I’ve recently spent some time customizing the Action Button on my iPhone 15 Pro Max to quickly perform actions and invoke shortcuts. This hardware button was a new addition to the iPhone 15 Pro models, allowing you to invoke an action or shortcut with one long tap.
With iOS 17, you can now create a folder of shortcuts that displays as a menu when invoking the Action Button. This is how I’ve settled on using it – a single-purpose shortcut didn’t work for me, but being able to select from eight different actions I’ve set up works quite well.
The setup process is straightforward. In the Shortcuts app, create a new folder (I named mine “Action Button”). Save up to eight shortcuts you might want to invoke into that folder. Then, in Settings, configure the Action Button to show that folder of shortcuts. That’s all there is to it. When you tap the Action Button, a menu of eight shortcuts will pop up, and you can quickly make a selection.
Here are the shortcuts in my Action Button folder:
Focus Off – turns off any active Focus mode
Reading Focus – turns on my Reading Focus mode
Choose Focus – allows me to choose from a menu of Focus modes to enable
20 min Nap Time – sets a 20-minute nap timer
Scan Document – opens the Camera app to scan a document and save it as a PDF
Perplexity Search – performs a Perplexity web search
Today’s Reminders – shows my Reminders for today
Log Weight – allows me to quickly log my weight each morning in the Health app
After months of ignoring it, the Action Button has become a useful and frequently utilized tool. I’ve enjoyed customizing it with a set of handy shortcuts.
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” This infamous quote from the late Charlie Munger encapsulates the concept of inversion – a problem-solving technique that urges us to flip our perspective. Munger was inspired by the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, who famously said, “invert, always invert.”
As the team at Farnam Street explains, “It is not enough to think about difficult problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backward. Inversion often forces you to uncover hidden beliefs about the problem you are trying to solve.”
Recently, I stumbled upon an excellent article in the Financial Times by Markham Heid titled “The life-ruining power of routines.” The subtitle alone piqued my interest: “Habits don’t lead to personal optimization. They lead to suffering.” Heid’s words resonated deeply, as many of us seem increasingly trapped in the grind of daily routines, sacrificing spontaneity and joy for the illusion of productivity.
It’s been drilled into us that there are is an allure to the notion of personal optimization, meticulously tweaking our processes in pursuit of a “superior life product.” But as Heid poignantly notes, “I don’t think I have the wrong habits; I think I have too many of them. And they are suffocating me.”
In search of a remedy, Heid discovered the writings of Joseph Mortimer-Granville, an English physician from the 19th century. Mortimer-Granville’s advice struck a chord: “To restore a flagging mind (or spirit), he wrote, a person must shift from ‘aimless automatic routine to activity with a purpose and an end’.”
He continued his exploration of this issue – ultimately focusing on adding novelty back into our lives. He noted that “the more I read and the more people I spoke with, the more I began to regard novelty as a kind of existential tonic. Without it, our interest in the world withers and we turn our attention inward, where all neuroses lurk.”
Breaking free from the shackles of routine requires reconnect with aspects of ourselves that have been neglected or abandoned. Like Heid, we can try to “approach my work in new ways” and “meet friends in unfamiliar places” – small acts of rebellion against the monotony that has come to define many of our days.
Heid’s results were immediate and profound. “The colors of my world [were] brighter, the products of my mind less predictable. I feel a bit like a prisoner who jostles the door of his cell and finds it was never locked in the first place.
Inverting our perspectives allowed us to see the insidious nature of unchecked routines and the importance of embracing spontaneity and novelty. By actively seeking out experiences that challenged our habitual patterns, we can reclaim a sense of wonder and curiosity that has been dulled by the relentless pursuit of optimization and productivity.
I’m reminded of the wisdom in Munger’s and Jacobi’s words. By flipping our perspective, we can uncover hidden truths and unlock new possibilities – a invaluable lesson for anyone seeking to break free from the confines of routine and embrace a life of greater richness and fulfillment. And that’s exactly what Heid describes.
Update: I first wrote about this back in 2012. The lessons remain powerful – even in retirement! Suggest you give these techniques a try if you have the freedom to do them! With the New Year, I’ve been looking back at some of my older posts – and this was one I re-discovered with a couple of important lessons!
Back when I was a senior executive in a big company, I had an amazing executive assistant who made a big difference in how my work flowed day to day. She could read me like a book – as they say – and could tell when my frustrations started to build. She guarded my calendar carefully (back in the days before meetings could somehow just pop up on your online calendar) – but most days I was almost zombie-like moving from meeting to meeting.
