472 – Become a Superuser with your smartphone: Tom talks Smartphone Tips

Episode 472 – Smartphone Tips
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with episode four hundred and seventy two of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm back again with some iPhone tips. I bet you thought it was going to be asked me a question then. Well, every once in a while I come out with the iPhone tips because. Not because I'm some kind of iPhone guru. I am certainly not. But I do know that so many people are not using many of the features that could make them work way faster. You know, I'm all about having the most of your time for marketing and creating products and stuff, not fighting with the technology. So I'm not pretending to be a guru. I just continually improve myself a little bit all the time with this technology. And I go faster and faster and faster, which is what leads me time to work on the marketing and the products and all the stuff that brings money and say so that's what we're doing today. I'm all about the productivity. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 471, which was one of my frequent. Many ask me a question episodes. I talked about paper calendars, hardware back up, as opposed to data backup recording in hot home studio environments, selling webinars, how to make a 50000 dollar video about your business for only pennies on the dollar, where to get thousands of opinions for almost nothing on book titles and book covers and what headshot you want on your website.

[00:02:02] All kinds of stuff like that. And ways to get return visits to your website. That was all on Episode 471. And of course, when you want to get to a back episode, just go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number 471. All right. How would you like me to send you big checks? Well, if you're in my affiliate program or referral program, I can do that because you send me a customer, they buy stuff. I give you a commission. Simple as that basic affiliate marketing. And you can be assured that they're going to get taken care of and get good quality products from me. You don't want to refer somebody that's a schmuck. Then nobody will trust you anymore. So if you're interested, give me an email at Tom@Screwthecommute.com and I'll get you details. Pick up a copy of our automation ebook. It allows me to really, really I'm talking about iPhone tips right today, right? Well, it's got iPhone tips in it. It's got all kinds of automation, email tips in it and short keys and just all kinds of things that will make you go lightning fast, pick it up at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. Now, please, if you've been listening to the show, you know, I'm really going crazy over this promotion that we're doing with the school to help people with disabilities not only learn and get a skill, but be hired. And so we've got a Go Fund Me going. It's at my school website, IMTCVA.org/disabilities. That'll be in the show notes. Please at least go over and check it out. And everybody, I just finished yesterday, my new crowdfunding book. So everybody that contributes 20 bucks or more is going to get a copy of that book that sells for 37 bucks. So and also that book could change your life because you can bring in enormous amounts of money for all kinds of projects, you know, medical problems that you have or or business ideas or books or all kinds of things that you can use crowdfunding for as long as it's legal. So check it out. IMTCVA.org/disabilities and at the top of the page, click on Go Find Me and you'll see some of the people in the program already. We're actually going to use some of the money to hire people to help run the program and we're going to put five people through. And then my big ideas, I'm going to prove the concept and then I'm going to get grants and foundation money and stuff to roll out really big. So that's the idea. Please give me a hand on it.

[00:04:54] All right. Let's get to the main event. So iPhone tips. And if you really like this topic, you should go back to my other episodes on iPhones, I think I had three, three or four of them, all different tips. And this will be the same thing with different tips. All right, So first of all, some of these things you might say, Tom that's so simple. Well, I work with so many people, and I got to tell you, they just don't know these things. So if you know any one of these great. Wait till the next one. I'll bet you. I guarantee you there's one here you don't know about. OK, and there's a really cool one coming up. So anyway, iPhone backup to iCloud now. Oh, and let me address your Android folks. If they haven't tuned out already, most of this stuff you can do on an android. So I'm trying to give you the idea and then you go figure out on an android how you do it. I don't know how to do it because I don't have an android. But the Android will do most of this stuff and. I got to tell you, when I when you immerse yourself in this, I don't you know, I'm not just pulling stuff out of a hat. I'm running into things and saying, oh, my God, I didn't know the iPhone would do that.

[00:06:13] I'm going to learn how to do it. And then I'm going to pass it on to the people on the podcast and it'll they'll do so many things. So if you just start digging into iPhone shortcuts and Android shortcuts and things like that, you'll start seeing, oh, my goodness, I didn't even know it would do that. That's perfect for me. So, I mean, it'll do a thousand things that you'll never need. But the 30 or 40 of them that you do need could just change your whole life. All right. So so you Android folks just hang in there. OK, so anyway, back up to iCloud, so basically and all this stuff is going to be in the show now, so don't worry about scrambling right now. So you just go to settings, you click on your name, you click on iCloud, you click on iCloud backup. And now here's the thing that a lot of people don't realize. You got to be plugged in and on Wi-Fi for it to do it. OK, and you can actually hit the button back up now, but it won't do it unless you're plugged in and on Wi-Fi because it's going to take a while to back up your host, all your stuff. And it has to have a connection to the Internet to to get up there. So it has to be on Wi-Fi and has to be plugged in.

