Post

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

Jun 8 • 10 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

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I hadn't been able to focus for more than 10 minutes in 6 months.

Coffee. Cold showers. Focus playlists. "Dopamine detox" weekends. Nothing worked.

A friend pushed me to see a cognitive performance specialist. I expected ADHD screening, brain scans, maybe a referral for medication.

He didn't even ask me about my symptoms.

He looked at my iPhone and said:

"There are 4 settings turned ON right now destroying your attention span. 8 out of 10 patients I see have the same 4 toggles."

Me: "So my phone is the thing breaking my brain?"

He didn't answer.

Here's everything he showed me in the next 12 minutes (save this, your focus depends on it): 🧵

The first setting he pointed at: Notification Previews.

Every notification on my lock screen showed the full preview of the message.

He explained why that matters:

"Every preview is a micro-decision. Should I respond? Is this urgent? Who sent it? Your brain processes each one whether you act on it or not. By the end of the day, you've made 400+ involuntary decisions before you've made a single intentional one. Your prefrontal cortex is exhausted before lunch."

The fix:

Settings → Notifications → Show Previews → Never (or "When Unlocked" if you absolutely need them)

This single change does more for focus recovery than any productivity app ever built.

I changed it on the spot. Within 3 days, I noticed I was checking my phone significantly less because there was nothing to "preview" anymore.

The second setting: Badge App Icons on every social app.

The little red numbers on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, WhatsApp.

He said they were the single most addictive piece of UI design in modern technology.

"Red badges trigger the same neural pathways as physical danger signals. Your brain treats every notification badge as a threat that needs resolution. The compulsion to clear them isn't laziness, it's hardwired. You're fighting evolutionary biology with willpower. You'll lose every time."

The fix:

Settings → Notifications → tap each social media app → Badges → Off

Do this for: Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat, Threads, Reddit, every messaging app you don't need real-time updates from.

He recommended I leave Badges on for: Phone, Messages, Calendar. Nothing else.

The first day was uncomfortable. The second day, I forgot Instagram existed for 6 hours straight.

The third setting: Auto-Play in every app.

This was the one I didn't expect.

He opened Instagram, X, and YouTube on my phone and pointed at the same problem in each:

1. Videos auto-play in Reels and Stories
2. X auto-plays videos in the feed
3. YouTube auto-plays the next video when one ends

"Auto-play hijacks the moment of decision. Your brain never gets to choose whether to keep watching. The platform decides for you. Every auto-played video is a decision you didn't make and decision fatigue is the #1 cause of attention collapse."

The fix:

1. Instagram → Settings → Accessibility, display, and languages → Reduce video auto-play
2. X → Settings → Accessibility, display, and languages → Data usage → Auto-play videos → Never
3. YouTube → Settings → Autoplay → Off
4. TikTok → Settings → Screen time → set hard limits

For iPhone-wide control:

Settings → Accessibility → Motion → Auto-Play Video Previews → Off

This was the change with the biggest immediate impact. Within a week, my "5-minute Instagram check" stopped becoming 40-minute scroll sessions.

The fourth setting, the most invisible: Background App Refresh.

He scrolled to General → Background App Refresh.

I had 67 apps with background refresh enabled.

He explained the connection to focus:

"Every app refreshing in the background is generating something new for you to notice a notification, a badge update, a recommendation, a piece of content the algorithm just finished generating for you. Your phone is a constant generator of small dopamine triggers, even when you're not looking at it. Your brain knows. It's waiting."

The fix:

Settings → General → Background App Refresh → either turn it off entirely or limit to Wi-Fi only

Then disable it for individual apps that don't need it: every social media app, every shopping app, every game, every news app.

Keep it on only for: Mail, Messages, Calendar, banking apps you trust.

I disabled it for 54 of my 67 apps. The phone immediately felt less "alive" and that was the point.

Then he opened Focus Modes.

He looked at my settings and said: "You have one Focus mode set up, Do Not Disturb. And you never use it. You're not alone. Most people set it up once and forget it exists."

