gang, like I've got some stuff redacted here just because it's like family stuff. I hope you understand. I use Apple's calendar app and this widget is one of the reasons I really like Fantastical. I think it's an amazing program. It has a lot of stuff I just don't need. And I actually prefer Apple's calendar widget, even over what we have in widgets. So I think Apple's calendar widget is really nice and,

You can show your tasks in here and you can select like what calendars you want. So I don't have all of my calendars here. It's just kind of like my primary one. So my work one, my personal one, the kids, Mary, but like I've got some calendars, like the school, like PTA calendar, like everything.

If the school dances tonight and my kids are going, it'll be on the family calendar. I don't need the school's copy of that event in this widget. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Yeah. And Metastacal, of course, offers that as well. And, you know, they have, I know people who really like their widgets. For me, the calendar one just sort of clicks with me. Yeah.

And then out on the home screen, I've got a stack of carrot weather widgets. The top one is just their conditions widget. And I have it set. There's this really cool setting in carrot weather where it basically can update the widget to a different type. So if it's raining...

Some of this information goes away and it shows me a little graph of like when the rain's going to be here. And then underneath it, so a single swipe on that widget, I have the radar kind of zoomed out from Memphis a little bit so I can kind of see weather, you know, coming over across from Arkansas. Because what happens in Arkansas will happen here a couple hours later. And so, yeah, that's sort of my...

Sort of the top of the home screen. And then I got my apps that wrap around this. Can I, can I just say on, on the widgets, this'll be true with mine too. Neither one of us are going crazy with widgets. No. You know, when widgets first kind of evolved, I thought, well, I'll just have all widgets on my home screen and,

And that was what I did to begin with. And just slowly apps started to creep on the home screen. And now like you, I've got about half the screen of widgets and half the screen of apps. Yeah. I mean, something like notion or notes, for instance, I can have a widget with like, I don't know, like a couple of pin notes or like recent documents or something, but

But very often when I open those apps, I may be going to a place that is different than those. And so I tried that for a while. Like, you know, actually it's more efficient for me to like go into the app and then go from there. Um,

And a lot of these things, like you lose density when you have all widgets. I would love Apple to make a widget size that is the size of an app icon. I think that would be really interesting. But they haven't done that. And so this is where I am, kind of a mix. And I think that's where most people are. I think most people end up with kind of a mix of both. Yeah. So I've got...

In the dock, I've got messages, mail, Safari, and camera. I know there's a camera control button like one inch away, but camera's been there a long time, man. It's really hard to break that muscle memory. Yeah, I took it out because I also had it in the dock. And I still, once in a while, look at it and I'm like, where is it? And then I'm like, oh yeah, push the button. So I'm going through the process, but I've given myself the...

I've taken the app out, so I've really forced myself to use that button more. Yeah. Let me ask you a question that may seem weird because it's been this way for like 17 years on the iPhone. But do you think it still makes sense for the dock to be consistent across home screens? Yeah, I do. I want to rely on it. And when we get to mine, the way I use it, I definitely want that to be a reliable list of apps that are always there.

I feel the same way. Sometimes I see online people like, oh, like, why can't the dock be different for home screen? But I view it as like, yeah, these things are available to me anywhere I am on the phone. Right. And of course, with only two home screens, that matters a little bit less than the days when, you know, you had eight or nine. In fact, when I was looking through old home screen photos, I found one from before folders and it's like six screens across. Right. It was like, oh, those days were terrible. Yeah.

And, you know, you can look in the show notes at the full image. I think some highlights for me or things that I often get questions about is like, why do you have GroupMe on your home screen? My connected co-hosts in particular find that one kind of funny. GroupMe is a text message app actually owned by Microsoft. And it's like a group app.

texting application like WhatsApp or anything else. The reason I have here is that our church basically runs on GroupMe, and I'm on several committees and some leadership stuff. And so I'm in and out of that a good bit throughout the week. It's like something comes up, someone has a question or whatever. And I don't know...

Our church ran a group meet before I showed up, and I do not want to be like, hey, why don't we all do iMessage? Or why don't we do something? Because you've got like a

overlapping big groups of people and so yeah group me it is and i stare at that terrible icon every day and it the icon hurts well you you could fix that no i know i've thought about doing like a shortcut to just just change it out but yeah but it totally makes sense if you've got something going on in your life that yeah is on a social platform you gotta have the app there it is there i don't know if it's weird wonder and honestly it's a fine app like it's

They just actually got a redesign and like they got a lot of good features in it. It's actually much better than I think its reputation would would say. A couple other things here is there's no like mainstream social media apps on my home screen. That was not always true for a long time. I had tweet bot.

And then ivory. But a few years ago, I was like, those apps are on my phone, but I don't want them on the home screen. The closest thing is discord, I guess. So I'm in yours. I'm in the six colors one. I'm in the Mac stories one. And then I'm a moderator, of course, in the relay discord for members. And so that one is like half social media, half work. Like I'm in there hanging out sometimes that I'm also there. Like if we need to deal with something, you know, as a moderation team and yeah,

that's frequent enough that it lives on the first screen now. That used to be on the second screen, and during a reshuffle maybe a year ago, it kind of graduated up to the top. Yeah, and one of the questions you ask yourself when you're building a home screen is, is this something I'm going to do on the phone? Like, maybe you just do Discord on the Mac. You've got to kind of give thought to that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think also, like,

Being able to revisit that, like group me was on the second screen until a couple of years ago and then became much more prominent in my life. It's like, you know what, you're going to graduate up and, you know, whatever was there got moved around. And so, yeah, um,

I also have two notes apps. I have notion and notes. Notes is all personal stuff. And then a little bit of like relay administrative stuff just for me. But the notion is where I do all my show preparation for my two podcasts connected and MPU. And I'm, I think like you and definitely like Mike and Federico, I'm in and out of show outlines just like all the time. Like I'll just have a random idea. I'm like, Oh, I need to put it in that outline or put it on our topic ideas list or

