 This is a stack of shortcut widgets. I can flip through these pretty fast and use them to quickly capture, consume, or share thoughts, ideas and articles and bits of knowledge. And I can do this by actually tapping into the one particular functionality of the app I want to use. And the main reason I'm doing this nowadays is because I want to shift the primal use of my iPhone here and sort of transform it into a capturing device, period. While removing the paradox of choice and also the mindless consumption and random scrolling through the apps. And as you can see I only have one home screen and I cannot swipe between pages. And the phone I currently use is an iPhone 8. It's not the plus version but it's actually pretty good. And I'm using the somehow minimalist wallpaper pack that I created containing 30 plus inspirational wallpapers such as this one. And you can actually find and download this wallpaper pack in the description down below and also in the pinned comment I believe. And everything is available for free but let's jump into the actual topic of the video. And I have created everything you can see on this page using Apple shortcuts. Apple shortcuts is an app that is oftentimes neglected. The app lets you get things done by choosing and using a particular functionality of the app you want to use. For example, let's pretend I need a five minute timer. If I want to set a quick timer for say my morning egg, instead of going to the clock app, choosing timers, scrolling through the number of minutes I want and finally setting it up, I can simply hit the timer shortcut, add my value and boom. And an app actually has multiple functionalities. If you take something like Google Chrome, which is a browsing app, there are quite a lot of things you can do at the app when you are not searching such as collecting and bookmarking stuff, flipping through the tabs and deleting your history as well. But what if you want to use it for pure search? Instead of say opening the app and hitting the search box and doing your thing, you can start searching right away. Another example is searching for something on YouTube. What I normally have to do is to open the app, face my feed, probably check my notifications as well and forget the thing I wanted to search for, which was my initial reason why I opened YouTube in the first place. And if I want to dive deeper into an app, I would simply search for it using the search feature, making the process more mindful overall. And I believe again that we should start using our smartphones as tools to gather and collect bits of knowledge, capture and generate ideas on the spot, and in the end, let the smartphone control you. And this is why I do not want to keep tons of apps on the screen. My new shortcut layout actually takes advantage of the new folder structure feature in iOS. And currently I own two folder stacks, having five sets of colors. The first one is called search and cap, aka search and capture. The second folder is called consume and digest. In the search and cap folder, I keep apps that I would like to quickly summon in times of need for capturing things such as text, audio, while also keeping my options open and allowing myself to send a quick message to a quick search or setting up a quick timer. These have the color green. Then I have the color cyan for apps that are mostly related to finding something such as doing a quick Google search, Google Drive search or YouTube search. The pinkish color is for my music related shortcuts and the orange one is for the things I would normally check during the day. And the last color, which is, I believe, a type of green is for some misch shortcuts I'm still testing and will let you know how that works. Moving to the next set of icons, these are somehow music related. I'm trying to keep things simple and I have one called Air Studio. And this one lets you quickly connect your Apple AirPods to your device without having to go through settings and stumble around other, you know, random distractions. And I keep using this one more and more and the normal process is to tap and open the app, which normally most people don't have it on screen, wait for it to load, tap it again and find your song. But with the shortcut, Shazam starts listening to your song right away, gives you the name of the song and also copies it to the clipboard for, I know, further reference. And I know that you can use like the history feature of Shazam, but that's mostly for archive purposes, at least for me. And then there's the today shortcut. This one is quite handy as it gives me a condensed version of what's happening today, some quick weather stats and what I have pending in my calendar. This is also easily adjustable so you can change your inputs within the app itself. And I also added a Twitter shortcut as I am training myself to tweet raw thoughts and then collect those into my Twitter feed archive for further reference. So instead of say opening Twitter and clicking on add new tweet, I can simply hit the shortcut and boom, there we go, I can start tweeting. And you know, scheduled to do that on a particular time slot during the day, using something like batching. I also have two top news type of shortcuts and I'm currently keeping those at the bottom of my stack as I don't like looking at the news that much. This can give me again a condensed view of the news as well and not allowing me to fall into your rabbit hole once again. And I'm still testing out the last two shortcuts as they are kind of consumption related. One allows me to quickly download the YouTube file, maybe I found just like an interesting song or an interesting video I want to keep. And the other one is simply like a word lookup NoBS tool. And I'm also using an app called Toolbox Pro, which enhances my shortcuts functionalities by adding new shortcut models that I can inject into the default app. And Toolbox Pro is essentially an app that makes shortcuts, you know, more powerful overall and adds more actions that are not available by default. And if you want to unlock all the Toolbox Pro features, you'll need to pay something like five bucks. But if you want to go Meta, if you want to go Pro, you can pay the five bucks and have like the full functionality of the app itself. I'd also have a few apps on the screen as well, just because I know that these are apps where I usually dive deeper and are not that distracting overall. And the idea behind this particular layout is that I can open my phone and I won't be tempted to use the full functionality of a particular app. And if your phone is slowly and gradually becoming a distraction instead of a tool you can use to your advantage, you can try out this iOS shortcut capture and consume type of layout. And one other trick I found useful is to remove the case from the phone itself. And I found out that this sort of like resets my perception. And this sounds kind of weird at first, but you see the human brain actually gets used to something pretty fast. And the feeling you get when touching your case and your phone is actually slowly gradually becoming routine. So I found that if I keep my case on for say one month, when I do remove the case to use the iPhone at its naked state, you know, it's in its baby suit. I experience a whole new sensation when holding it in my hand. It feels like it actually feels like a new phone. So it's just like quite interesting how you can reset your perception by simply just like removing your case. And this is why I feel like this resets my hedonic treadmill and prevents me from craving for a new phone. As again, by rotating my case, I get the use of a new phone every single month. And let's face it, nowadays the phone is actually an extension of ourselves. And we should stop letting the phone use us and we should learn how we can control and use it to our advantage. And now there are tons of shortcuts out there with people who took this to a whole new level. But please let me know in the comments below if you have any other shortcuts that you found useful and you would want to share. Thank you for watching and I will see you in the next one. Peace!