Five Tips for Using the iPhone to Run Your Life

If we admit it to ourselves, we’ve become pretty heavily reliant on our cell phones. The instant we carried them around with us and realized they serve as alarm clocks, we started using them as - what else? - alarm clocks. When we discovered the idea of ring tones, receiving phone calls stopped being a chiming annoyance and became a new experience entirely.

So it’s no surprise that an effective smart phone like Apple’s iPhone is right at the center of it, creating apps that have not only taken this cell phone nesting instinct to the next level but have introduced us new ways to run our lives. In some ways, this can be a great thing - but if we do it wrong, we find ourselves joined at the hip with technology. Here are five tips for using the iPhone to help run your life - without the iPhone running your life for you.

Tip #1: Don’t be afraid to mess with the sleep function.

The iPhone needs its rest, too, and that’s why it will rest if you don’t touch it for a while. When it goes to sleep, however, you can add another feature: using the sleep function as a “reverse alarm,” as Lifehacker Australia recommends. You can turn on music while you take a shower, as Lifehacker notes, and then listen for when the music goes off - and know that your shower should be over. It’s also a great way for cooling down after some tough reps at the gym.

Tip #2: Coordinate alarms with your schedule.

Do you use Google Calendars on your iPhone? Then you should be able to easily coordinate said calendar with an alarm so that you can wake up in accordance with the way you’ve got it all planned out, as this site is quick to point out. When running your daily life, it’s usually best to run everything through the same source - such as through your Google calendar. The more alarms, bells, and whistles you have filtering all of your schedule through, the more complicated things are going to be, and clutter is the enemy of a disciplined life.

Tip #3: Find ways of separating your work and personal life.

Sure, the advantage of the iPhone is that you can take your work with you in many cases, but the disadvantage is that...well, you can take your work with you. If you want to get away for the night, for the weekend, or for a vacation, then you’re going to want to separate your work and personal life. This can be hard to do when you run both of them through the same gadget. So don’t be afraid to enter “personal mode” in which you don’t answer work-related calls and you remember to shut off your iPhone at a certain point in the night. Sometimes it pays to be offline.

Tip #4: Have a to-do list every day on your iPhone.

If you don’t have a daily to-do list, then you’re probably not getting as much done as you could. If you’re going to be lugging your iPhone around wherever you go anyway, you might as well accelerate your personal productivity while you’re at it. So write a daily to-do list the day before you want to complete the list, and then execute the items on that list one-by-one until they’re done. It’s that simple, and having the list on your iPhone will keep it handy.

Tip #5: Keep a list of apps you’d like to download.

Why a list? Why not just download them? Because it’s a great way to whittle down a list before you buy anything: if you review your list from time to time and realize “oh, I don’t need that one,” you’re less likely to buy the apps on an impulse. You want the apps that help you run your life, but you don’t want clutter.