[00:07:32] But get your stuff back up to iCloud and I don't want to hear you crying about well, I don't know if it's secure. Look what happened to Paris Hilton. And, you know, if somebody hacks you at least a heard of you put it down. OK, so I don't put anything up there that's totally outrageous, that confidential. And I don't really have much of that other than, you know, passwords and stuff. But those don't go up to iCloud. I put them on roboform, which is highly encrypted. But but just quit worrying about this stuff. I mean, people want to guard everything they have with a machine gun nest and then they're going broke. I mean, I'd rather make a lot of money and have some hassles with spammers and and maybe a hack here and there of my website, which, again, you should keep your eye on, but then then be broke and protected. Put it that way. OK. All right. Next thing, this is a good tip. If you know you're going to be out somewhere where you can't charge your phone and you need extra battery power and without buying an extra battery pack and all that stuff, this would be turning on the low power mode. And this can extend the battery life of your phone like three hours. Let's say you you hike and stuff and there's no signals out there and and, you know, so you're not backing up anything, but you are way out in no man's land.

[00:09:05] And if you got hurt or something, you could at least have the battery power to try to do something about it. Now, if you're out of if there's no signal, you can't call anybody. But a lot of times a text will get through when my phone won't get through. So you still have a fighting chance to have your phone working for three extra hours. So keep that in mind. OK, now how do you do it? Well, you go to settings, battery, low power mode, you use toggle that on and click continue. Now you are going to lose some features like like it's not going to automatically grab emails and it's not going to automatically upgrade apps and stuff. And and some visual stuff is going to be reduced. And then when you get back, turn it off. If it's if you happen to like the extra battery power and you don't see any trouble with the things that you're missing. Great. Leave it off. But I usually, you know, around the house most of the time and keep it plugged in. All right. But that can be very handy when you need to turn on your low power mode. And I suggest even when you don't need these folks, try it a couple times so that you're not in a deer in the headlights whenever you really need it and you can't remember how to do it.

[00:10:25] All right. So so try that one out. All right. Here's a handy one. You know, I've complained for years. I think that was where I've complained for years about how hard it is and how big liars they are. When they say your printer is easily wireless, you know, it just hooks up beautifully to your Wi-Fi like nothing's happening. I swear to God, over all these years, I've had to have the geeks hook it up and then some glitch would happen and it would quit and they'd have to come forward with it for half an hour to hook it back up again. So this is a way that you can print from your iPhone, but your printer must have something called airprint. And there'll be a link in the show notes to the Apple support site that lists all the printers that have airprint. And what you do is you let's say you get an email. And you want to print it out, well, you open the email and then you click the share button, but then instead of sending it to somebody else, you tap print. And you can do the same thing on Apple Maps if you know you're going to be out somewhere and maybe signal's bad, you can print out a map, too, but you have to have that air print function as part of your printer for that to work. But that's a handy thing to print stuff from your phone.

[00:12:00] And there's none of this complicated, crazy setup like there is for your computers to try to print wirelessly through your network. Oh, my God, it's never been it's never worked out. I have a 16 foot printer cable laying across my living room floor for the past 20 years. OK, here's a productivity thing on Apple Maps to avoid traffic so you can get like say you want to go somewhere you so you go on Apple Maps and then you click on there's a little I like Indigo. It's like I in a circle at the top, like an information little circle. You click on it on it's near the top. Right. And then you turn on the traffic toggle switch. And then it's going to show. You know, bumper to bumper traffic in yellow and stopped traffic in red, and so before you even leave, you can, you know, look for alternate routes and things like that to get around the traffic. And, of course, it updates as you're on your way also. So that's a handy productivity thing. All right, now, this simple tip, you know, this is like the simplest of simple, but I didn't know it for a long time and I'm standing next to people and and I'm watching them type something into their phone, a message. And I'm saying, what are you doing? And this has to do with making a period a lot of times if people don't know this, they will get to the end of a sentence.

