What’s your address? How do I get to your office? Where is parking near your house? These are all common questions one might find themselves answering or typing over and over again. It’s not only frustrating, but just plain annoying, since it is the epitome of wasted time. Here are the steps for setting up autotext or text replacement on your iPhone. The whole thing can be set up in less than a minute:

• Settings
• General
• Keyboard
• Text Replacement
• Tap + in the upper right
• Phrase: Expanded long text that will be entered.
  • Ex. “Our office is on 123 Main St next to the pizza place. Park in the back, but don’t use the three spots that say ‘Parking for Dr. Smith.’ He tows cars.”
• Shortcut: Short snippet of text you’ll actually type out.
  • Ex. “ofcdir” (short for “office directions”)
• Tap Save

This is a great time saver and pays for itself over and over again. Because this is based on the keyboard software, it can be used anywhere in iOS from text massages to email and other apps on the phone. (Note: I lost my text replacements when I upgraded iOS firmware. It might make sense to text yourself the replacements before upgrading.)                                   Bonus tips: (1) Voice-to-text. When you want to send a text, just tap the microphone icon next to the spacebar in your keypad. Talk into the phone and it’ll automatically convert your voice to text. Way faster than typing long messages by hand. If it makes you feel self-conscious, keep in mind it’s not that different from just talking on the phone. (2) iPhone/Mac integration. If you’re an Apple junkie, you can text right from the Messages app on your computer. You can probably type faster than you can thumb-text, so if you’re at your desk anyways it’s the way to go. Only works iPhone (or Mac) to iPhone (no Android), but it does sync the conversation between your computer and phone.