My ultra minimalist phone setup

This is what my iPhone looked like at the beginning of the year, and this is what it looks like now. Pretty cool, right? I want to walk you through my most minimalist phone setup yet, how I customize my iPhone's home screen icons, and I also want to share the essential apps I use every day to be more productive and stay on track with my yearly goals. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them in a little bit. So first things first, let's start with my phone. I have an iPhone 13 mini. I've had it for about three years now and it's holding up really well. I have no plans on upgrading this phone anytime soon I don't use a screen protector or a case and it's starting to show there are lots of little scratches on this thing But honestly from the right angle, you can't even tell and since it doesn't impact the functionality I really don't care I'd rather have a smaller sleeker phone and having a case that makes my phone larger than I want it to be There's a reason why I went with the Mini in the first place. We have a lot to talk about today. Over the years, phones have gotten bigger and bigger because, well, that's what most people want. Apple discontinued the iPhone 13 Mini two years after its release because of poor sales. And very few companies, if any, are interested in making phones this small. But I prefer it because it encourages me to use my phone less, and it fits in my pocket better. All right, so I'm definitely behind the trend on this one, but I just found out that you can update the icons on your iPhone's home screen to be anything you want. You could be wildly colorful and vibrant or very simple and minimalist. Basically to create a minimalist icon for your home screen you need to use Apple's shortcuts app. Using shortcuts you can create an additional icon that will open up the app of your choice. So to create a custom icon you first want to start a new shortcut search nothing and add that command first. this will stop the shortcut banner from appearing whenever you click on a shortcut next search open app and then select the app that you want to open then click this drop down icon click add to home screen and then this is where you would add your custom icon you can choose from one of apples or you can design your own after you've created your first shortcut it gets a little bit easier just open up the shortcuts app your last shortcut that you made will be open go to this this dropdown at the top and click duplicate. And then from there, just follow the steps that I laid out previously. So I found a really great minimalist icon pack online. It costs about $20, which isn't so bad. Saves me time making all these icons myself, but there is a problem. So these are the icons that I got. They actually come in black, white, and pastel, which is pretty cool. So there are 50 icons here. They all look really great. I actually only need probably 10 of them, but there were five icons that I just couldn't find in this pack that I'm gonna have to customize and make myself. Those are these ones here. So I need to make custom icons for my Hue smart bulb app, my air conditioner app. And for some reason this pack did not have Apple Podcasts or Audible, which just seems crazy to me. I was able to find most of the icons I needed for free online, which kind of had me second guessing whether I actually needed to spend $20 on this pack or not. I did dial in some small changes to make the icons more consistent with the pack that I purchased. I also had to scale up the icons a little bit because they were too small for my liking. If you're the kind of person that has like four pages of icons on your phone, this is probably gonna take way too long to be worth the effort. But if you're like me and you've consolidated all of your favorite apps to just one screen, then it's really not that bad. Honestly, this alone doesn't drastically change my relationship with my phone. It just makes for a more pleasant, less sensory experience than what I typically had before. It's also a great reminder to me that I'm in control of this device and it's not in control of me. Here's one shortcut that I made that wasn't just aesthetic, but actually helps me to save seconds every day. That's right, seconds. know, but honestly, sometimes it's just really annoying to open up an app, wait for it to load, click through to multiple screens to get to where you want to go, especially if it's something that you do multiple times a day. So for me, this one relates to parenting, but normally when I turn on my son's red nightlight or his green morning light to let him know that it's time to wake up, I would have to click on the Smart Life app, then click this button and then click on the favorite light here. Now I can just click on one of these four circles to cycle through the different combos of rain sounds and light colors that we've got set up within the app. I moved it one swipe over because I'm terrified of accidentally clicking on the morning light when my son's sleeping and waking him up. So last year when I went from having a big team to becoming a solo creator again for the first time in a very long time, I had to get really intentional with the tools that I use every day. Each one had to be useful enough to justify the cost, powerful enough that it could scale as I grow my audience, and easy enough that a dumb-dumb like me could figure it out without the help of a team. The easiest decision that I made by far, and I'm not just saying this because they're the sponsor of this video, was sticking with Squarespace. I've been using Squarespace for seven years, and it's by far one of the easiest website builders that I've ever used. It's effortless to get started whether you're using their AI website builder or picking from one of their many beautiful templates. It's super quick to make changes, drag, drop, and dial in your settings like the perfectionist that you are. Squarespace also gives you access to some really powerful built-in tools for e-commerce, blogging, analytics, and domain hosting. I mean, that's just too easy. That's a phrase that they use here in Australia. It makes sense here. Go to squarespace.com to get