And so I'll hop in, do something. The notion iOS app is pretty good. Um, and so I'll hop in, do the thing, hop out. Um, just kind of like fast little interactions, uh, as the day goes on. Yeah, totally agree. And notion, as much as we make fun of it, the mobile app does give you that ability. Like I have worked on outlines in the backseat of a car and, um,

It works. And even like the whole database thing where like all of our episodes are actually database entries. It just, you just tap on it. Like it's, it's totally fine. Um, and in terms of, this is not the notifications episode, that one we're going to do later in the year, but in terms of notifications on my home screen, uh, three,

Three, no, four applications can put badges on my phone, uh, phone. So here I have a voicemail that I needed to deal with, uh, reminders of my things due today or overdue, uh, Slack. If I have any unread direct messages or like right now we're dealing with something, uh, and I will turn on like all notifications for that channel that can badge, uh, and then mail can badge. And that's the only way I get mail notification is the badge just updates, uh,

So only those four can put badges on my, on my home, on either of my home screens, nothing on the second screen can badge. And that is pretty awesome. And I've really pared that down over the years. There was a time where like other apps would have had that ability. You know, if you get a mention in notion or, you know,

other things, but I've really paired that back over the years. Yeah. It's so important. Right. Yeah. Any other questions on my first screen? Not really. So you're using Timery. How, how often are you time tracking? I time track my entire time at work.

And so during the workday, it's always running. Like my MPU timer is getting ready to cross 54 minutes for the day. And I usually do that at the Mac. I have it on the home screen of the phone because sometimes I will –

Be doing something maybe not at Mac, like, hey, I'm stuck in the DMV and I'm going to like work on this outline, then I'll start my MPU timer. It probably doesn't have to be on the first screen, but I've kind of grown accustomed to it there. But the majority of my interaction with Timery happens on Mac OS.

Yeah. I I've been using the timing app on my Mac. Yeah. And that, that kind of like, it's nice. Cause you don't have to throw the switches. And the other thing that I thought was interesting is I didn't think you liked the new reader. Oh, you've got the old reader. I am using reader classic. I don't really care for the new reader. And like, I'm a little worried about what's going to happen with reader classic. The developer said it's going to stick around, but yeah,

And sort of in like a back burner project this year is going to be re-evaluate RSS readers on iOS. Unread is waiting for you with open arms. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, well, it doesn't accept my Feedbin account, so. Okay. Which I really value. Not so open arms. I really value Feedbin because I can forward email newsletters to RSS. And I have so much stuff doing that, including yours. There you go. Yeah.

My second screen is relatively simple. I got a photos widget at the top. It's usually not a blue box, but it is for show notes. And then that's a stack and I can scroll and get to day one. The day one memories widget is really awesome. And day one used to be on my first home screen. It actually used to sit where group me sets. And now you see it on neither of them. Part of that is a, is a concerted effort this year to, to,

take my journaling and day one a bit more seriously. And so how I've done that is it is a thing that I do at my Mac because I found over the last couple of years, a lot of my day one entries, like a picture and or a couple of lines of text. And that was fine for some of them, but some of them I had more to say and I didn't at the time or, so I'm kind of trying to make this like a Mac task. And so day one is still installed on my phone. Um, but yeah,

It is one of those things where like it's happening at a place with a real keyboard. Okay. But the day one memories widget is incredible. You go through and it's like, you know, today in history and it's like a picture of your kid when they were five on this date, you know, it's awesome. The second screen holds my one folder of icons. I have a health folder, um,

Um, food noms is in there. We just talked about food noms on more power users last week, I think. Um, recently. Yeah. So I am checking that out. I don't, I have not spent much time in it, but it's in there. And then, you know, sort of the normal health apps, uh, Apple's app is in there. Uh, happy scale, which you've talked about in the past, but I'm going to plus plus is in there. They're all kind of together in there.

It's a good idea. I should do a health folder because I do have a couple health apps. I could combine those into a folder. I'm so hesitant to do that sometimes, but I think that makes sense. Yeah, I think a lot of folders can get kind of hectic, but these are all apps like I use just enough that I want kind of access to them. And honestly, the folder is a little bit of a memory jogger. It's like, oh, health apps. I should work out today or whatever it may be.

Some unusual things on here or relatively new things. The chat GBT app is the newest thing on either home screen. Also have it on the Mac using it a fair bit, especially with their search. Again, see all previous episodes about don't trust AI with critical information, but I find it useful.

And then I think the only thing kind of stale on here is Google Docs. That was much more important when we were doing connected and NPU basically out of out of Google Drive and Google Docs. But that's not true for either show anymore. I may end up swapping that out for for Google Drive. And that way I could get to.

Anything I needed spreadsheet wise or docs wise kind of from a central place. That's the only thing in looking at this that kind of feels a bit, um, a bit out of place. Sure. Sure.

A couple of things here I see that are interesting is you have chat GPT now in your lineup. How often are you using it from your phone? Not a ton. I have, I have used it as a, you know, you're just like hanging out with people who are like, Oh, you know, when did this or that happen? And like, you know, I can just ask chat GPT and with the search, it felt like I get relatively good information. I definitely using it more on the Mac.

