2 min to read
MediTEAte
🍵 It's called the present because it's a gift.
The iPhone has a native app named shortcuts which is a heavily slept on feature. It can automate certain features depending on what you program. For example, I have an automation for when my wake-up alarm is stopped every week day. When I stop my wake-up alarm, my iPhone performs text-to-speech of a Marcus Aurelius passage from Meditations that serves as a guiding reminder for the start of my day. I’ve read that other people use and scan NFC tags to run shortcuts for different household responsibilities. To give you a better understanding of what shortcuts are used for, below are a few shortcuts that I use/used:
- Leave when?: lets me know when I should leave a place in order to get somewhere at a given time.
- CamelCamel Price History: takes the URL of an Amazon item listing, and shows a line chart of the price history for that item - so you can see if you’re actually getting a deal
- Bypass Paywall: different news journals (like the NYT and WSJ I think) had paywalls for their articles. However, if the webpages for those articles were opened through links directed from Facebook, then the article wasn’t paywalled. So, this shortcut prepended all articles with
http://facebook.com/I.php?u={article_URL}to ‘trick’ the journal website to think I was being directed from Facebook. This practice may be outdated and no longer work.
The particular shortcut that I want to showcase is MediTEAte. I have this shortcut as a widget on my home screen. When I tap it, it automatically opens up a one-time payment application named Forest, which is a fun pomodoro timer app (and you can even plant real trees using coins that you earn through pomodoro time). Then, you select if you want ambiance or no ambiance which essentially turns on ‘Background Sounds’ on the iPhone. In accessibility settings, the iPhone has natively installed background sounds like rainfall and stream that you can listen to. Then, the user selects how long they want to MediTEAte for. Once the time is selected, an alarm is set for the time and the phone is on do not disturb for the duration of that alarm.
You can get the MediTEAte shortcut here.
I use MediTEAte when I want to be more presently focused and not entrapped in some distraction. I also pair it with Wim Hof/Tummo breathing. It’s a good practice to adopt for practicing grounding and focus for the present moment.
