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What's on my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)

2019-12-11 · Tech review, setup or bag tour · Ali · recording, 22:42 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech (also: Productivity and time, Relationships and personal life) · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Sponsor segment present, His medical past, His own numbers

Junior doctor Ali tours the apps on his iPhone 11 Pro Max in a Notion-sponsored video: Drafts as short-term memory, Notion as his favourite app of the year for running his life, Todoist for menial tasks, Evernote as the long-term memory of his second brain fed by Readwise, his hospital apps, and social media kept on page two for friction.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Cold open on his dating profiles; the yearly what's-on-my-iPhone video

00:00:58 — Fantastical, Drafts and Notion: resonance calendar, idea refinery, daily highlight

  • ★★ Ali's calendar app is Fantastical, rather expensive for a calendar app; he likes it mainly for its natural language processing, which picks out an event's place and time from what he types. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali discovered the app Drafts a few months ago and has used it practically daily since: a very quick note-taking app that opens a new note as soon as you tap it. — 00:00:58 · Drafts
  • ★★ Ali keeps Drafts as a short-term memory, like a computer's RAM: any thought he needs to write down during the day, such as an idea for a podcast or a video or a little to-do list, goes into Drafts on his iPhone. — 00:01:49 · Drafts
  • ★★ Notion is probably Ali's favourite app that he discovered in 2019, and he uses it for a great many things. (hedged) — 00:02:18 · Notion
  • ★★ Any book, podcast, video or article that resonates with Ali goes into his resonance calendar in Notion, which pulls in the article with a link; recent entries are Seth Godin's piece Water Towers and Paul Graham's essay The Lesson to Unlearn. — 00:02:47 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali uses Notion as the idea refinery for his content: a large inbox of the ideas he is working on, which may become drafts and then email newsletters. — 00:03:11 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali also tracks his videos, video ideas and upcoming sponsored videos in Notion: he uses Notion to track his entire life. — 00:03:41 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali says he will make many more videos about Notion over the next few months, because he has about ten different uses for it. — 00:03:41 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali has started setting a daily highlight, a tip from the book Make Time: a single highlight to accomplish each day, since the point of productivity is doing what we actually want to do and not wasting time on the rest. — 00:04:10 · daily highlight
  • ★ Notion sponsored this video. — 00:04:39 · Notion

00:05:15 — Todoist, Castro, Audible, Evernote, Lightroom, Day One, Bear, Spotify and Discord

  • ★★ Todoist is Ali's to-do list app: he uses Notion for projects that need his attention over time and Todoist for small tasks such as calling his grandmother, watering the plants and sorting out home insurance. — 00:05:15 · Notion, Ali Abdaal's grandmother
  • ★★ Ali's Todoist holds a weekly reminder, every Sunday, to publish the weekly podcast and his email newsletter; he tries to check Todoist once a day to stay on top of menial tasks. — 00:05:45 · Not Overthinking
  • ★★ Castro is Ali's podcast player: after several years on Overcast he switched to Castro for its good library and inbox feature. — 00:05:45
  • ★★ Castro's inbox lets Ali go through new episodes of the podcasts he follows, drop the ones he does not care about and add the others to the top or bottom of his queue. — 00:06:47
  • ★★ Ali's podcast queue holds a Ben Horowitz interview, Tim Ferriss, a few episodes of Bulletproof Radio and an episode of The Alternative CV, run by a friend of his. — 00:06:47 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali's podcast queue also holds Noah Kagan and many episodes of Derek Sivers's new podcast, each only about a minute long. — 00:07:15 · Derek Sivers
  • ★★ Ali calls Audible the best source for audiobooks; he has just finished listening to Robert Jordan's The Dragon Reborn. — 00:07:15 · Audible
  • ★★ Audible shows Ali has listened to 13 days and 15 hours of audiobooks, perhaps in his life or just since he installed this phone; he listens one or two hours a day in the car on his hour's commute each way to work. (hedged) — 00:07:43 · Audible
  • ★★ Ali uses Evernote as the long-term memory of his second brain, with notebooks for the subjects he cares about. — 00:07:43 · Evernote, second brain
  • ★★ Ali says he will make more videos later on about using Evernote as the long-term memory of his second brain. — 00:07:43 · Evernote, second brain
  • ★★ Ali's rule for what goes where: something he comes across goes into Notion when it is a resonance calendar piece, and into Evernote when he is taking notes on it. — 00:08:12 · Notion, Evernote
  • ★★ Ali edits the photos for his Instagram page in Lightroom, with presets and a few other edits. — 00:09:12 · Adobe Lightroom, Instagram
  • ★★ In the journaling app Day One Ali keeps a journal of screenshots of nice comments from YouTube and Instagram, which he looks through as a pick-me-up when he feels sad. — 00:09:12 · Day One, Instagram
  • ★★ Ali used Bear a lot before he discovered Drafts and still uses it for long-form writing, such as book notes on a plane, since Notion has no offline features, or newsletter pieces; but he is phasing Bear out for Drafts and Notion together. — 00:09:52 · Drafts, Notion
  • ★★ Ali's recently started Discord server, with channels on studying, podcasts, books and productivity, is where he hangs out; it had 228 people online and, he thinks, over 3,000 members in total. (hedged) — 00:10:54

