I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to write about things like iPads with everything going on but thought I could be useful with some tips for working from home. As someone that’s been home based for a while here are a few things I try to follow

• If you have a smart watch (or set a timer) then set some stand or movement reminders. Get up from your desk every hour to have a walk around the house or a stretch
• Drink plenty of water
• Keep some easy to access and healthy snacks on hand
• Set yourself a schedule, for example work from 10-12 then break then 2-5
• It's ok to play video games or watch TV in your breaks
• Pick some exercises you can do indoors, I'm no fitness guru so you'll have to look elsewhere for what these are unfortunately
• Set up your office or work environment. Make sure you're not uncomfortable when working and get some speakers so you can listen to music
• Check in with your team via Skype or messaging

Got any tips to share with me?

Believe it or not this isn’t as straightforward as you might think if you aren’t looking beyond the end of your nose.

To turn off shuffle make sure you have the current track playing full screen as per the image on the left (see above).

Swipe down a bit and there is the shuffle button. Tap to disable shuffle.

Control Centre is really handy for getting to those settings that require a bit of drilling down quickly. I use it mainly for enabling low power mode or greyscale. Here’s how I customise it.

Head over to settings and tap control centre. From here tap customise controls. You can now add and remove items in your control centre as you see fit.

I’ve got two main tips that I use to get more battery life out of my iPhone on long day trips away from a power socket.

Low battery mode

This is a great feature even when you have a fully charged battery. Head to settings, battery and toggle on Low Power Mode.

My next tip is a bit more drastic but works wonders.

Enable display accommodations

By enable black and white mode you can stretch your iPhone battery even further.

Head over to settings, general, accessibility, display accommodations, colour filters. Turn this toggle on and use greyscale.

I’ve been using a lot of default Apple apps in a bid to simplify both my workflows and data. In this day and age it’s good to have your data in just a few places and I’m starting to delete third party apps that hold my data (more on this in a later post).

Here’s how I add lined paper to the Notes app on iOS.

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1. Open up Notes
2. Create a new note
3. Tap on the Share icon (see first image above)
4. Tap 'Lines & Grids'
5. Choose the grid pattern that you want