Saturday, May 16, 2026
SUMMARY BY CHATGPT
In Episode 1120 of the podcast Screw the Commute, Tom Antion shares several practical smartphone tips, mostly focused on iPhone users, while noting Android users can usually accomplish the same things with different steps.
Main Phone Tips Covered
1. Prevent “Do Not Disturb” Overrides
Tom explains why text messages can still come through even when Focus or Do Not Disturb mode is enabled. By default, iPhones notify senders that notifications are silenced and allow them to “notify anyway.”
Fix:
• Go to Settings ? Focus
• Turn off Share Focus Status
This prevents people from bypassing your silence settings.
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2. Quickly Find Unread Text Messages
A simple shortcut many users overlook:
• Open the Messages app
• Tap the hamburger/menu icon
• Select Unread
This filters messages to show only unread texts.
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3. View Photos by Location on a Map
Tom describes how to locate travel photos without scrolling endlessly through thousands of images.
Steps:
• Open the Photos app
• Tap Collections
• Select Utilities
• Choose Map
The iPhone displays photos grouped geographically, making it easy to find pictures from trips such as Italy, Vancouver, or California.
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4. Use QR Codes That Appear on Your Own Phone
Tom discusses a common frustration: scanning a QR code that is already displayed on your phone screen.
Solution:
1. Take a screenshot of the QR code
2. Save it to Photos
3. Open the image in the Photos app
4. Press and hold on the QR code
A menu should appear allowing you to open the associated link. If it doesn’t:
• Use the Live Text feature first
• Then press and hold the QR code again
He also cautions listeners to be careful with QR codes from untrusted sources because they can be used maliciously.
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Additional Themes
Throughout the episode, Tom:
• Encourages listeners to continually learn hidden smartphone features
• Promotes his automation and internet marketing resources
• Discusses his mentoring program and online school
• Emphasizes how quickly internet marketing and technology change, requiring constant curriculum updates
Overall Message
The episode focuses on small but highly practical smartphone productivity tricks that save time and reduce frustration in everyday business and personal use. Tom’s broader point is that people spend so much time on their phones that learning even a few advanced features can significantly improve efficiency.
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Episode 1120 – Phone Tips
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1120 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about some more phone tips. I've probably done 20 episodes on phone tips. I mean, you're on your phone all day long. You ought to use some of the things. I don't know one person on earth that can use all the features of these cell phones, either iPhone or Android. Now you Android folks, I don't have an Android, so my tips are usually iPhone, but the same tip can probably be done on Android. Maybe if I just give you the idea and then you Google on how to do it on Android, how about that? All right. So this is episode 1120. Hope you didn't miss episode 1119. That was small, immediate corrections. This came from my flying days so that I didn't get off course. And there's all kinds of things that will help you in business if you get this handle a handle on small, immediate corrections. All right, pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Free version 3.0 is the latest. However, in version 3.0 until I come out with 4.0, I talk about short keys, which I just love, but it's now no longer a program. It's a browser extension. So if you see me talking about short keys, it's now a browser extension. Go look at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. If you'd like one on one help from me and my staff to help you with, you know, I've been doing this 32.5 years now, okay? And I just love it. I could have quit 20 years ago, but I just love this internet stuff. So greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and IMTCVA.org is my school. It's the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it's certified to operate by Chevron. All right. So let's talk about some phone tips here. So don't you hate it if you turn on your do Not disturb and you get a text anyway? Well, why does this happen? Well, when you turn on the focus part of an iPhone, the other person that was trying to text you gets a message that says, hey, your things are silenced, but they get an option to click a button and send their text anyway. Okay, I don't know how that is silencing things. So what you got to do is you go into your settings and then focus and then turn off share status. So even if you are focused and you don't want text this and that and the other, or while you're sleeping or whatever it is, the other person doesn't get notice of it. So there's no button for them to click to force their message through. See? So that's how you, that's how you get rid of that. Go back and listen to this again if you want to figure out how to do that.