One particularly frustrating day – one of back to back seemingly endless meetings – she caught me at the end of the day. She’d noticed that one hour meetings on my calendar seemed to take all that time – and that I’d often have no time in between one meeting and the next. A day of this kind of back to back meeting schedule was particularly grating on me.
She had a very simple suggestion: saying to me “Let’s change your minimum meeting time block to 90 minutes instead of an hour.”
So simple. I agreed to give it a try – and a few weeks later noticed the difference it had made in my work day. Most of the time, my meetings ended after an hour or a bit more. Her insight was that, by blocking 90 minutes on my calendar, I’d actually have a bit of “recovery time” in between meetings. It was sorta magical – I had “think time” during the day – a time to reflect, recover and prepare.
Sometimes these simple things make a big difference – in your personal productivity and, perhaps more importantly, how you feel about your work – and, ultimately, your life.
Back when I was still working, I decided that I wanted to try to apply a similar idea to my work week. I’m fortunate – being no longer hostage to back to back meetings in a corporate setting – and I usually had quite a bit of flexibility in terms of balancing meetings, calls with clients and prospects, actually working, doing email, etc. But I always noticed the toll that interruptions and, importantly, the context switches that come with them actually took on my ability to focus and get things done.
So, I began to block each Friday as a day when I would not schedule meetings, conference calls, etc. I’d just try to protect each Friday as a day for me to get my work done. Obviously, I can’t guarantee being able to do so – clients sometimes want to schedule meetings on Fridays, important internal work requires Friday work sessions, etc. And, of course, there’s always email, Twitter, etc. But I was surprisingly successful in protecting many Fridays – so that I could focus on the work at hand. I’ve come to think of Fridays as my “crank day” – that’s about cranking on work, not being cranky! And avoiding those externally-imposed context switches which seem to add such a burden and create a hit to productivity. Flow – it’s all about creating a zone where you can focus.
It’s proven to be a very useful personal productivity technique for me. If you’re in a situation when you can apply it, give this simple idea a try!
Would love to hear if it makes a difference for you!
Back when I was a senior executive in a big company, I had an amazing executive assistant who made a big difference in how my work flowed day to day. She could read me like a book – as they say – and could tell when my frustrations started to build. She guarded my calendar carefully (back in the days before meetings could somehow just pop up on your online calendar) – but most days I was almost zombie-like moving from meeting to meeting.
One particularly frustrating day – one of back to back seemingly endless meetings – she caught me at the end of the day. She’d noticed that one hour meetings on my calendar seemed to take all that time – and that I’d often have no time in between one meeting and the next. A day of this kind of back to back meeting schedule was particularly grating on me.
She had a very simple suggestion: saying to me “Let’s change your minimum meeting time block to 90 minutes instead of an hour.”
So simple. I agreed to give it a try – and a few weeks later noticed the difference it had made in my work day. Most of the time, my meetings ended after an hour or a bit more. Her insight was that, by blocking 90 minutes on my calendar, I’d actually have a bit of “recovery time” in between meetings. It was sorta magical – I had “think time” during the day – a time to reflect, recover and prepare.
Sometimes these simple things make a big difference – in your personal productivity and, perhaps more importantly, how you feel about your work – and, ultimately, your life.
Earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to try to apply a similar idea to my work week. I’m fortunate – being no longer hostage to back to back meetings in a corporate setting – and I usually having quite a bit of flexibility in terms of balancing meetings, calls with clients and prospects, actually working, doing email, etc. But I’ve always noticed the toll that interruptions and, importantly, the context switches they bring actually take on my ability to focus and get things done.
So, I began to block each Friday as a day when I would not schedule meetings, conference calls, etc. I’d just try to protect each Friday as a day for me to get my work done. Obviously, I can’t guarantee being able to do so – clients sometimes want to schedule meetings on Fridays, important internal work requires Friday work sessions, etc. And, of course, there’s always email, Twitter, etc. But I’ve been surprisingly successful in protecting many Fridays in 2012 – so that I could focus on the work at hand. I’ve come to think of Fridays as my “crank day” – cranking on work, not being cranky! And avoiding those externally-imposed context switches which seem to add such a burden and create a hit to productivity. Flow – it’s all about creating a zone where you can focus.
It’s proven to be a very useful personal productivity technique for me – and it’s one of my lessons from 2012 – relearned and reapplied from earlier experience. If you’re in a situation when you can apply it, give this simple idea a try in 2013! Would love to hear if it makes a difference for you!
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