started today, and then go to squarespace.com slash Matt D'Avella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You won't regret it. Okay, that's the end of the whole Squarespace part. let me give you a quick tour of all the apps that made it onto my home screen and just as important the ones that i've deleted for good i want to cover some of the ones that help me be more productive every day as well as stay on track with my yearly goals if you're not familiar yet for a long time you've been able to delete icons from your home screen that you use less frequently and you don't want cluttering up your phone so my home screen only has my most used apps let's start with the top row we've got my clock and weather apps after that is my service new south wales app i'm not sure how common this is around the world but service new south wales has a valid version of my driver's license in it so whenever i leave the house i don't need to take my id with me i can just pull up this app and share it with the police if i'm getting arrested it's very convenient you've got my camera app at the top right here this is the google home app. It has all my security cameras on it. After that is the Hue app. So this app allows me to control my Hue light bulbs in my home and in my office. So if I go into the Hue app, I've got my podcast studio lights here. Those are for those three lights you can see there. This is my air conditioner app. It is the worst air conditioning app that I've ever used in my entire life, but it's the only one that works with the system that we have. So whenever I can, I try to bundle similar apps together. So the next few are all communication related. Those are FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Messenges. And then Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible. So one of my goals for the year is to read more books. I'm aiming for 25 this year, which would be 20 more than I read last year. And the only way that I'm going to be able to do this is to listen to audiobooks. And that's why I've placed Audible in one of the most easy to reach places on my phone. The bottom two widgets are helping me track my big goals for the year. The left widget tells me how many weeks have passed during the year and the right widget is called progress and it's a running tally of all the YouTube videos I've made this year. My goal is 40. Turning my phone's home screen into a habit tracker is one of the best uses I think I've ever found with my phone. Since I open my phone up many times a day it's a constant reminder to stay on track with my long-term goals And it's also been really satisfying to see this progress bar fill up over time. Inside the progress app, I'm tracking my other big goals for the year, like the books that I've read and the content I've created. It's not the most beautiful design in the world, but I tested over 20 other apps. And this is the only one that allows me to show my year at a glance from the home screen. And finally, on the bottom dock, I've got the phone app, as well as my top three productivity apps, Google Calendar, Notes, and To Do. Notably, I still use Apple Notes as my go-to note-taking app, and I still use a variation of the Para system that I learned from Tiago Forte and featured in a very popular video I made a few years ago. I've simplified the folder structure a little, so it's not Para, it's Pa. Projects, Areas, and Archive. Just to give you a little bit of a look inside, in the Project folder are all my active projects. This includes notes for my YouTube videos, my podcast, Three Rules, my newsletter, my bonus YouTube channel, and my YouTube course. I'll leave a link in the description below if you wanna learn more about this organizational system for your notes and files, I highly recommend it. And you probably also noticed that I'm still using ToDo. It's my favorite ToDo app that I've ever used. I love it because it's easy to push items from one day to the next, and it isn't stuffed with a bunch of useless features. I'll leave my affiliate link in the description below if you want to try it out for yourself. Swiping over and you'll see all my nightlight shortcuts at the top that we already talked about. And this large widget at the bottom is the Strong app. It's an amazing app that stores all of my weightlifting programs, historical lifting data, and helps me keep track of how many times I lift each week right on my home screen. This has been hugely helpful in keeping me committed to going to the gym three days a week. I don't think my phone or the apps that I used have changed a whole lot since I last walked you through this a couple years ago. And I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted to share this with you. I think so often we get wrapped up with trying to find the latest and greatest app and the thing that's going to improve our productivity. But when it comes down to it, a lot of times Google Maps, Apple Notes, and your basic to-do app works just fine. And if it's not broken, don't fix it. It actually reminds me of this popular meme that went viral a couple years ago. I think in the end, it's fun to explore with these fancy new apps. But a lot of times you can do everything you need to do with a much simpler productivity setup. The apps that you might have noticed that aren't currently on my phone are Instagram, TikTok, email, and Reddit, just to name a few. I do download Instagram or email from time to time for work, but 90% of the time I don't have them installed on my phone. But I'm not perfect, so I'll share my guilty pleasure with you. I do have Prime Video installed on my phone where I watch The Office before bed pretty much every single night. I honestly have a really hard time getting to sleep these days if I'm not watching an episode. It's a terrible habit, I know, but you know, I'm just trying to survive.

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Hi there– my name is Matt 👋. I made a documentary called Minimalism that trended on Netflix a few years back and now I make YouTube videos. Please subscribe so my mother-in-law thinks this is a better career than being a doctor.

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