But it is also kind of like the health folder, like a little bit of a reminder of like, it's something I'm trying to spend more time with this year to understand it and be able to cover it better. And so, and that's just kind of the one that I chose. Like I know there's other, there's Claude and lots of other models and services. ChatGPT is kind of the one that I'm focusing on for now. Some point later in the year, I may spend more sort of

intentional time with one of those other applications and then maybe that would go there um can i make a confession please right now i'm paying for all three i'm paying for claude chachi pt and gemini that's uh that's that's not right that's not right well i think the um i'm doing a bunch of stuff in the labs and i want to like kind of have the accounts and yeah gemini just added a thing where the notebook lm gets better and

And basically all the people in the Mac Sparky Labs are huge enablers. That's the worst part about running the Mac Sparky Labs is they all tell you, oh, you got to try this. But yeah, so right now I'm paying for all three, but we'll just leave that one right there. You also have good links.

which I am testing as well, and I'm really happy with it. That's the one that I want to accept an RSS feed, though. I feel like, oh, come on, man. There should be a way to auto-send emails and RSS to good links. That would be cool. Yeah. You should write the developer. They seem to be very responsive to... You know, I will. I'm going to do that. The other thing that bothers me a little bit is the Settings app

is at the end of the third row the setting should be in a corner in my opinion putting it like in the middle of the stack to me is just not right but yeah that's just me i can see that

And the fact that you have the settings app on the screen is kind of interesting. I had it in my dock for a long time. I was one of those people in the early days. You could probably go. That's fair. If I think about it, as many times I go to settings, I probably should have it too on my screen. Yeah. I think the last one I want to...

call out is parcel. This is a delivery tracking app runs across all of Apple's apps and it's fantastic. It's party trick. I think is that it can log into your Amazon account. And like, if you got paper towels coming, just put paper towels, like any other delivery. And so I switched to parcel years, a couple of years ago. It's super cheap, works great, actively developed, super happy with parcel.

Yeah. And the other thing I would see for me, I put that one as a widget in the widget screen. I don't want it as an app on my desktop or my, uh, on my home screen. Yeah. I just, just go check the widget. Go and see what's going on. Yeah. All right. Looking good, Steven. Do I get a thumbs up?

I approve, except for the words under the app still bother me at a fundamental level. Maybe it is just me. Maybe you guys can go to talk.macpowerusers.com and tell me I'm full of it. But I just can't believe you've got names under the apps. But I'll get over it eventually. We'll see what people say. Yeah. I feel like you've got your key apps there. You're getting your work done.

I wish that you would take focus modes just a little bit step further because you've got a mix of work and personal here. Yeah. I would be interested to see if you made like just a personal home screen versus a work home screen that might be more efficient. And again, I think it helps some helps you, your brain like, okay, I'm not at work now. I don't need to see the work apps. So that's just me. I'll be talking about that when we get to my screens.

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my focus mode usage. It's definitely not as robust as yours, but I've got really, I think two primary ones. I do have a third one for recording that I basically never use. It's basically just do not disturb. So I just turned do not disturb on. So I have a home focus mode because as, as people who work from home will know or work for themselves or both,

It is very difficult sometimes to like draw the lines between the two. And that's what you were saying, right? Focus mode that gets rid of the work gaps entirely. I've basically done that. They're still there, but my, my, my home focus mode comes on.

At 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. I do it that late because I've got some close collaborators that are on the West Coast, including you. And so I can catch those people. And then if I have my phone, my alarm is set for 6 each morning. But if it comes out of this before 6, then all the Europeans are talking. And I don't need that at 4.30 in the morning. Yeah. Weekday, 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., this is on. And then on weekends, this is on.

And it does a few things. Um, I have it silence notifications from discord, Slack and test flight. So Slack is the only one that can badge, but discord and test flight, and I have go to control center or a notification center, excuse me. And it silences all of those, uh, and test flies because, uh, very often underscore will have a build, you know, of widget Smith or something before I'm up. And so I'll, I, you know, I'll get to it when I get to work. Um,

And then the most critical thing this does is it turns off my work email accounts. So if I open mail, all that's there is my personal email when I'm in this focus mode. And that has been the biggest difference for me in particular on the weekends. You know, on a weekend, you're in your email looking for the ticket to the thing you're going to. We're like, oh, they emailed what time this part birthday party is. I don't remember when it is or whatever.

Having my work email off in this focus mode is, has been great. And that's a really good feature. I think of focus modes. And honestly, I wish more apps would support focus modes in that way where you could turn off like, you know, individual parts of the app or accounts in an app. Yeah. And I feel like that's something that I don't think that many people use. And, um,

One of the reasons I want people to try this stuff is number one, it'll help you. Number two, selfishly, I think the more people that use it, the more resources Apple will put into it. Yes. Because this stuff is really good, but it could be better. And I'm sure they're going to look at usage when they're deciding how much engineering time they're going to throw at it. Yeah, I think so. And then my second focus mode is the sleep focus mode.

I'm going to put a link in the show notes to sleep schedules. This is like this kind of, I think at least kind of convoluted feature that's in the health app, but it also shows up in the, in the clock app, but it is also tied to the sleep focus mode. Very complicated to talk about, but in sleep mode, I only allow notifications from a few direct family members and my parents.

Those people can call me and I do allow repeated calls. So the thing where someone calls you, they don't get you and they call you right back. That I think is like an excellent feature and do not disturb. That was introduced originally in Iowa six when do not disturb was introduced. And so if, you know, it's firefighters calling you and they call you right back, it'll ring. Yeah. I want firefighters to get up, be able to get ahold of me, you know? Yeah.

And then the only apps that can send notifications in sleep mode is alarms. Carrot weather, which the only notifications carrot weather can send are for watches or warnings. I would like that. And then home and ring. So I got some ring cameras and a ring security system in my studio. And then any time sensitive notifications. And this is a way that I...

will temporarily kind of promote an application within my notification stack. We'll talk more about that in our notification episode. There are times like maybe when I'm traveling or if something a little bit unique is going on, it's like, I really would like to be notified in sleep mode, you know, because very often I'm still awake when my sleep mode kicks off. I want this to be able to temporarily notify me. And so allow that as just an escape hatch.

