When you’re using your iPhone like I’m using the kitchen, you’ll definitely know your way around all of the functions, how you can save important time and how to get things done.
But after your successful battle you’ll also leave a battlefield of dirty pans, squirts of tomato sauce on the microwave, and desperate parents (or at least a dad). Talking about your iPhone this means: You’ll have a pretty cluttered home-screen with lots of different apps and folders and notification badges all over the place, desperately trying to maintain some sort of order.
The problem with that is while I have to clean the microwave from its tomato sauce stains before using it the next time, you’ll feel overwhelmed with the different apps and notification badges lurking around before you effectively can use your iPhone again.
The funny thing is, if you ask folks most will tell you that iPhones look great and that this is one of the main, if not the single one reason, they’ve bought this freaking expensive device in the first place.
Now, I wonder if most folks find the looks of an iPhone visually appealing and if they love the minimal design, why do they clutter their home-screens with apps, with some they only use once a month?
Why do they take so precious care of the gorgeous outside and don’t pay any attention to the inside?
Poll: Are you using your iPhone to show off or as a tool to improve your life?
I don’t want to get started on society and its focus more on outward presentation than on inner values here…
But why don’t you organize apps on iPhone home screen in a way, that it’s pleasing in the eye, too? Why don’t you want to use your good-lookingiPhone as a tool to add value in your life?
Question-Time:
What if you can match the minimal outside of an iPhone with a minimal, visually appealing home screen? What if you can combine the visually appealing looks of a minimal home-screen with the powerhouse productivity you’ve been looking for? What if you can combine having less input to achieve more output?
It’s easier than you can imagine
Actually, it’s not even a combination. It’s one and the same. With less distracting input, you’ll have a more productive output.
And if you like minimal design, you’ll like the looks of it too
With the minimal ways to organize your iPhone home-screen I’d like to explain in this article, you’ll have a new way to avoid being overwhelmed from using your iPhone and use it more as a productivity tool than as time-killer.
With that in mind, here’s your simple guide on how to organize iPhone home-screen to suit your needs:
1. Become clear about your priorities
What do you intend to use your iPhone for, largely? Want to get organized and stay on top of your calendar events? Looking to get work e-mails out of the door, faster? Or do you need a small organizer keeping you up to date about milestones of a project?
Whatever it is, pick the three most important apps. The three iPhone productivity apps you need to achieve your goals and place them down into your dock. I don’t mention your most-used apps on purpose. Because, when you want to use your iPhone to help you be more productive and creative, it won’t help you to put your favorite social media apps in your dock.
The idea is, if you need to call people, why would you put the
Twitter apps
down there? Yes, you can only choose three apps for your dock, because you’ll need the 4th space for the following:
2. Place all apps in a folder
After you determine the three most important apps to use your iPhone in the way you want, the next step will be to place all the other apps in a folder and move this folder down in your dock.
3. Organize your “one-for-all” folder
Although you’re using only one folder, it needs to be organized. It shouldn’t be hard to find the apps you need with a few taps.
To solve a problem of placing all apps into one folder and then searching back and forth between the different pages of apps, I arrange them in an order according to how often I use an app.
Let me explain: On the first page, i’ve put the apps I use most often, on the second page i’ve put the apps I use the second most often and so on…
4. Use Spotlight to launch your apps
As you may already know, it could still prove tricky to find the right app in this one folder in which all of the other apps are. Swiping back and forth between 70 or even 130 apps can consume a lot of your time, however, the good news is that, we have a solution for that as well.
Apple has made it really easy to
find an app on your iPhone
by incorporating the Spotlight search feature. By swiping down on your home-screen you access it and have the chance to search for the app you want to use.
It takes way less time to use Spotlight to search for an app which is buried deep in your “All” folder, compared to searching this app with scrolling your “All” folder or looking for it on your different screens.
5. Turn off the notification badges
In my article on
how to make your iPhone work for you, not against you,
I explained why I decided to turn off almost all of the incoming notifications and the related notification badges. Here, the idea is pretty much the same. Because one of the primary reasons why you want to have a minimal iPhone productivity setup is because it appears attractive. But if you leave your notification badges on, things will get cluttered easily and quickly, which can lead to losing time in fishing for the right app and trying to “fight down” the number of unread messages, e-mails, tweets, etc. Another benefit you get after you
disable iPhone notifications
is that you won’t check your iPhone, whenever a new number pops up. In addition, you have more control and can determine the time which you check the latest news, respond to your messages and e-mails, and act on the latest social media notifications.
Bonus-Tip: Turn on Siri App Suggestions
On my spotlight search, there are additional two rows of apps, which I can access easily and quickly. These apps are suggestions from Siri (this personal assistant from Apple, everyone forgot about), based on which apps I often use on my iPhone. As such, you can use this panel with another 8 apps to your advantage, because if you use these apps all the time, they’ll be displayed there all the time, right? And this also means that you can re-structure your dock and your all-in-one folder to stop these apps from appearing first. You can simply access them via the Siri panel if you need to.
After showing you the ideal iPhone productivity setup and explained my interpretation of this principle, I would be grateful if you show and explain to me your iPhone productivity tips.
Leave your thoughts in the comments section below!