7 Gen-Z iPhone Tricks That Make You 95% More Present

Unless you take and view lots of photos/videos with your phone for work — let’s face it, who does — the color just makes the distractions more distracting. If you’re not ready for this yet, I suggest you at least enable Night Shift to reduce your phone’s energizing effect at night.

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6. Disable notifications along the way

Each stop on the way to your target app presents an opportunity to reaffirm what you want, but also one to get distracted. Hence, it’s crucial to get your notification settings right. Out of my 32 apps, only 8 send notifications in one form or another.

• Badges are useful for apps you check once a day or less, for example only if they contain news, in my case Telegram, Reminders, Phone, and the App Store for updates.
• Banners only make sense for calls or calendar alerts, since they interrupt you while you’re in an app or moving around.
• Alerts I don’t use at all, just worse than banners.

You already know my take on messages: not on the lock screen, only in your notification history. That’s it! Your phone is now streamlined for maximum mindfulness. There’s only one thing left to do.

7. Install exit prompts

This is the utopian dream: a phone that tells you to put it down right when it’s done being useful. I can’t think of a good way to implement this as of now, so my best shot is choosing the perfect question for your wallpaper.

Originally I had it set to “What are you looking for?” However, that only addresses your journey into the phone, not out. After answering your call, you might be ‘looking for’ fun and distractions.

“Why am I in your hand?” is better because the question is just as valid once you’re done using an app.

“Why am I still in your hand?” if you will. To make good use of this, you can:

1. Press the home button after finishing your business inside an app.
2. Press it again to return to the oasis and hopefully decide to lock your phone.

I’m fascinated by the fact no one has come up with a good solution for this, though not surprised. You can’t sell medicine to healthy people and you can’t sell apps to people who don’t use them. Master your tool before it masters you.

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Niklas Goke is a writer who has been featured in Thought Catalog, Medium, TheMuse, and more.