Apps on My Home Screen

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we make technology work for us. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Like you, I have numerous apps on my smartphone, and they're pretty cool. I mean, there's so many apps in the world to do so many cool things from order food online to buying your movie tickets in advance to translating languages.
But there are a few apps that have the distinction of residing on the home page of my phone, and for a reason I try to keep distracting apps on a second page or buried somewhere in a folder so I don't see them when I first unlock my phone. But I try to keep important apps where I can see them easily to encourage myself to use those apps more often.
So here are some of the apps that I have on my front page. First of all, I have calendars five. Now I use Google calendars and I actually have quite a lot of calendars and they all sync together. But I purchased Calendars five, which is an app by Riedel many years ago, and I've been using it religiously for probably close to a decade at this point.
The reason I use it instead of the default Google Calendars app is because it allows me to just tap and expand or shrink the length of any item on my calendar. And also it allows me to do some little things like to duplicate, to copy stuff that right now isn't in the Google Calendar app, which they probably will put in a future feature.
But I just really have liked Calendars five, and that is the calendar app I have on my homepage right now. I also have my Reminders app and I just use the Default Apple Reminders app and honestly, I almost never tap on the app itself. I almost exclusively use it with Siri, so I use reminders to send myself a message later when I will be at my desk or when I will be near the thing I want to accomplish.
Sometimes I think of things while I'm out and I'm on the go and I don't want to forget them, but I don't have the opportunity to put them directly into my calendar. Maybe I'm driving or otherwise occupied, so I will use my Siri voice command to give myself a reminder for later when I know that I should be around my desk or wherever so that I can address the issue then.
Along with that, I also have a budgeting app on my home page, and I am not someone who's naturally gifted with numbers or with money. And it's one of the reasons why it's even more important for me to be tracking my expenses. So my wife and I share a budget app so that we can put in our expenses whenever we eat out or buy something.
And this is really helpful for me because it brings my finances in front of me more than if I were just using a card or using Apple Pay and not seeing what I was spending every day. So when I have to manually track each transaction, it really helps me be mindful of the way I'm using my resources. And because I don't really like budgeting and money, I put the app right on my home page so that I have a habit of tapping on it more often and just making sure I'm using it.
I also have Sleep Cycle, which is an alarm app that helps wake you up gradually and I have loved and used this for a long time. I can't remember the last time I just used one of these loud annoying alarms. Sleep cycle is really helpful for me because it tracks my sleep during the night. It can record if I was making noises, like if I wasn't breathing very well, or even if I woke up with a nightmare and was making noises.
And it wakes you up gradually over a period of time that you determine based on your movements in bed. So I really love that app. I've been using it for a long time and highly recommend it. I also have notes, just the default Apple notes. Now I used to use Evernote and I've used an app called Note Master.
I've used a lot of Notes App over the years. I still have an ever note account and I have thousands of notes in my Evernote account, but I've started just using the default Apple Notes because it syncs easier across all my Apple devices and it doesn't cost any extra money. So I have a lot of folders inside of my notes to keep things like this episode.
For example, I type out everything I'm going to do on my podcast inside of my Notes app, which is really useful. I also put meeting notes, agendas, reminders, lists of goals and various other things, but I use my notes all the time, and right next to that is the Books app. I love using books, e-books. I like real books with covers and and paper pages as well.
But, you know, sometimes I can't take them with me. So I like to have an e-book that I can read. So I have my books out there so that I can just pop open a book if I'm going to sit somewhere for an extended period of time. And I'd love to be able to read. It's very relaxing for me, and it can be educational depending on what I choose to read that day.
I also have a translator app. I actually have three translator apps right now is because I'm learning a language currently, and I'm constantly curious about how you say different things in this language that I'm learning. So I keep my translator app right on the front page because there's still so many words I need to learn, and I'm constantly curious to try to figure out how this is said in another language.
And then I also have a Way of Life app, which is a habit tracking app, and I use this to just track daily habits. Now caveat here, I don't always track same day. Sometimes I'll let a few days go by and then I will catch up on the tracking of my habits. So it's not like a hardcore religious thing for me, but tracking habits is something I have been doing now for over a decade and I really find it useful for me to be conscious and aware of a few important things.
Now you can track, obviously whatever you want, and maybe I'll go into further detail in a future episode about how I use a habit tracker. But just suffice to say that I have been regularly using a habit tracker for at least a decade and I find it useful and important to. I want to make sure I'm being mindful of the way that I'm spending my days, of how I'm feeling, of what I'm putting in my body.
And the Habit Tracker allows me to do that. So what is it you have on your home page? What is the app that you use the most or the collection of apps that you use the most? I'd love to hear what it is you spend your time doing on your phone and any other comments, questions, criticisms, or random conversation you want to have with me.
You're welcome to email me at [email protected]. And until next time live like it matters.