Yesterday I tackled a nagging “to do” item, which I hadn’t even really realized I wanted/ needed to do until suddenly it was driving me absolutely insane.
That task was organizing my iphone apps.
I am one of those people that generally ignores the aesthetics of my phone. I do set a personalized wallpaper/ lock screen, but that’s about it.
Also, (and I think I’ve written about this before), I somehow usually just “don’t see” those little notification bubbles. You know, the ones telling me I have 4 spam voicemails or need to upgrade my software or have 86 new emails. I don’t have pop up notifications turned on, but I do have the notification bubbles on at least some apps.
Anyway, my phone is usually kind of a hot mess. Which is odd, because I use my phone a lot, obviously. You’d think I would see it and that it would bother me more than it does. But yet somehow I have always just dealt with its disorganized state and have generally ignored it.
Until I realized the other day that I had somehow worked up to having like SIX pages of apps, all scattered and totally random, with zero organization.
Now, I am a big fan of the App Library and the search bar, so this is likely why I was able to ignore the mess of apps. I just scrolled right past them. But I realized I was having to scroll through allllll these pages of apps to get to the search bar!
I also knew I just had a) a lot of apps that I don’t even need on my phone anymore (e.g. do I need the Disney World ride wait times app on my phone right now?? No Disney plans in the works at the moment…) and b) some apps that I do use very often, but would really like to be able to find more quickly/ easily! (without having to “search”)
So, I:
- first, deleted any totally irrelevant apps
- then I moved my MOST used apps to my first page/ home screen
- I made a widget for my Google Calendar app, because I reference that a lot.
- Moved the email app, phone, safari and messages apps to the bottom 4 “primetime” spots
- Made a Page 2 of apps I use frequently and want quick access to (e.g. the soccer team messaging app, the wordpress app, the school app, etc.) but aren’t necessarily daily use apps, either
- Then, ALL my other apps I dumped into folders. I ended up with:
-Apple Stuff
-Books (library app, goodreads app, etc.)
-Social Networking (what’s app, Skype, FB messenger)
-Gas Stations (for rewards… have a couple)
-Games (I don’t play games, but still have a few of the kids’ games/ random family games that we’ve used when waiting in a line, etc.)
-Finance apps (banking)
-Healthcare & Fitness (Beachbody app, some other misc.)
-Restaurants
-Weather (the weather channel app and a radar app)
-Entertainment (You Tube, netflix app, prime video…)
-Productivity (things like a scanner app I use, the Zoom app, a journal app, etc.)
-Travel (Trip advisor, expedia, booking.com, the airbnb app, etc.)
-Misc.
-Shopping
(This still is a lot of categories, but they all fit neatly on the top half of one page, 4 rows.)
I know some people just basically remove all apps from the home screen (but keep them on their phone) and just use the search function to find them. But I think I might forget what I even have! I have a lot of various apps nowadays.
With my new system, I just have 2 pages of apps, plus the 3rd page with all the categories/ folders.
I like that I can still go and scroll through those apps if I want to, but they are neatly organized how I want them to be. (I realize there is redundancy with the App Library feature now! But I don’t think I can choose how those are organized – seems like the iphone auto-categorizes those.)
It actually feels AMAZING to not have a disorganized mess of 6+ pages of apps to scroll through! Everything is now where it should be, in a place that makes sense. And it all looks so nice and neat. Like I said, one of those little things I just kept ignoring, but it was annoying me in the background….
(As I write this, I’m wondering if this will totally appall some people who are reading? Am I the only person who had a totally disorganized phone??)
Maybe next I’ll try to clean out my contact list. lol. Totally have people in there that I’m pretty sure were parents from Ethan’s kindergarten soccer league who I haven’t seen or talked to in… oh, about 8 years. HA.
Okay, almost time to pick up Asher from swim practice. Rainy dark Wednesday morning here…. I did not want to get up today…. but we did.
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for the Google productivity apps. I am a big Gmail user, and I also love my Google calendar, Google Tasks, Google Drive, and I’ve recently started using Google Keep. I love how they are all nested right on the sidebar of my Gmail.
GRATEFUL KAE 
I have all apps with (useful) notifications on one page, and one page for reading-music-movie/tv.
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I am super anal about my phone, so I have 2 pages of aps, total. The 1st page is my most-used aps, and 2nd page contains a lot of folders and some commonly used aps. When I was on social media, I read that you should make it harder to get to those aps, so I had FB and IG, in a folder, but in a 2nd page of the folder so I would have to work harder to get to them and be less inclined to do so. I’ve kind of done that with email and text – they are within a ‘messages’ folder on my first screen of my phone.
Unlike you, though, I cannot ignore the little red circle – I always try to clear out notifications. Those red bubbles drive me crazy! I don’t get any notifications, though. I’ve seen people’s phones with a number in the hundreds in the red dot and it makes my heart race a bit just thinking about that! Ha! Can you tell I am a very very very very type A? 😉 I do turn off that red dot notification for things like my work emails/work teams because I will feel forced to look at it to clear the red dot and that means reading work emails/messages in the evening when I really don’t want to/need to be working.
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I have six pages of apps because I don’t like my home screen to have anything on it except the time. I also hate it when apps are in folders because then you have to remember what folder things are in. I am so stressed out thinking about any other type of reorganization. 🙂 I hope this helps you, but I’m going to quietly exit out of this page so I don’t have a panic attack.
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I have six pages of apps, too, and while there are somewhat organized, there are many I should delete and just consolidate everything. Thanks for the reminder 🙂 I love that you tackled this!
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i have my screen page very clean, with apps that I use frequently grouped in folder in the home screen, and others less frequent ones in the second page. For those that i occasionally use, I delete them and use the search function when I use it.
i need to clean up the contact list too, but what a hassle. maybe few alphabet per day. 🙂
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Oooh! I should do this! I have three pages of apps and I don’t really think I need all of them on display
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