He walked me through his protocol:

1. Work Focus(9 AM - 12 PM and 2 PM - 5 PM): Allows only calls from family, blocks every other notification
2. Deep Work Focus (one 90-minute block per day): Blocks everything except emergency contacts
3. Personal Focus (after 6 PM): Blocks work apps entirely
4. Sleep Focus (9 PM - 7 AM): Blocks everything except calls from a short list of people

"Focus modes are the most underused feature on iPhone. Apple built them specifically for attention protection. Almost nobody uses them. The few who do reclaim hours of cognitive bandwidth per day."

The fix:

Settings → Focus → create modes that match your actual schedule

Set them to automatically activate based on time, location, or app usage.

I built three Focus modes that day. Within 10 days, my screen time dropped 38%.

The sixth fix: Screen Time limits but used differently than most people use them.

He said most people use Screen Time wrong.

They set vague limits like "1 hour of social media per day" and ignore the popup when it appears.

His approach was different:

1.App Limits set to 15 minutes total per day for the worst offenders (Instagram, TikTok, X)
2. Communication Limits set to allow only specific contacts during work hours
3. Always Allowed restricted to just Phone, Messages (with select contacts), Maps
4. Downtime scheduled for 9 PM - 7 AM every day, automatically locking distracting apps

The point isn't to never use these apps. It's to make using them require a deliberate decision a small friction that breaks the automatic pickup-and-scroll habit.

The fix:

Settings → Screen Time → set up aggressive limits, especially for social apps

He recommended I set the passcode for Screen Time to a long random number my partner would hold, so I couldn't disable it impulsively.

I haven't disabled it once in 4 weeks.

The seventh fix: Display & Brightness settings calibrated for focus.

This was the one I hadn't connected to attention before.

He walked through my display settings:

1. True Tone: ON (constantly adjusts color temperature to match ambient light — which subtly stimulates the brain)
2. Auto-Brightness: ON (same effect, slightly different)
3. Color Filters: OFF (he recommended enabling Grayscale during deep work)

His framing: "The reason your phone is colorful is the same reason casinos are colorful — to keep your attention. Every saturated color, every animation, every motion effect costs you focus. Most of these are unnecessary for actually using the phone."

The fix:

Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters → Grayscale (assign to Accessibility Shortcut)

Now I can triple-click the side button during deep work and the phone becomes black-and-white instantly. The dopamine appeal of opening Instagram drops to near-zero when the feed has no color.

This single change reduced my Instagram time by 60%.

The eighth fix: Where the phone lives during work.

The specialist asked one final question:

"Where is your phone when you're trying to focus?"

I said: on my desk, screen down, but within reach.

He shook his head.

"That's the worst possible setup. Your brain still knows it's there. Studies from UT Austin show that the mere presence of a smartphone in your line of sight reduces cognitive capacity by 10-20% even if the phone is face-down, silent, and turned off."

The fix isn't a setting. It's a habit:

1. During deep work, put the phone in a different room
2. During meals, put it in a drawer
3. During sleep, charge it outside the bedroom
4. Use an Apple Watch for essential notifications if you need to be reachable

The first week was uncomfortable. The second week, I noticed something I hadn't felt in years, long stretches of uninterrupted thinking.

Not "focus." Actual cognitive depth.

The uncomfortable truth:

I went to a cognitive performance specialist expecting to learn about my brain.

What I actually learned was about my phone.

Every default setting on a modern smartphone is calibrated for one thing: maximum engagement.

Notification previews. Badge icons. Auto-play. Background refresh. Color saturation. Constant availability.

None of these settings are accidents. They're the result of thousands of A/B tests run by attention engineers whose job is to make the phone harder to put down.

The fixes above take 15 minutes total.

They cost nothing.

They restore the cognitive bandwidth I'd lost over years of "just checking my phone real quick."

The specialist's final words as I left his office:

"You don't have an attention problem. You have a phone problem. The phone is winning. It will keep winning until you change the defaults that were designed to make it win."

