How I Achieved iPhone Zen

Last week I set myself an impossible challenge — achieve a one home page iPhone.

That’s 28 pieces of software, on my iPhone 6 Plus. A seemingly arbitrary number, but one that translates to an aesthetically pleasing iPhone experience.

But like the hoarder who says he’ll need everything he’s stored (one day) deleting rarely-used apps was harder than I had ever expected.

What If?

Remote Mouse — for example — lets me rig up my laptop to my TV, and control the cursor using the phone. It’s a seamless experience, but since I got my complimentary staff Sky package installed I’ve felt no need for it.

But what if I left Sky? What if I wanted to browse Netflix on the big screen? What if I really needed it, and there was no data coverage?

Be strong.

I steadied my hand, held down a finger.

The apps wobbled. I hit the delete button. Gone.

Suddenly, a release. A hole had been chiselled in three walls of apps.

Of course, I already knew this was possible.

With one hand on my phone as I walked to the Tube one day, I’d deleted three apps. I had no idea which ones.

I assumed that as I went to open each of them at some point in the near future, I’d realise and simply re-download them.

But a month later I was still none the wiser. I’d lived perfectly well without them.

I took heart from the experience. The New York Times’ experimental NYT Now app is an attractive way to sum up the day’s news. But I’m already overloaded with content to wade through. Gone.

Foursquare spin-off Swarm was downloaded merely to show-off during a series of cultural escapades around London. It was no longer necessary. Gone.

BillGuard, which connected itself to my online bank account to alert me to any dodgy-looking purchases, constantly flagged up false positives. “Two payments of £5 were taken by Sky,” it would chirp, oblivious to my same-day double top-up of my canteen payment card. Gone.

But those were the low-hanging fruit.

Aspirational apps such as Headspace — the meditation app — were the hardest to delete. Each one gone was an admission that I’d given up on an aspiration that had popped into my head at some time or another.

Other deletions involved reaching compromises — dubbledecker is a cute-looking app that’s a doddle for getting you around London by bus.

But Citymapper does that pretty well too. Not quite as well, granted, but close enough that I could ditch the young challenger.

With a bunch of Apple software preinstalled as standard, an “extras” folder was called for if I was ever to achieve my goal.

You can call it the failure folder, though, because alongside the baked-in Apple apps are the apps I don’t use often but simply cannot let go of.

Gif-making app Gifit is used about once a month to make a funny looping image of my dog Roxy; Google Drive is used — occasionally — to pull up a photo from the past; the Barclays Bikes app will kick into gear when spring hits the capital.

But other than that, I’ve achieved it. One screen. Here’s the result.

Was it a hollow victory? No. Information overload has been averted. I’ve stemmed the information flow, I’ve minimised my daily distractions, and the signal-to-noise ratio on my most-used electronic device has been corrected after six years of being haywire.

Last night, my girlfriend — who has a scattering of half-filled, badly-named folders across four screens turned to me and said: “I want to get everything onto one screen,” and the process began all over again.

I’ll never judge hoarders in the same way.