On occasion. Yeah. And then the wallpapers are set to black in sleep mode because it's time to go to bed. Like you, I'm mixed on that sleep mode. I think it's a good idea. I like the way that it turns the watch face kind of to night mode. Yeah. And, but I've been doing a thing lately where I leave my phone downstairs at night. So that's a whole nother thing. So it's not as big of a deal for me. So that's, that's my focus modes. Like I said, it's not super robust, but it's, yeah,

It's kind of taking care of the low-hanging fruit. And as we get into yours, I think we'll see really what these things can do. But that's where I am with them. Yeah, I feel like I'm over a line somehow, but we'll get there in a minute. Yeah, you're really pushing this thing. So yeah, let's talk about it.

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And our thanks to NetSuite for their support of the Mac Power users and Relay. I am using focus mode not as aggressively as I was before. I have kind of streamlined the focus modes I have.

And there's screenshots of everything in the show notes so you can go take a look at it. But the first thing I'd like to mention, and I don't want to go down the full rabbit hole on this, is my dock icons. Everybody always looks at my dock icons and they're like, what is that? And so there's three icons there. One is like a cup of tea. One is kind of the Max Barkey logo. And one is just the peace symbol because I didn't know what else to use. But those are all shortcuts, right?

And I cover this at length in the shortcuts field guide. But the general idea is I make shortcuts that are like choose from menu shortcuts where you can have like 20 things. It's like a menu of shortcuts. And so when I push that button, whether it be personal, Max Barkey or piece, which is other shortcuts,

it opens up a menu of things that my phone can do, like add a new OmniFocus entry for a Mac power users episode. Like I've got very, I've created a bunch of little shortcuts that do things that I do all the time. And this is my attempt to make the iPhone, a context device where I work in those three contexts, personal Mac Sparky and other. So I,

Whenever I think, oh, Mac Sparky, I want to add a show about notifications, I hit the little Mac Sparky icon. Then I tap the button to add an OmniFocus entry about Mac Power users. And I just type it in, and it goes exactly where it belongs. So I've made a bunch of these shortcuts. Like if I want to take a nap, I hit the personal button. I hit the nap button. It changes the do not disturb mode gets turned on. A 35-minute timer gets set. A whole bunch of stuff happens.

And so my phone is way more contextual than you would think. And it's all under those three buttons in the dock. Okay. Maybe we'll do a show on that someday. I don't know. It really kind of, it goes deep, but the idea is make it do actions. Not don't open apps. Yeah. Right. So a lot of my life is set up that way.

And I think that's where Apple is heading with some of this stuff with like app intents. A lot of that has not shipped yet, but I think we're going to see more and more of that as time goes on about the iPhone in particular being about individual actions or tasks and not so much about going into an app. I think that always be kind of the fallback and maybe how the masses still do it. But I think for a lot of people, they're going to catch on to this. And I think you're a little bit ahead of the curve there.

Well, I hope so because it makes the phone a more efficient device. So most of the stuff, I'm not going to say most, a lot of the stuff I do on my phone just involves me tapping one of those three buttons and then triggering a shortcut that does it for me. And if I find myself doing things repeatedly, I then go in and add a new shortcut in the choose from menu list and create a new action for it. So it's like, it's something that I'm just always doing.

And as a result, I've got this kind of curated list of actions under each one of those buttons. And it's very useful. So that's the note on the dock icons. Okay. So this is the personal focus mode. And this is what I was encouraging you to do earlier is the idea of like, well, what if I made one that's just for me personally? It's a single screen. I've got two widgets. They're the smallest size. It's the date and analog clock at the top.

Nothing fancy. I am using the Fantastical widgets because I use Fantastical. They do a good job. Can I say one thing about that calendar widget? Yeah. It would drive me bananas that the vertical spacing above the 14 and below the Tuesday is not the same. You know what? I never noticed it, and now I will never be able to stop looking at it. I'm sorry.

So thank you for that. I think a lot about alignment of widgets these days, and that's killing me. Now I'm going to have to change it. I'm going to have to change it. Or send FantasCal an email. OK, Steve, just go for this. Yeah, I will. I will do both. I will do both until they have a week. Yeah, and I like the little analog clock. And so that's kind of fun to have up there. And I don't need that there. I know it has the time up in the upper left corner. I generally know what date it is, but it's my personal preference.

home screen. I don't need a ton of apps and that, that works for me like that. Yeah. Then under that, my top level is like reference stuff. I have the sub stack app that I just, just really like in read wise. I said this on a prior show and I've had a couple of people write me since asking about it, but

You know, rather than get stuck in a news doom scrolling or whatever it is that gets you upset, I've really been trying to change the stuff I read to authors that I like.

And that's a combination of Substack and ReadWise Reader for me. So both of those apps are really good at getting good stuff to read anytime I want. And then the Kindle app, where I've got a bunch of books in Kindle. If I want to read a book, I can do that too. ChatGPT is on that line. And I use it a lot these days. I'm just finding all sorts of uses for it. I was applying a new finish to a piece of wood. And I wasn't sure the best way to buff it.

And I said, I'm using this product. What's the best product to buff it with? And I got an answer like immediately. And I'm like, yeah, this is the new internet. This is the way this stuff works. I mean, I, the more I use it, it's like, I'm not clicking on the Safari button nearly as much because of the chat GPT icon there. Then underneath that, I've got kind of health and personal stuff.

The health app and my wife and I belong to a local Pilates club and I've got their app there so we can make reservations quickly. This is something that I'm already going to change from talking to you. I'm going to make a health folder on my home screen. And because there's more apps that I use, like Food Noms is a good example. And I think I'm going to create a folder there to put those in. So there's that.

