Effective Use of my Smartphone

I often find myself in certain ruts where I don't try anything new and keep doing things the way they have been done for awhile. Then something will happen that challenges the old way and makes me look for improvement in everyday things. One such recent improvement came from the question of how effectively I am using my smartphone.

Every morning in the winter, I wake up and get ready to go skiing. I drive the 14 miles to Snowbird and ski for an hour before work. When anyone asks, this is my "gym time." That means I am using my ski boots daily and they need help drying out. I have a set of boot dryers that I use and only want them to run for a limited amount of time. I used to turn them on while I got ready for the day but decided I could use the timer on my smartphone. It is set for 50 minutes. When it goes off, I turn off the boot dryers. It is a little thing but started my mental wheels turning about how to use my smartphone more effectively.

Smartphones come loaded with a number of productivity applications and so there is no need to load up any more. Are you using those you have to their fullest potential? This morning my wife is busily working and sent me a quick text even though she is in the room above me. This is much more efficient than yelling through the house and trying to have "the original" long-distance communication.

One app I do have loaded onto my phone that I use constantly is a dictionary. I'm a pretty smart guy and figure I know the meaning to most of the words I hear in English. The reality is that there are a small number of words that I guess at the meaning based on context. Recognizing this, I have started looking up the meaning for words I am not absolutely sure of. This is tough to do in conversations but easy to do when I am reading something. Often times I will look up a word and remember something I heard from someone else and look that up too. I wouldn't say that my vocabulary is exploding, but I am finding I understand a lot more about what is being said.

Unfortunately there are a number of smartphone apps that can hinder you. I purposely don't have any social media loaded on my phone. I find it can be a distraction and keep me from actually being productive. I also don't have a lot of games on my mobile device. While they can help pass the time when you are stuck in line or waiting for an event to start, they more often keep one from doing more important things.

Using your smartphone effectively is a combination of taking advantage of its features as well as not letting it become a distraction. If you have any suggestions on what works for you, I'd be interested in your comments.

Why So Many Apps?

Lately it feels like there is an app for anything you want to do. I am not a fan of loading up my mobile phone with a ton of applications (or apps) that I rarely use. After all, isn't that the reason we have the web? You can create the same thing you would use an app for with a general HTML page.

Right now I have about a dozen apps I should install on my phone. Instead I prefer to use my browser and have not loaded them up. Whenever I try to use IMDB on my phone to look up an actor, it suggests I load the app. Naturally I decline and just use the web interface. It does what I need. I also use the Google page instead of loading the special Google app. The web works just fine.

This evening I used the website for Virgin Pulse to input my healthy habits for the day. Sure I could load up another app on my smartphone but don't want to. There are many more examples I come across weekly and wonder what I can do to let vendors know I don't want another app. Why? For the simple reason apps take up space on my phone and I prefer to save that space for important stuff like cool pictures or videos. Perhaps you feel the same way.

It All Works With Electricity

Thursday night my youngest daughter came to pick me up at the airport in Salt Lake but couldn't bring my car because of a small problem. Instead she drove her car.

Sunday evening my oldest son celebrated his birthday and spent part of his dinner feast extolling the virtues of the new car he purchased recently for him and his wife. He pointed out that if he locked his keys in the car, he could use an app on his smartphone and unlock the car. I asked him what would happen if he left the lights on. His wife jumped in and pointed out that the app also allows you to turn the lights off. I then asked what would happen if you left the lights on and forgot about it, as would usually be the case. She had to agree that the app would not work with a dead battery.

When my daughter tried to pick me up on Thursday evening, my car's battery did not have a charge. A small light in the interior got left on during a trip on Saturday and nobody turned it off. When I got home from the airport I couldn't even open the trunk where the car battery is stored because my trunk latch requires electricity. Fortunately I could use the key to unlock my door and open the hood where there is a second set of electrical terminals for charging the battery.

Technology is advancing and there are a number of great features that now come standard with a number of cars. My son has a new car that he and his wife appreciate. It is just important to remember that electricity is an important part of this new technology and we shouldn't take it for granted. After all, if the car next to us at the ski resort on Saturday had some of this new technology, the owner wouldn't have had to call a locksmith to get into his car. He could have just pulled up an app on his smartphone and unlocked the doors without much fuss.

Lose It

I just found a new free app for my iPhone. To borrow a line from Charles Dickens, "It is the worst of apps, it is the best of apps." It is called "Lose It" and is sort of an electronic weight watcher's program.

The idea behind "Lose It" is to help you record the food you eat and the exercise you do every day. When you first start the application, it asks your weight, height, and gender. It then asks you your goal weight and gives you a safe estimate of how long it should take to get there. You are then ready to start inputing the food you eat as you eat it. Since I always have my iPhone with me, I just enter the information while I am chewing. Otherwise I might forget. Today I had some left-over Cashew Chicken with rice. While it was reheating in the microwave, I found a similar recepie in the program and had it calculate the calories.

The great thing about the program is you can see your calorie count as you go through the day. I started using it on Sunday and was 7 calories under my daily budget. Yesterday I went skiing for an hour at lunch and watched an additional 500 calories get added to my alotment. I only used a portion of them and went to bed with calories to spare.

You can probably see why it is the best of apps. As for why it is the worst, I feel hungry all day long. Given the temptation of snacking, it is too much work to enter the snack in the program and so I have cut down on those extra meals. I also am more careful about what I eat. The kids all had donuts and hot chocolate this morning for breakfast. I ate a donut but had to pass on the cocoa as I didn't want to start my day with too many calories used. Instead I drank water. What fun is water and donuts?

I love to eat and it probably shows a bit too much. My hope is that I can actually get down to my goal weight by April. Several of my cycling buddies have been using the program for a couple of weeks now and they have all lost weight. I probably should thank them for showing me the app, but I'm hungry and my next meal isn't for a couple more hours. I really hate those guys.