I have a contentious relationship with my phone.

This must not be news to any one. Most of us have similarly contentious relationships with our phones. We love to hate them, or hate to love them. Phones are our most personal devices. They are on our person all the time and if sometime we don't have our phones nearby, we get the jitters. ([[202503072334 We are all addicted to our phones|We are all addicted to our phones]])

When I had first read Installer #73 and the screen share featured in it by Colin, I had thought cool, but not for me. During last week, somehow I revisited the idea. I began thinking about the contexts in which I used my phone.

I ended up with these 4 focus modes:

1. Comms : Social + Messaging + Personal Mail
2. Read + Write : Music + Overcast + Obsidian +Safari + Kindle
3. Work : Teams + Outlook + Enterprise Apps + LinkedIn
4. FIN : Smart Home apps + HSL + Nordea + DNA

Screenshots:

deliberate use

Using my phone is a different experience now, when compared to the previous way I used to use it. Not massively so.

There is a degree of deliberation to it. One little thing, which tells me, hey you're looking at social apps. Or, you're reading. Or, whatever. When compared against the instinctual way in which we end up doom-scrolling.

more automation

I had been excited to use Focus Modes, when they came out as part of iOS 15. I remember checking the feature out, but it felt so replete with options that I left it there.

As part of these changes, I set up focus modes which would show a particular home screen when selected, which streamlines the view to just include the things I want to look at.

I also, set up a few automation flows on Shortcuts. I had used Shortcuts in the past for a few things, but not as much as I had hoped for.

A few things that I set up now:

1. Few launch this app shortcuts for the today view
2. Three shortcuts to launch my most commonly played music on Apple Music (Focus/Classical Chill/All Songs)
3. A shortcut to turn all focus off

In addition to the shortcuts I was using already:

1. Timber and Daily Log for adding short notes and time-stamped logs to daily notes in Obsidian