Um, also my personal, I've got photos and maps, you know, maps is cause if I get in the car and want to drive around and I use that and the, um, the photos, I just like looking at my photos, you know?

Uh, you'll note that I do give it a badge thing because in my family we have a bunch of shared albums. Okay. I was, I was curious about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We, we, we all use photos and whenever somebody takes a trip or something, and this isn't just my nuclear family, it's the extended family. Okay. Um, everybody creates shared albums. So it's fun to check. Somebody's on a trip right now. I got to see what they're doing, man. I tried years ago to get that to stick with my family. Um,

And just no one would do it. I want to try it again, like with my brother and like, you know, in-laws and stuff like, Hey, just put pictures of the kids in here. You know, like as long as you and my nieces and nephews are doing, but it is a cool feature. I mean, you can basically use it like a private social media network. Yeah, totally. Except in my family, it's stuck a little too hard. Oh no. Because like they go to like, you know, they go to the beach and they, they put like 30 pictures in there and I'm like,

You know, I could go with one or two. I could. Man, I'm going to get in so much trouble if anybody hears that. Oh, boy. And then below that is kind of the social and I don't know. These rows, I tried to theme them, but they're not really. I put messages and a phone next to each other, two green blobs. But I keep those and I keep them badged.

Cause I'm not good at, I don't check. I don't immediately respond to messages. So I need a badge to remind me to go in there and go through them. Yeah. So Steven's like, yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. Sometimes I get put on red, you know, I was like, I know he saw it, but just,

No, I'm the opposite to a point where it's probably pathological. Yeah. Okay. Well, we balance each other. That's right. And then the Safari, I think everybody's got Safari on their home screen somewhere. Yeah. And the little Eufy app, because I have the Eufy cameras and I bought a Eufy robot back. Okay. They have one app now that does all that. So I can check the cameras and everything.

That's cool. Just to go back to the top of the show, I have to turn out all my floodlights right now because the wind is blowing so hard that they're just lit up all night because stuff is blowing around and it triggers the floodlights. So it's like I'm always going in there to do one thing or another. UP app, I'll just give it an OK. It could be better. But it's a typical hardware app. You need the stuff. And then the bottom row is kind of the –

the action apps, even in personal, I'm always jumping into drafts to write things down. Drafts is my catch all. And then OmniFocus, which we just did a whole show on.

And Apple notes is there. And then the last slot is kind of rotating. It just depends what I'm doing. If I'm traveling, I might have travel apps there right now. I've got the watch duty out there, which is a really great app to keep track of fires. So I'm just like checking it in as we're windy, but that won't, once the wind dies down, I'll, I'll move that out and put something else back there. Okay. I like that idea of having sort of a, a placeholder spot. Yeah.

That's pretty smart. Yeah. I mean, you'll know a couple of things that are not there. Obsidian's not there as much as I like Obsidian. I refuse to use it on the iPhone. So I don't even, I don't even try. I don't let me there. So this is your personal focus mode. This is what you're seeing on weekends and evenings and stuff. Okay. Yeah. And the wallpaper is just a stylized picture of the Apple rainbow, which I've made blurry. So yeah, it doesn't get in the way.

blurred wallpapers or like really simple ones i think are the way to go even now where you can have uh your icons wherever you want them i still just find like if there's a lot of detail back there that i i struggle this this wallpaper is from basic apple guy and if you guys want good wallpaper go check out all the stuff he's made it's it's all good

you know, about, about once a year I sent him a note and be like, is this the year you come on Mac power users? Yes. I've done that too. Yeah. He's, uh, he's very private and like we chat a good bit and like, I don't know his name. Uh, so it's, there's a bit of a mystery there, which is, it's, it's, you know, it's like, if you don't know who Dr. Drang is, you know, it's like, who's Dr. Drang? But we know Drang cause we're lucky.

I'm, I'm, I'm in the circle. That's right. That's right. Uh, he gave me a hug the last time I saw him. I was like, Oh, this is so nice. Uh, he's much taller than you think it would be. I haven't seen him in a long time. I need to see him. Okay. But I can't see him very often because he lives in the North pole. It's true. It's true. Uh, so what about the today view and your personal focus mode?

Yeah. I like you, I use it as a reference, but I also have stuff in there I can act on. I think the Apple home kit widgets are kind of nice. They are. So I have one there where I've got quick ability to turn lights off and on.

That being said, I realized as I took this picture, I almost never use it anymore because of the control center home kit stuff now. So I think that one is going to go the way of the Dodo. But next to that, I've got the weather. I've got food noms, which is giving me daily tracking. I've got in there a thing for kind of media audio consumption where I can just resume something quickly. I've got...

The music, podcasts, and Audible. Okay. So kind of a little listening. Yeah. And I tried podcasts for this month just to see, can I just get by with podcasts? It's not that bad. It's a lot better than it used to be. It's come a long way. Now, is there a reason those aren't stacked? You just like seeing where you are in each of them? I just want to flip over and push a button. Often I will listen to music when I'm

doing stuff and I don't want to swipe. I just don't want to stack. If I was going to stack them, I'd probably put them on the home screen.

Okay. And then flip through them. But for whatever reason, I just put it over here. I've got a bunch of other stuff under there that you can't see. Well, some things I've got the battery widget. I've got the air quality breathable widget in there. That's really good. Yeah. You know, I've got world clocks. I've got a, um, a find me. That's just showing me where my wife is. Okay.