I didn't need ADHD medication.

I needed to know that my iPhone was running a focus-destruction system I'd never opted into.

Save this. Try these 8 changes for 14 days.

Then tell me what your attention span actually looks like when your phone stops fighting you for it.

• • •

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More from @iam_elias1

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

Jun 7

Her iPad battery dropped to 78% in 18 months even though she barely uses it.

For context: a healthy iPad of that age should be at 90%+.

A few hours a week. Some reading. The occasional Netflix episode. She'd been "careful" with the device since the day she bought it.

She took it to the Apple Store expecting them to find a defect.

The Genius Bar technician didn't seem surprised at all.

"I see this every week. iPads degrade faster than iPhones and Apple has never publicly explained why. There are 8 specific things that quietly destroy iPad batteries. Most of them feel like the right things to do."

He opened her settings and walked her through every one.

Here's what she learned. 🧵

The first thing she learned: iPads die from being left alone.

This was the part that hurt the most.

She had treated her iPad carefully. She didn't drain it to 1%. She didn't blast fast chargers through it. She used it twice a week, then left it on her nightstand.

That was the problem.

The technician explained:

"Lithium batteries hate being idle at high or low charge states. When you leave an iPad sitting at 100% for weeks, the battery chemistry slowly degrades. When you leave it at 0% for weeks, it degrades even faster. The 'safe' state is around 50%."

iPads sit unused more than any other Apple device. That's exactly why they degrade faster.

The fix:

1. If you're not using your iPad for a week or more, charge it to **50%** before putting it away
2. Don't store it at 100%. Don't store it at 0%.
3. Check on it every 4-6 weeks and top it up to 50% again

She had been storing her iPad fully charged "so it would be ready when she needed it."

That habit was killing the battery.

The second cause: She kept it plugged in 24/7 when she did use it.

Many iPad owners especially those who use the device on a kitchen counter, nightstand, or kids' room, leave it plugged in permanently.

The screen stays on at full brightness. The battery sits at 100% for hours. Heat accumulates.

This is the worst possible long-term state for any lithium battery and iPads experience it more than iPhones because they tend to live in fixed locations.

The fix:

Settings → Battery → Battery Health & Charging → Optimized Battery Charging → ON

If your iPad is one of the newer models that supports it: 80% Charge Limit → ON

Then change the habit:

1. Unplug the iPad when it reaches 80-90%
2. Don't leave it plugged in overnight if it's already full
3. Use it on battery for normal sessions, charge only when needed

The technician's framing: "The iPad is engineered to be portable. The moment you treat it like a permanently-mounted screen, you're treating the battery in a way the chemistry can't survive long-term."

Read 11 tweets

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

Jun 5

Your laptop takes a screenshot every 60 seconds.

Not a feature you enabled. Not a setting you agreed to.

Microsoft built it. Microsoft turned it on. Microsoft is rolling it out to more laptops every month.

It's called ''Recall'' and it's been quietly capturing everything on millions of Windows screens since 2024. 🧵

Microsoft Recall captures everything on your screen, every 60 seconds.

Not metadata. Not summaries. Full screenshots.

Every email you read. Every banking session. Every password manager autofill. Every private message. Every medical record you reviewed. Every encrypted chat that's only "encrypted" until it appears on your screen.

All of it captured, by default, every minute the device is on.

The screenshots are stored in a local database Microsoft calls "snapshots."

The original implementation stored them in plain, unencrypted form on the laptop's hard drive sitting in a folder any other user account, malware, or person with physical access could read.

This wasn't a bug.

This was the design.

When the world found out, the backlash was historic.

In May 2024, Microsoft announced Recall as the headline feature of its new "Copilot+ PC" line.

Security researchers tested it within hours of launch.

