One Secret New Feature on iOS 14 that will make you a Productivity Beast

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I used to have a Blackberry KeyOne. It was by no measure the fastest performing smartphone, but it had some nice features which cannot be found on most flagship smartphones. Like the 2-day battery life and physical keyboard. Another, under-appreciated and extremely useful feature of the KeyOne was the programmable “convenience” key on the side of the phone. With this button, you could have it quickly open any application (like your messaging app, email inbox, or to-do list).

The KeyOne’s convenience key

For a long time, such a feature was not available to other smartphones like iPhones and Samsung phones. The iPhone’s side button can be used to launch Siri and Apple pay and many Samsung phones have a button to launch Bixby (Samsung’s version of Siri/Google Assitant). Unfortunately, these buttons cannot be reprogrammed to launch other applications.

Left: iPhone’s side button to launch Siri Right: Samsung’s Bixby button

There is still not any simple ways to reprogram these buttons (There are some nefarious ways to reprogram the Bixby button), however, there is another quick and easy way to launch any application (or Shortcut) on iPhone.

Within Settings>Accessibility>Touch>Back Tap, you will find an option to set up “Double- or triple-tap the back of your iPhone to perform actions quickly.” This new feature was rolled out with Apple’s latest update of iOS.

If you have ever read David Allen’s seminal GTD then you understand the importance of being able to quickly transfer thoughts from your head into some note-taking system or to-do list. Developing the habit of quickly capturing your thoughts into a system does two things:

• It prevents you from forgetting the thought you had
• It frees up your “mental RAM”

How to set up Back Tap to quickly add tasks to your To-do list: Within the iOS Shortcuts app, you need to create a workflow to open the To-do list application of your choice ( Reminders, Things, Omnifocus, Todoist etc.)

• Open up the Shortcuts app and click the “+” in the top right corner to create a new Shortcut

• Click the Add Action button
• Use the search bar to find your to-do list app (In this example, I am using TickTick)

• Now, you should be presented with a list of different actions specific to the application you chose in the previous (here, I chose Add Task).
• Click on “Task” and select “Ask Each Time”

• Click Next in the top right, give your action a name and click Done
• Finally, go to Settings>Accessibility>Touch>Back Tap and select double tap (here, you could also choose triple tap if you’d prefer) and find the Shortcut that you just made in the list.

Now, each time that you double-tap the back of your phone you will be able quickly to jot down your thoughts and tasks. It can even run when your phone is locked. It should look like this.

Using this shortcut will save you a few a clicks (and a couple of seconds) each time you add a new item to your to-do list. More importantly, it will help you get back to whatever you were working on without getting distracted by your phone.