My 2020 iPad Pro Home Screen

I’ve always been a big user of the iPad Pro and the introduction of iPad OS has not really changed the way I work on the iPad as much as others have. The area where I have seen the greatest change has actually been the home screen and how I access apps.

At the beginning of every year, I like to clean up my home screen to take into account how I want to work and the apps that I use. I used to fill up the home screen with lots of apps so that I could access them quickly but that created lots of distractions which defeated the point of having an iPad to begin with.

iPadOS allowed users to choose two different layouts for their home screen. One used the standard app icon size, which frankly looked ridiculous on my 12.9 inch first generation iPad Pro because there was so much space between the app icons. The other layout is what I have been using. It has smaller app icons and has a vertical carousel of widgets that used to be accessed by a left swipe from the home screen.

The old me would have packed the home screen with more apps but I have found it much more productive to keep the number of apps small. I set myself a target of keeping the apps on the Home Screen to one row and relegate everything else to secondary screens, the dock or the widgets screen. This arrangement also allows me to appreciate the wallpaper which is a sensory relief for me given the short daylight hours and incessant rain that are features of the British winter.

By doing this, I get quick access to only the handful of apps that I need to use frequently, whether through the home screen, the dock or as widgets to surface quick information. I would have liked to reduce the number of apps in the dock itself but with iPadOS, I can’t drag apps from the search bar for slide over or Split View. I can only do that from the dock hence the large number of apps in the dock itself.

What isn’t on the Home Screen is almost 100 apps that I have spread over several screens. I have relegated all my messaging and social media apps to secondary screens with the exception of iMessage, FaceTime and Skype because I use those to talk to my wife and family. And I use the search bar to find and open apps as and when I need to. I have found that the act of having to type out the name of an app introduces just the right amount of friction to stop me from aimlessly going from app to app and wasting time. I have become far more deliberate in how I use apps.

So what’s left on the Home Screen :-

• Settings app :- I use it to regularly review the notifications, locations and other permissions that I have granted to apps.
• Facetime, iMessage and Skype :- there because they are my primary communications channels with my family, many of whom are in Singapore. I have left iMessage in the dock so I can call it up in Split View, or more likely SlideOver, if I am planning a holiday or flight details with my wife and I need to see a website or my calendar at the same time.
• Camera :- For the occasional times when I take photos with my iPad.
• Shortcuts :- My 2020 resolution is to learn and use Shortcuts to improve my productivity so it gets a place on the Home Screen for easy access and to serve as a reminder of my resolution.
• Mail :- I use the stock app for my personal inbox. You might wonder why I also have Spark, another email client, in the Dock but more of that later

I confess I have not put as much thought into what goes into my Dock and it has now become quite unwieldy with lots of apps occupying the bottom of the screen. I wanted most apps in the Dock so I could quickly call on them in Split View or Slide Over but given iPadOS’ ability to have several apps in a SlideOver carousel that you can then choose from, this might not be a pressing reason for keeping apps in the Dock. Also, with the steady improvements in the ShareSheet, I can access photos, media and files directly from an app rather than from the stock apps. I will review at the end of the year how I use the apps in the Dock and do a similar cull but for now, I have

• Photos :- I thought this would always be in the Dock or Home Screen but with the powerful sharesheet abilities in iOS and iPadOS, this is a prime candidate to remove from the Dock at the end of the year.
• Music :- I am a heavy user of Apple Music.
• Spark :- I use this email client for my work inbox. I like Spark’s ability to automatically sort my emails into different inboxes, snooze emails that I want to look at a later time, and to set reminders if people have not replied to my emails by a certain time.
• Fantastical :- my calendar of choice. I like how it creates events from natural language input.
• Safari :- browser of choice. I have Chrome on my iPad but it is buried in some secondary screen.
• Files :- I find I use this mostly to get quick access to my work files on oneDrive.
• Todoist :- task manager. My favourite thing about Todoist is the ability to tag tasks. I have tags for each regular meeting that I attend so that I can quickly see what are the issues that I need to work on, or raise for discussion at these meetings.
• Folder of Office365 apps. My school uses Office 365 so this is a quick way to get to the ever increasing number of Office365 apps that we use.
• LinkedIn. I use this to check the work background of people I meet, or alums that I am connecting with. I still hate LinkedIn’s implementation on iOS and now iPadOS. It is one of the few apps that don’t support Split View or Slide Over. Here’s hoping this changes in 2020.
• Yoink :- I use this as a repository for files or URLs that I share or use often.
• Folder for writing apps. This is the graveyard of writing apps that I have tried and given up. The list includes Notes, Agenda and Scrivener. It is a prime candidate for a cleanup at the end of the year.

And finally I have the widgets carousel that comprises :-

• Carrot Weather :- I live in Britain where the weather is a national obsession. It is great to get some snarky remarks from an app to go with the weather forecast.
• Fantastical :- Nice snapshot of the events for the day
• News :- I am one of the five people in the world that use Apple News+ and I intend to write about that in a future article.
• Battery :- quick check on battery levels of my iPad and Apple Pencil
• Nord VPN :- to quickly connect or disconnect to Nord VPN. I use this mostly when I am travelling.
• Shortcuts :- to quickly launch a shortcut if I am in an area where I don’t want to call on Siri by voice.

I thought this would be a shorter article given that I had pared down my Home Screen but it was not the case. To me, that shows how powerful iPadOS has become but also that I need to evaluate my own workflows as technology changes.