What they found was worse than anyone expected:

1. ''No encryption'' on the snapshot database
2. ''No authentication'' required to access it
3. Plain-text storage of passwords, credit card numbers, and private messages captured from on-screen content
4. ''No filtering'' that actually worked passwords typed into "secure" fields still appeared in screenshots

One researcher, Kevin Beaumont, demonstrated that he could **extract 50,000 screenshots from a Copilot+ PC in under 4 minutes** using a tool he built called "TotalRecall."

The story dominated tech news for weeks. Microsoft delayed the launch. Recall was paused.

Most users assumed that was the end of it.

It wasn't.

Read 12 tweets

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

Jun 4

10 free GitHub repos that people shouldn't miss.

Each one replaces something you are currently paying for.

Save this thread. You will come back to it.

🧵 Thread:

1. Ollama · 165,000 Stars

ChatGPT costs $20 a month.

Ollama runs 100+ AI models on your own laptop for free.

Llama 4. DeepSeek R1. Gemma 3. Mistral. Qwen3.

Three commands to install. Runs completely offline. Zero data sent to anyone.

github.com/ollama/ollama

2. Open WebUI · 124,000 Stars

Ollama gives you the models.

Open WebUI gives you the ChatGPT interface to go with them.

A polished, self-hosted web UI that connects to any local or cloud AI model. Voice calls. RAG built in. Image generation. No subscription. No account. Your data stays on your machine.

282 million downloads.

github.com/open-webui/ope…

Read 12 tweets

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

May 30

Her Apple Watch battery dropped to 78% after just one year.

She wore it daily. She charged it overnight. She used it like every other Apple Watch owner she knew.

Yet her battery had degraded faster in 12 months than her iPhone had in 3 years.

She took it to the Genius Bar, expecting them to confirm it was defective.

The technician ran every diagnostic.

"Your watch isn't broken. It's just been running 24 hours a day doing things it doesn't need to do. There are 4 default settings on every Apple Watch that hammer the battery overnight. Apple knows. They've known since the first Series 1 launched. They don't change the defaults."

She asked why.

He gave the same answer Apple Store employees have learned to give silence.

Then he opened the Watch app on her iPhone and walked her through everything.

Here's what he showed her. 🧵

The first culprit: "Always On Display."

This is the single biggest battery killer on any modern Apple Watch.

The Always On feature keeps the screen dimly lit 24/7 instead of turning off when your wrist drops. It looks beautiful. It's also one of the most aggressive battery drains Apple has ever shipped.

The technician put it plainly:

"Most Apple Watch owners think their battery is degrading. It's not. It's being used twice as much as it needs to be. The screen is on all day, even when the watch is just sitting on your wrist while you're working."

The fix:

Open the Watch app on iPhone → My Watch → Display & Brightness → Always On → Off

Or do it directly on the watch:

Settings → Display & Brightness → Always On → Off

Battery life on most watches jumps 30-50% the same day. The screen now turns off when you drop your wrist, exactly the way Apple Watches worked for the first 7 years they existed.

You lose nothing functional. You gain hours of battery life and years of battery health.

The second culprit: "Wake Screen on Wrist Raise."

This setting sounds harmless. It isn't.

Every time your wrist moves when you're walking, typing, brushing your teeth, gesturing during a conversation, your Apple Watch wakes the screen.

For most users, that's hundreds of unnecessary screen activations per day. Every one of them costs battery and contributes to wear.

Then there's the bigger problem: the watch also activates during sleep. Every time you roll over, every time your arm shifts under the covers, the screen lights up.

That's why your battery drains overnight even when you're not using the watch.

The fix:

Watch app on iPhone → My Watch → Display & Brightness → Wake Screen → adjust to "Tap to Wake Only"

Or on the watch directly:

Settings → Display & Brightness → Wake on Wrist Raise → Off

The watch now only turns on when you tap it or press the side button. Your battery stops being drained by hundreds of accidental wake cycles per day.

Read 10 tweets

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

May 29

His internet has been slow for 6 months. So, he paid Comcast to upgrade his tier.

Speeds got worse.

He called Comcast again. They blamed his router. He bought a new one. Still slow.