00:11:22 — Hospital apps: MedicBleep, Medirota, MicroGuide, the BNF, MDCalc, BMJ Best Practice

  • ★★ MedicBleep is the confidential messaging app of Ali's hospital: when he is on call for obstetrics he marks himself so in the app, and anyone needing the on-call obstetrics doctor messages him there. — 00:11:22
  • ★★ Medirota is the electronic rota app of Ali's hospital, which he checks to see whether he is on call. — 00:11:22
  • ★★ Antibiotic guidelines differ by hospital, Ali explains, because the bacteria in different hospitals and areas have different sensitivities to antibiotics; every hospital has its own guide, and his has it on the MicroGuide app. — 00:12:21
  • ★★ Ali uses the British National Formulary app daily to check drug doses and indications. — 00:12:50
  • ★★ Ali calls MDCalc a great app for doctors: it holds medicine's many scoring systems, such as the one for blood thinners in atrial fibrillation, whose criteria are annoying to remember. — 00:13:19
  • ★★ Ali looks up official evidence-based guidelines for many conditions on BMJ Best Practice. — 00:13:19

00:13:48 — How his home screen is organised: apps he wants to use on page one, social media on page two

  • ★★ Page one of Ali's iPhone holds the apps he actively wants himself to use, such as Drafts, Notion and Bear for writing, or that need very quick access. — 00:13:48 · Drafts, Notion
  • ★★★ Ali keeps Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on page two of his iPhone to add a slight layer of friction; he thinks he would use Instagram much more if it were on page one. — 00:14:14 · friction, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook

00:14:29 — Reader, Instapaper, Readwise, The Economist, Kindle, Spark Post, Teachable, YouTube Studio

  • ★★ Reader is Ali's RSS feed aggregator of choice for the blogs he follows. — 00:14:29
  • ★★ Ali saves articles to read later and offline in Instapaper; he used Pocket for many years but switched to Instapaper for its highlighting. — 00:15:08
  • ★★ Readwise syncs Ali's Kindle and Instapaper highlights into one Evernote note per article, so returning to a long Wait But Why article he sees only his highlights, which he calls incredibly useful. — 00:15:49 · Kindle, Evernote
  • ★★ Readwise also emails five random highlights every day, which Ali calls a good way to revisit lessons highlighted while reading. — 00:16:36
  • ★ Ali subscribed to The Economist to keep up with current affairs, read it maybe once and uninstalls it on camera. — 00:16:57
  • ★★ Ali reads on the Kindle app when he does not have his physical Kindle with him. — 00:16:57 · Kindle
  • ★★ Ali is reading A Time of Dread, which he calls the first book of John Gwynne's Blood and Bone trilogy, and calls Gwynne's earlier quartet The Faithful and the Fallen incredible. — 00:16:57
  • ★★ Kindle highlights sync through Readwise into Ali's Evernote notebook, but he tends not to highlight fiction, seeing no point in it. — 00:17:42 · Kindle, Evernote
  • ★★ Ali makes all his video thumbnails in Adobe's Spark Post, adding text and icons to an image; it gives his distinctive thumbnail style, which some call a little girly and he thinks looks quite pretty. — 00:17:42

00:18:49 — Tabs for guitar chords

  • ★★ The app Tabs gives the chords of almost any song, such as Taylor Swift's Blank Space, for Ali to play on guitar or piano and sing along, and transposes a song that is too high or low for him. — 00:18:49

00:19:22 — His Hinge, Tinder and Bumble profiles

00:20:52 — Sponsor apps, finance apps, MyFitnessPal, Superhuman and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali has lost so much money on Bitcoin that he no longer opens Coinbase: seeing how little is left depresses him. — 00:20:59
  • ★ Ali used MyFitnessPal to track calories for a while, then could not be bothered and stopped. — 00:20:59
  • ★★ Ali's email app is Superhuman: it costs $30 a month, but he calls it the fastest and best email app. — 00:21:35
  • ★★ After showing his Hinge and Tinder profiles, Ali asks viewers to critique his dating profile, because he is still single. — 00:22:06

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Drafts · Evernote · Notion

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Derek Sivers · John Gwynne · Noah Kagan · Paul Graham · Robert Jordan · Seth Godin · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Not Overthinking

Works: A Time of Dread · Alternative CV · Make Time · The Dragon Reborn · The Faithful and the Fallen · The Lesson to Unlearn · Wait But Why

Organizations: Facebook · Instagram · The Economist · Twitter

Concepts: daily highlight · friction · refinery · resonance calendar · second brain

Products: Adobe Lightroom · Adobe Spark Post · Audible · Bear · BMJ Best Practice · British National Formulary · Bumble · Castro · Coinbase · Day One · Discord · Fantastical · Hinge · Instapaper · Kindle · MDCalc · Medic Bleep · Medirota · MicroGuide · MyFitnessPal · Overcast · Pocket · Reader · Readwise · Superhuman · Tinder · Todoist

Only in the description or credits: iPhone 11 Pro Max

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