And it's not being creepy. I just want to know if has she left work? Can I, should I start cooking dinner? You know, kind of thing. And so I just keep that over there and, and I I've got a stack of those with my kids too. So I can just see where everybody is. I want to say one thing about breathe the bowl real quick. It's by our friends over at carbon. That was really cool app development shop. A breathable is free and,

And it used to have like, I think an in-app purchase and they've gotten rid of that. But even before that, the proceeds were given to like climate change foundations and now it's free to everybody. I think it's, I think it's really nice. It's one of those apps that exists so it can create widgets. Like there's not much going on in the app itself, but it is so well done. The polish level and breathable is like,

It doesn't need to be as nice as it is, but I'm glad that it is. Yeah. It's really nice. And I bought it when they first released it. It's just a widget. It's not an app. It just creates a widget that tells you the air quality, which is bad here right now because of the fires. It's put a real hitch in my rucking. I tell you, I'm into rucking now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Throwing weights in a backpack. Yeah. Yeah. But I can't do it because the air quality is so bad. If I go out, it's going to mess me up. So yeah.

But yeah, so I check breathable. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by OneBlocker. OneBlocker is a premium content blocker for Safari on iOS and Mac. In addition to blocking obtrusive ads, OneBlocker can also block trackers, annoying pop-ups, EU cookie notices, comment sections on YouTube and on blogs, and so much more.

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The idea though is to have focus mode. So when I am not working, this is the focus mode that I have. So this is my phone.

all weekend and, you know, whenever I'm just not working. And then I've got a couple focus modes related to work. The first one is just what I call work mode. And that's because Apple built it as work mode. They don't let me rename it. So it's work mode. I'd rather be Max Sparky mode or something better than that, but it's work mode. Yeah. It's two screens.

And that one focuses on the work stuff. It's got the fantastic out widget, but it also has a list of the, of the upcoming events on it. So I can see what's coming up and I'll note that the spacing is better now that you've brought this up. Although the spacing between the 14 and the Tuesday is not ideal. It's kind of weird. Yeah. Yeah.

man. I'm sorry. All right. The, the one thing I do like about their widget is it does show the weather, which is nice. The upper and lower limits of the weather along with the air, the air quality notice, uh, light, um, alarm there, uh, below that I've got another widget, which is the, uh, uh, Mac whisper. I'm sorry. Whisper memos.

which I talked about in the last episode, you push a button, you talk, it shows up in drafts. Just like, it's so good. Yeah. And I like it so much that I not only have it on my watch, I have it on my phone. So there you go. It's an ugly widget though. It's a black box. It says record in the middle. Pretty straightforward. They could do better. They could do better on that. And it doesn't seem to respect day and night. It's just always a black box. Um, the, um,

Other stuff I have on there is, you know, the phone and messages. But we use Slack for a bunch of stuff we do. And so I've got that there. I've got ChatGPT and Gemini listed there. Gemini is being tested because I just signed up for it.

Um, my node, I'm always opening up to like kind of cook ideas and my node is still the tool of choice for that. I tried to replace it with free form. Not quite there yet. You know, my node still wins and, um, notion is that that's usable on the phone.

Yeah. Yeah. For a quick entry and stuff. Like if I'm in a line, I think cause those mind node kind of like mind maps I build are always in the back of my brain. Sure. And suddenly it'll just cough up an idea for something that I'm thinking about. And I need to need to get it in there really quick. So I'll just open it up and dump it in. It's, it's good enough for that. I mean, it's not really the place to do full mind mapping, but it works.

Okay. Notion is there because, you know, as we've mentioned, Notion's a thing for us.

My RSS reader is unread and I'm constantly going through it and kind of working items in there because I do that Friday podcast for the labs and I want to kind of catch news and rumors and interesting things as they come across the wire. And then OmniFocus drafts. And in the Flexi spot, I have right now Taut because a bunch of people have been telling me that I need to find a way to use Taut

And I'm not sure why, because I use drafts. Yeah. But I'm trying Taut, which is really pretty. Yeah, I think there's probably some overlap there. But it is nice. I really like Taut. You get seven, I think it's seven, basically plain text documents. And they sync really fast. Yeah.

But that's it. And so I use it as just a scratch pad. You know, like right now I've got some invoice numbers I was dealing with earlier. And then I've got one that has all it is, is a list of like common URLs for relay membership questions. It's like, how do I get my more power users feed? It's like, boop, copy that email you back super fast. Yeah.

Yeah, makes sense. And then I have a second screen for my work screen, and it's just got the widgets for Notion. It's got two different Notion widgets. One is favorites, and one is jump back to recent. And because I do a lot of work in Notion these days, I need to be able to get back to them. And navigating it on the iPhone isn't great, so the widgets really help. Not a great widget, but it does the job.

I guess I should mention briefly these focus modes, like how I trigger them and use them.

Uh, the most common way I use them is just from control center. As I just swipe down and switch, as I change modes, uh, you can make focus modes switch automatically. Uh, I use that for a couple of them, but not most of them. I generally tend to find it. I don't mind pushing the button as I go from one thing to the next. And the background of the home screen is very intentional. Like if I see rainbows and I'm working, then I'm like, Oh, I'm in the wrong focus mode.

because, you know, the rainbows are personal. And the background for my work mode is that kind of blue waves, which is again from basic Apple guy. And that stuff that I know I'm in the work mode. So it just, there's like a visual reminder to me as to how I do that. Make sense? Yeah, totally. I think it's really good. All of them do that. Like my podcasting background, I changed to orange in honor of you, Stephen. Yeah.

Awesome. And, and the, and then I have one called production, where I'm when I'm really like recording screencasts and videos, I really don't want to be bothered. And that one is black, because, you know, production, we're in the dark room, you know, doing production.

Those use the same home screens as my work mode. I, I toyed with the idea of making custom ones, but usually when I'm podcasting and I'm doing production work, I'm not on my phone anyway. So, you know, it doesn't really matter. Um,

In terms of the rest of the focus mode stuff, it depends on which one. If I'm in the personal focus mode, the people I let through, it's inclusive. There's an exclusive list. There's just a few people that don't get through when I'm in personal mode. And those are people that are work-related that seem to always want to bug me when I'm not at work.

