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 I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all of my new subscribers and thank my existing subscribers for their continued support of my monthly newsletter. I sincerely enjoy bringing you these tips, and I love the positive feedback! As always, if you need any help organizing any room or garage in your home, or any workspace or storage space at your place of business, I am available to help you get organized. All you have to do is contact me. -Robert
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How To Organize Your Phone Apps
Smartphones allow us to have thousands of apps at our fingertips. There's an app out there for almost everything. Many of these apps are intended to help steamline our lives, make us more efficient and increase our productivity. If you have to scroll through four or five screens, gazing at a rainbow of cluttered icons for several minutes to find your productivity app, it isn't very productive, though. Organizing your apps will allow you to save time as the app developers intended.
Regardless of whether you have an iPhone, Android-based phone or other smartphone, here are some great tips to help you organize your apps and deal with those overcrowded screens:
Create App Folders
The best way to clean up your screens (and decrease your number of screens) is to put your apps into folders. This will allow you to group up all of your social networking apps, your photography apps, your utilities and everything in between. You can label your folders to make them as generic or as specific as suits you.
Get creative; personalize your folders with emojis if you want. Your smartphone will automatically create generic folder names for you if you press and hold, and then drag two apps together. You can easily edit this name, though. Try using verbs instead of categories like Play, Listen, and Share.
Within your folders, you can alphabetize your apps or even organize them by icon color in order to help you more quickly find the app you need when you need it. Under your Settings you can find an option to configure or reset your home screen layout - this will put your icons and folders in alphabetical order for you and save you time if ABC-order is right for you. You may want to consider leaving your most frequently used apps out of folders. There are even apps on Android phones for organizing your apps.
Configuring Your Layout For Your Thumbs
Most people use their thumbs to do their app tapping and swiping. On most smartphone screens, it's easiest to reach the apps with your thumbs if they're around the edges of your screen, particularly the corners. After your dock, put your most used apps and folders into the corners of your screens. You may want to consider leaving the bottom row, right above your dock, empty. This makes it easier to swipe from screen to screen without accidentally launching an app or opening a folder. You probably swipe in that area anyway without even realizing it.
You should also really take advantage of your dock and make sure your most-used apps are there. Your dock stays where it is no matter what screen you've swiped to, and you have easy access to it with your thumbs. This is a great place for your text messages, email, browser and actual phone. If you don't use your browser a lot, though, you should replace it with an app you find yourself using more.
Prioritizing Your Screens
Organizing your apps is all about prioritizing. You can further prioritize your phone apps by putting certain folders on certain screens. On your first screen, put the apps you use the most often and the folders containing your favorite apps. Remember: your frequently-used apps not in folders should be in the corners for your thumbs.
Also, put apps you need to get to quickly on the first screen like your Camera and maybe Calculator. Try not to have more than three screens and put the folders of apps you use the least or the most distracting games on the third screen.
Decrease Clutter, Increase Performance
Many of us end up downloading apps and then not using them nearly as much as we thought we would or not using them at all. Don't forget to periodically go through your apps to get rid of excess ones. If you find a better app to replace and old app, then get rid of the old one. Get rid of games you don't play anymore and free up space for future apps. Deleting excess apps will also increase your phone's performance.
After you delete apps on Android devices, you also need to remove additional file clutter left behind after the removal of an app. If you don't get rid of that file clutter, then you'll find your phone going slower and slower and you'll also risk running out of space. Your phone has a cache just like your computer, which needs to be cleared periodically.
There are, of course, apps for that. There are a lot of great one-touch apps out there that will delete your junk files for you in seconds. You can also find automated cleaning apps which you can configure to clean your phone periodically, so you don't even have to remember to launch the app.
As always, please contact me if I can be of any assistance in helping you organize your home or business.
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Sincerely, Robert Mizrahi
CEO Chaos Commandos |
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