[00:03:35] Okay. Another. This one's really, really easy. But I didn't know about it until I was researching this stuff. How to find unread texts. Well, you click on your message app and then there's this hamburger icon. Hamburger icons are like three little horizontal lines of one big one middle one small, like the three bears. All right, Papa bear, pop a line, a line and baby line. All right, you click on that and then you just click. It gives you a menu of other things, but you can just click on unread and it'll pick up all your unread texts. So that's a very easy one. Now here's a very interesting one. This is how you see a map of your photos, like where they were taken. Let's say you travel a lot and you say, oh, gee, I, I want to show you this picture from Italy or something. And, and you got to scroll through 9000 pictures to find it, right? What you do is you go to photos, your photo app and then not the one, your camera thing, your photo app, and then click on collections. And there's a whole bunch of options under collections that might interest you, but what you can click on is called utilities. So you click on utilities and then you click on map and it shows you okay. In Italy you took 14 pictures and you just clicked that Italy icon and boom, there they all come up. Okay. Or if you were in California. So it shows you a map of all the places you've taken pictures and, and it grabs them all in one place.
[00:05:27] So if you had a trip to Vancouver, click on Vancouver. There's all the pictures from Vancouver. So that's how to make a map of your photos. Very interesting. Now this last one, this drove me crazy. You know, I do a lot on my cell phone like we all do nowadays. And I would get something with a QR code. Now you got to be careful with QR codes to make sure that it's a reputable place, because a lot of bad stuff has been done with QR codes, so make sure it's reputable. But if it came to my cell phone, I was like, how in the heck am I supposed to hold my camera up to my own cell phone? All right, which is how you did it in the in the way early days of QR codes, there was an app that that you had to do. And then nowadays you don't need an app because if it's something where you're shooting using your camera as the QR code reader, you know, on a sign or a billboard or a, or a flyer or something, no problem. But when the thing comes to your cell phone, that was that was driving me crazy. So here's how you you do that. The first thing you do is you take a screen capture of the QR code. Now, if you don't know how to do that on an iPhone, you you tap or you squeeze the, the up volume button and the on off button simultaneously.
[00:07:06] And you'll hear it like a camera, like the camera snapping off. And then if you're happy with that screenshot, you click a check mark up in the top right and it saves it to your photos. All right? Then you open your photo app and you hold your finger on the QR code, and you should get a menu. Now, I'm going to tell you, if you don't get a menu, what to do, but you should get a menu that's like open. Copy link. You know, that kind of stuff. Open in a new window. Open in an incognito window. I mean, you got various options there, but but if you don't get the menu, you may have to open the photo or, you know, have the photo open and click the live text icon. If you don't know what that looks like, just, uh, just Google that. All right. And then after you tap the live text icon, you go back and, uh, I think you have to hold your, you know, when I was doing it, I had to hold my finger on the QR code, not just tap it. And then it would go to the open up the place it was supposed to see. So, so that problem is now fixed for me and hopefully you too, because there's more and more QR codes going on. I have several episodes on QR codes, all the cool things you can do with them. So. So there's some more phone tips for you if you like. Help one on one, help with this and the other gazillion things to be successful on an internet and digital marketing business, let me know.
[00:08:44] Check out greatInternetMarketingtraining.com or my school at IMTCVA.org, and it's certified to operate by SCHEV, which is the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. And if you're in my mentor program, you get a scholarship to the school, which you can either use yourself or gift to somebody. I had one guy join the mentor program, gift the scholarship to his daughter. His daughter, before she graduated was making $6,000 a month. Okay, now I can't claim everybody does this for sure. But and then she has a big marketing agency now all stimulated from this school, see. So, very powerful stuff. And it's changing all the time. We change our curriculum. I mean, there's, you know, days where we have one thing one day and we have to change the curriculum the next day because of how fast things change on the internet. And no other schools do this. I mean, you're lucky if, uh, if they change them per semester or per year on this kind of stuff. And most of them, I can't think of any of them that are run by a multimillionaire, I'll tell you that. So they made the money doing this, by the way. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. The school is IMTCVA.org and the mentor program is greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. And I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.