He called a third time. They sent a technician out. The tech ran a speed test from inside the modem and said:"Speeds are fine on our end. Must be your devices."

A neighbor who works in IT came over the next weekend with his laptop.

He looked at the router for two minutes, opened the admin panel, and pointed at four settings on the screen.

"Comcast pushed a firmware update last year. They enabled all four of these silently. This is why your internet is slow. This is why every Comcast customer's internet got slower around the same time."

Here's exactly what he found and turned off. 🧵

The first setting: "Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspot."

He didn't even know it existed.

Every Comcast-issued router by default broadcasts a ''second public Wi-Fi network'' called "xfinitywifi" meant for any nearby Comcast subscriber to connect to.

That sounds friendly. It isn't.

That second network uses ''your home's bandwidth.'' Your router's processing power. Your electricity bill. To provide free Wi-Fi to strangers walking by your house.

Comcast turned it on for every customer without explicit consent.

The neighbor showed him the fix:

1. Log into your Xfinity account at xfinity. com
2. Go to Services → Internet → Manage Internet → Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspot Network
3. Toggle it OFF

It took 30 seconds. The router immediately freed up bandwidth that had been routing through it for strangers for months.

The second setting: "Automatic Channel Selection."

The router was set to "Auto" for both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi channels.

Sounds smart. In practice, it's the worst default in modern networking.

Here's why: in any apartment complex or dense neighborhood, dozens of routers all set to "Auto" end up fighting for the same handful of channels.

The neighbor pulled out a Wi-Fi analyzer app on his phone and showed him the problem: 14 other routers in range, all crammed onto channels 1, 6, and 11.

The fix:

1. Log into the router (usually 10.0.0.1 for Comcast)
2. Wireless Settings → Channel → manually set to a less-crowded channel (use a Wi-Fi analyzer to find one)
3. For 5 GHz, set to channel 36, 40, 44, or 149

He set it to channel 161 on 5 GHz. Speeds doubled instantly.

Read 9 tweets

Elias Al

@iam_elias1

May 28

A man saw his phone storage was ''full'' after 18 months but he barely had any photos.

He had deleted apps. Cleared messages. Removed downloads. The warning kept coming back every two weeks:

"Storage Almost Full.''

He went to the Apple Store ready to buy a new iPhone.

The employee at the Genius Bar held up a hand: *"Before you spend a thousand dollars, let me show you something."*

She opened Settings → General → iPhone Storage and shook her head.

"There are 7 things eating your storage right now. Apple ships every iPhone with all of them turned on. Nobody tells you they exist. Let's go through them."

Here's what she showed him in the next 8 minutes. 🧵

The first thing she pointed at: "System Data."

His System Data alone was using 24 GB.

He had no idea what System Data even was. Most iPhone users don't.

She explained: it's a catch-all category Apple uses for cached files, logs, temporary downloads, Safari residue, leftover update files, and dozens of other invisible things that accumulate over time.

Apple gives you no way to directly view or manage what's inside it.

The fix isn't perfect, but it works:

1. Restart the phone (clears short-term caches)
2. Settings → Safari → Clear History and Website Data
3. Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Offload unused apps
4. In extreme cases: back up and restore the phone (this nukes most of it)

He restarted the phone first. System Data dropped from 24 GB to 14 GB instantly.

10 GB recovered in 30 seconds.

Then she opened the Messages section. His jaw dropped.

Messages was using 18 GB.

He thought he had deleted his old conversations. He hadn't.

Here's what Apple doesn't make obvious: every photo, video, GIF, and audio message ever sent to you over iMessage is stored on your device forever — unless you explicitly tell it not to.

That funny meme your friend sent in 2019? Still on your phone. Every group chat photo from 5 years ago? Still there.

She walked him through the fix:

1. Settings → Messages → Keep Messages → change from "Forever" to 30 Days or 1 Year
2. Settings → General → iPhone Storage → Messages → Review Large Attachments → delete what you don't need

He went from 18 GB to 3 GB in Messages alone.

15 more gigabytes back.

Read 10 tweets

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