[00:13:41] They'll click the one, two, three, button the change screens and then click period and then click back to start typing the next sentence. You know, I'm laughing, but I'm laughing at myself, too, because I was doing the same thing until somebody showed me so. So all you got to do is double tap the spacebar at the end of a sentence and it'll put a period and then a space and you start typing your next sentence. And you can if you happen to be using voice, you can just say the word period or exclamation point or question mark and it'll put it in for you. But just try that and you'll say, oh, my God, if I didn't know that, just hit spacebar twice and you'll put a period in. OK, now here's another one that's kind of a hassle sometimes is how to keep your screen from rotating. Well, you go to your control center now. These things have names, but basically on a more modern iPhone, you swipe from the top right to the bottom left like a diagonal, and that opens up a screen that has stuff in it. You can have you can put whatever you want in there. That's a whole different thing. But it's got a magnifying glass and the flashlight icon and, you know, stuff like that. Well, it also has a little lock with an arrow that's around it like a circle. That's your portrait lock.

[00:15:14] Portrait is when your phone is vertical. And a lot of times when you turn it sideways, it's it turned sideways. And that's called landscape. Well, sometimes you want to lock the screen so it doesn't do that. And so you go into the control center and if you're on an older iPhone, you swipe up from the bottom to get the control center and just hit that little thing. It'll change, you know, to highlight it. And now when you turn your phone, it'll stay locked in a certain thing. I know when people send me pictures that are in a certain look, you know, rotation and I try to look at them, they're like taken the wrong way. And as soon as I move to the phone a little bit, the thing moves again on me. So so all I do is turn on the screen lock and that way I can turn the phone and look at the picture normally, even if it was sent to me sideways. So that's a really good one. All right, now here's an interesting one, you can share your ETA or estimated time of arrival when you're walking or cycling. Now, what you do is you open Apple Maps and you search the location that you want to walk or cycle to, you know, ETA is automatic when you're driving. But anyway, you you tap the directions and then you tap whether you're walking or cycling. There's a little icon for that and you select which route you're taking and then you just tap share ETA and send it to whoever you want.

[00:16:53] If they're on an iPhone, they'll get it. Now, the only thing that can mess you up here is if they have taken Apple Maps off of their iPhone or don't have it on there. In that case, they'll get a text. And if they're not on iPhone, they'll get a text instead of because they don't have Apple Maps on an Android. So it's pretty cool function. It's a kind of a safety thing to, you know, if you don't show up at a certain time, maybe you broke your leg and they know your route and they know what time you were supposed to be at your destination. And then if you're not there, somebody should come looking for you. So that's a little and and, you know, boy, you just saw that lady. And in a park, a very popular park, she ends up her and her dog stabbed to death in the middle of the day, you say. So I'm not sure if this would help that. But, you know, you got to start really being more careful when you're out there and get your ear buds off. You know, when I teach the brutal self-defense class, the most dangerous thing possession people have is their cell phone because they they're clueless to what's going on around them. You know, if I have no idea the circumstances there.

[00:18:07] But if that lady had been aware, she might have been able to start running like crazy and screaming, maybe the person just snuck up on her because she wasn't aware. So and that's very common. So get the ear buds off when you're when you're walking and running because it's just too dangerous nowadays. OK, but anyway, that's a function of Apple Maps. Now, here's some things again, that people just and I know it drove me crazy until I figured it out, is organizing your home screen and I'm going to be telling you something, I swear you don't know. All right. First of all, to move your icons around, I think I got six or seven screens now of icons, and that includes folders of full icons. So I got a lot of apps up there. But anyway, you hold your finger on a blank place on the screen and all the apps start to jiggle. And yet you press and hold on the one you want to move and you drag it wherever you want to put it, and if you have to cross screens, you drag it to the edge of the screen and hold until the screen switches and you got to practice work because they'll they'll jump pretty fast on you. And then you put it where you want it and let it go. And then on the later operating systems up at the top. Right. It says done, you can just click done. And that stops it.

[00:19:31] I think you can just tap on the screen and an empty space and it also stops it. So that's one thing of moving an individual app around. But when you get loads of apps, it's a pain in the neck to search for and when they're all over the place. So the next thing is to make folders on your iPhone screens and. What you want to do is find, let's say, find two apps that are related to each other. So let's say you have on your travel, you have travel stuff and you have one airline, Delta and the other American. OK. I don't know if you would do that anymore with all this stuff going on, but anyway, so you make the screen jiggle, you know, just like I told you, hold a blank space till Jagels. Then you hold one. You press and hold one of the airline apps and drag it over and drop it on top of the other airline app. Well, what happens is, is the iPhone automatically makes a folder and suggests a name for the folder, maybe airlines, it says, and maybe you're happy with that. So you just say, OK, and you now have a folder that doesn't take up as much space with two things in it. And like I have one that says travel that has my airline stuff in it and have another one. Navigation has all my maps stuff in it. I wrote them down here.