And when I was a lawyer, this list was much longer. Now that I'm just a Max Barkey, it's shorter, but there are some people on it. I will go no further to protect the guilty there. There you go. So they do it either way with...

Like you can make it either allow people in and then block certain people, or you can have it block everyone and only allow certain people in. So I'm doing both of them depending on which focus mode that I'm in.

Um, with apps, I'm not as precious. Um, for instance, in my, uh, my work focus mode, I don't really have any apps blocked, but it's just a kind of thing where if something comes up that, that does bother you, then, then block it. Whereas in my personal one, I do block some apps because you know, if I'm personal mode, I don't really want to be bothered. Yeah, no, I totally get that.

Another thing I do is I carry this over into watch faces. So like I have a bluish watch face that shows up on my wrist when I'm in work mode, which matches the blue background. And again, if I'm looking at my watch and it's not blue, if it's kind of the more the rainbowy colored one, I'm like, oh, I'm in personal focus mode, right? Now, you know where you are exactly based on the colors of the backgrounds.

And, you know, the same thing goes for, you know, orange and black for production and, and podcasting. Uh, the exclusion lists are much tighter on those. Like when I'm podcasting, the only people that can get through to me are you and Mike Schmitz and my wife. And, um, when I'm in production, the only person that can get through to me is JF. And, and this just a nice way to kind of adjust those as you're going through the day. Yeah, no, it makes, it makes a ton of sense. Um,

Focus modes sync across devices optionally. We're not looking at the iPad or Mac today, but do you sync these or is this iPhone only? Absolutely. Absolutely. Everywhere. And you can also trigger them very easily on the watch. You hit the big button, you can change your focus mode. And I do that all the time. I do it on the Mac before I sit down to podcast. I change the focus mode in the control center.

So yeah, I, I use all those tricks and I find, I find that it really does help me kind of keep on track with what I should be doing at the times I should be doing it. Cool. No, I think it's, I think it's great. And I think the use of color is so underrated here. Um, if you've got focus modes, like definitely have wallpapers that are different. You can also, it extends out to the lock screen, which we're not really talking about, but

you have different artwork on your lock screens or a solid color, right? Like, Hey, I'm recording it's orange. It's a, it's, it's quite, it's a quite useful trick to kind of tell your brain, this is what we're doing now. Yeah. I want to make a new one like for like introspective time when I'm reading, meditating, journaling, that kind of stuff.

And I haven't decided what to do because I need another focus mode to do it. And there just aren't enough. But one other one I do have is Disneyland. And this has been a great focus mode. I've talked about it before. But my wife and I have passes. We go probably once every week or two. And when you get to a theme park, you have different preferences. And this is one that is location-triggered.

So it's triggered not only in Disneyland, it's also triggered in the Disneyland parking lot and the downtown. Just that whole kind of area of Anaheim, it always triggers automatically for

My watch face gets yellow to match Mickey's shoes. And then the screen is kind of a bluish aqua. And the app setup is completely different because when you're in a theme park, like battery widget is on the home screen, which is not normal. But when you're there, you need to know if your batteries are dying or not. Yeah. Yeah. You know?

I have to, I'm kind of embarrassed because I look at the one I submitted and there's two different AirPods cases. Oh, well. Oh. Okay. We can't just let that go. Maybe we did talk about this. You're trying the fours, right? I have fours and I have pros. I have both. But I don't know why it picked them both up.

Should have picked up my Mac, right? That's picked up the Mac. Yeah. The other thing I have on, even though it's on my lock, my widget screen, I have the weather cause and it's hourly, uh, the weather hourly widget. Cause you kind of want to know what the weather is, whether you can go on a wet ride or it's a hot day, whatever. Then I have, I have the Disneyland. There's two different apps you need from Disney. Uh, don't get me started. I could literally do a whole show on what's wrong with the Disneyland app. Um,

But I'm not sure it would be very popular. But I could do a whole show on it. I have a guess. Yeah. Every time I see Matt Panzarino, we talk about it. Because I think we both have a list. But yeah, it's not a great app. And then they have a separate app, which should be part of that one app. It's called Disney Play. I'll just leave it there. But I have both of those there. I have a Pocket 3. I really want to resume my vlogging of Disneyland.

But my problem is my wife got a fancy job there, so she can't be in it anymore. And I haven't started it yet. But that app is there so I can work with that device. And at some point, I am going to resume that, Steven. I don't know when. And then because you're at Disneyland, I got the Photos app. I still have Messages and iPhone apps.

And then I have Find My, because sometimes we need to find each other in there, and the Instagram app, which is aspirational. I keep thinking I'll start posting to Instagram, and then I never do. So there you go. And the doc, which we talked about a little while ago, is the same across all of these? Never changes. Always there with a list of shortcuts for me. Okay.

I feel like focus modes, I guess, which are kind of what we're talking about today, are just such a great feature that Apple made. And so many of the problems with digital devices can be cured with appropriate use of focus modes, filtering people out, filtering apps out, getting just what you want to see on the screen. I hope everybody uses it. Write in, let us know if you're using it.

You know, whatever it is that's holding you back from it, let us know. Maybe we'll add this to a future feedback episode. But I just think it's great. And they really have done some good work with it over the years. Could you talk a little bit about how you set up, like the actual mechanics in iOS of setting up different home screens for different focus modes?

Yeah, it's not ideal, honestly. So you go into settings. I'm going to do it as I talk through it because I don't want to mess this up. I just realized that Steven is right. I should have settings somewhere easier to get to. You could be there right now. Yeah, I know. But if you go to wallpaper, it gives you a list of all the different wallpaper setups that you have.