[00:21:11] So I have let's see. Yeah, my navigation folder has all my map, like Google Maps, Apple Maps. I got a productivity folder with notes and reminders. I've got a Sam's Club app in there so that I can get gas faster than putting the cards in the machine and all that stuff. I got a newsstand folder that's got all my different news sources, I got an audio folder that's got a podcast, voice members, a decibel meter, all that stuff. I got a social media folder. I got to buying apps folder that's got an Amazon offer up, Craigslist, eBay. I got a travel folder that's got Uber, Lyft and Waze, hotel and airline apps, you know, that's just on the home screen. And it's there's still some other miscellaneous ones. But here's the here's the really cool thing I want to tell you about at the bottom of your screen is what is called the doc. And it it has four places for the most important things you use all the time. And it stays there no matter what app screen you're on. To. Put the most important things on there, you have to take if there's four things there, you've got to make the screen jiggle by holding it on a blank space and then drag something out of the dock to make space to drag another app into the dock. And then you hit done and there you got that, that'll be on every screen. But here's the thing.

[00:22:51] I bet you I bet the farm you didn't know. You can take something out of the dark to leave a space, but you can drag a folder into the dark, so instead of just having four things in there, you could have your whole travel folder with 47 apps right there in the dock handy for every screen that you're on. So you don't have to search for stuff now. I don't think there's a limit on how many things you can put in a folder. So if you just go to crazy with this, the folders only hold, I think, nine things per screen. So it'll start making more screens. You got to look for, you know, two. So if you get crazy with it, you'll still have to do some searching, but a lot less. So that's the trick. I bet you didn't know about it. You can pull a folder down into your dock and have it show up on every app screen. So that's that. OK, so another one is. In your message, like your texts. You can pin your most important people to the top of your message list. I mean, I get, you know, hundreds of messages. And if there's somebody that prior to doing this, if there's somebody like Jennifer, my bookkeeper, or Mark, you know, the video guy or Larry or Travis, you know, so I don't want to have to search through 100 texts to find them or or jump through hoops to hit in the star and go into my favorites and all this.

[00:24:33] So they're right at the top of my message app. So to do this, all you got to do is find a message from one of your important people and press and hold the message. Don't press and hold their name press and hold the message and. There will be a thing that says pin so pin mark. OK, so you hit pin mark boom or he's got an icon at the top of my message list where all of his techs are. And if I want to text him, I don't have to go searching through to find a text that he sent me and send it back. So that's really handy if pinning messages to the top of your spinning text and people to the top of your text message at. All right, so there you go. So I hope you get an idea that this stuff will really make you go faster and this is only a fraction of it. Like I said, I don't pretend to be some guru on this. It's just that I get a little bit better all the time, a little bit faster. And every time I do, it's more time I can be working on products and sales letters and selling stuff and and making money, which is what we're all about in the business world. OK, just a reminder about the crowdfunding campaign. We'd really need like to have your help.

[00:25:56] You'd be doing something that would change somebody's life. I mean, permanently. I tell people it's like your name on a library that you helped donate or in a park bench or something. Yes. So any little bit helps. But if you happen to be flush with cash, you can sponsor a whole person and and change change their life. So. So check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities that will be in the show notes and then click on the Go Fund Me campaign at the top. You can see some of the people already progressing through the program and the plans we have for it will be giving you updates. There'll be an update soon from Charlie Collins, who has the vision of twenty five hundred instead of twenty twenty. All right, so his face is in the keyboard. He's got this monitor that's as big as like a, I don't know, an outdoor movie theater and upbeat guy and just chugging along and making it so. So we got him. We got Tammy Stevens just getting started. She's completely blind. We have Robbie Messerschmidt, who is got all kinds of physical mobility problems and she's chugging along. So I'm really I'm just really excited about helping these folks and a lot more of them once we roll it out big. So anyway, check it out. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Go get your iPhone and Android and get faster on it. All right, folks, we'll catch y'all on the next episode. See you later.

Join my distance learning school: https://www.IMTCVA.org
Or join the mentor program PLUS get a FREE Scholarship to the School: https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com