And it gives you the ability, obviously, to add a new one as well. And under each one, you can pick which home screen to use because it keeps a list of all your home screens. You just hit the Customize button. And you can also customize what focus modes they're attached to. So you can also switch focus modes that way by just going to the different wallpaper and selecting that. So there's just so many ways to do this. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think it's so interesting the way Apple implemented it. I know a common critique that we hear about is, hey, it's kind of complicated to go in and set up the allow list and the deny list in terms of notifications and people. And I don't disagree. It can be pretty fiddly. But if you spend a little time setting it up and then tweaking it kind of as you discover things, I don't think it's actually that bad necessarily.

But I also don't know how Apple could solve that because sort of inherently you're dealing with like all the apps on your phone, all the people on your phone, different settings, the way things look. It's just, it's just a lot of stuff to manage. And so, yes, it would be nice if it were simpler, but I also don't really know what that would look like. I kind of disagree with the criticism, honestly. It's just,

So you go in there and you say, is this going to block everyone and let a few people in? Or is this going to let a few people in and block? Or is this going to let everybody in and block a few people? You just got to decide which side of that coin you're going to play. But then you just add people or take them off. And honestly, you don't have to get it perfect the first time you use it. A good example is my personal focus mode. I allow everybody through, but people I block.

I didn't put that block list, all those people into the first time I use it. I just look at the people that just keep bugging me in downtime related to work. And then I eventually start adding them. Yeah. No, it makes, it makes a lot of sense just to kind of chip away at it. Yeah. It's just, it's not that hard. And then the other thing that Steven mentioned that I didn't, but I use is, you know, when you're in, uh,

you know personal mode allow these emails through or these calendar lists through and not the others and it just allows you to really make your devices less intrusive in your life they still have all the value and they still have all the power but they don't get in your way when when i read about people buying these like intentionally broken phones that they sell now they sell like

Like they're, you know, just like a step between like a Motorola flip phone and the iPhone. And it's like, Oh, this phone doesn't have a camera and it can't do any of this stuff. And it's great because it never bothers me. I'm like, have you tried focus modes? Cause you could make that happen on a phone that does have a camera. So you could take a picture of your kid when you want it. You know, I don't know. It just doesn't. I,

I think I'm preaching to the choir with our audience, but I also feel like a lot of people probably haven't taken the time to set it up. And granted, it will probably take you an hour or two to do it right. But then every time you pick up your phone, it will be less intrusive and give you exactly what you need.

It's just, you know, this, this whole idea of living an intentional life in the modern world so hard, but you can, you can help yourself out with, with tricks like this. Yeah. 100%. I mean, looking through yours, I want to spend some time, you know, setting up more different work and personal ones with, with different apps. I'd like to see what you did with that because I feel like, um, like you, for someone like you, cause you have like,

you have obligations outside of relay that are very important, not only as a dad, but at church and the other stuff you do. And like, I think it'd be cool to have like focus modes that were honed in on that stuff. It's just a home screen full of group me icons.

all group me, all group me all the time. And then you could just share it with, uh, with your friends over there and connected every time they ask for it. Their heads would explode. Oh man. It'd be, it'd be good. Yeah. But I mean, it really is. The other thing I, I don't want to overplay this, but I really like looking at my phone and it reinforcing what I'm supposed to be doing. Like if I get like down a rabbit hole, uh,

One of the benefits of working at home is I can step out of the studio and do something else. And so yesterday I went out. I'm finishing up a piece of furniture. And so I'm always checking on it. Is the glue dried or whatever? And I'm out there. And I looked at my phone.

and it's got a blue background. I'm like, oh wait, I'm supposed to be working now. So I'm like, okay, so what am I going to do? Am I going to go off the clock now and stay out here for an hour or am I going to get back to work? And I'll get back to work. But it's like, it just puts that little bit of

intentionality into it. You know, you look down at your watch or your phone and, and you see where, what your, what mode you're supposed to be in, and then you can choose whether to honor it or not, but it kind of keeps you on track. I love it. I think it's, I mean, that's one reason I time track, right? It's like, Oh, the timer's going up for MPU, but I found myself over here doing something else. Like, well, it is a reminder of,

I mean, the data is good and important because it helps me make decisions in my business, but it's also a, Hey, you've kind of said you're doing this. Are you really doing it? And sometimes like, Oh, I just forgot the time or other times like, Oh, you know what I did? I wandered down a rabbit hole. I need to, I need to come back, you know? Yeah. Well, it's just like even the Disneyland one as silly as that is. It's like, when I look at that, I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm at this really fun place with my wife.

the place she loves most in the world. And I'm going to just like be here for her for the next four hours and nothing else matters. And if I look at my calendar, it's empty and I'm not going to get any notifications from people. You know, it's just like, you just know that you're there. By the way, when I go to Disneyland, I have it block everybody except the

that I occasionally go to Disneyland with. And you, of course you always get through, Steven. Appreciate that. Because you're like, hey, where are your ads? I was like, oh, I'm at Disney. Okay, well, not anytime soon.

I remember once I did like a fancy business call with you and you about halfway through the call, you're like, are you at Disneyland? Yeah. It was, it was before I was on the show and you were practicing law. It was like a, like a relay FM LLC and like sparky law firm meetings. Like, wait, is that music? Like what is happening? I had a client do that once I was practicing law.

And the steamship whistle blew and I'm like, oh, now I'm dead. Now he got me. Now it's now, now we know. Yeah. Yeah. Gang, go set up your focus modes, set up some home screens, have a little fun with it. Make your phone work for you. Yeah. All right. We are the Mac power users. You can find us over at relay.fm slash MPU. You can sign up for feedback and sign up to be a member there for more power users where you get the ad for extended version of the show.

Thank you to our sponsors today, 1Password, Squarespace, NetSuite, and 1Blocker. As always, thanks to the more power user subscribers. You guys help us keep the lights on. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.