Decluttering your iPhone — My journey from chaos to clarity

From a reformed ‘messy phone person’

Minimalism is a buzz-word that gets thrown around a lot these days.

I get it. I appreciate the clarity it can bring, but never put in the effort to realise this in my own life.

When I think about the places that I have an excess mess in my life, the first one to come to mind was my phone.

Stephen Cognetta calls the Home Screen your ‘Virtual Bedroom’

This reaffirmed my analogy of having a messy bedroom — ‘Messy room, messy mind’ — as my Mum always says.

It’s a mess, right?

Badges everywhere, apps in no particular order, more apps than anyone could use etc. I am a ‘grass-is-greener’ person with apps. I love to try new ones, but this leads to a tonne of applications on my phone that I never use. More than 250; my About screen tells me.

You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.”― Napoleon Hill

It was more than time to clear this up, here’s what it looks like now.

[Some of your apps look different to mine? I love the ‘change app icon’ feature that some developers are adopting, I change them wherever possible. ]

Here are the steps I took to clear this carnage up:

1. Get a simpler Wallpaper

• I love the beach scene but it does add to the clutter.

2. Turn off badges for all apps (aside from Messages and Things)

• This was most of the stress-factor of looking at a messy phone screen. It was all of the apps demanding my attention.

3. Turn off Notifications for all apps that I don’t need.

• Notifications from I left them on for calls, messages and limited notifications from social media apps

4. Reorganised my Home Screen

• Removing time-wasting apps and replaced cheap dopamine for worthwhile reading or creation.
• Ensured Social Media was on the second page, banished YouTube.

I focused on the apps that aid creation or are generally constructive. Hopefully, this means I spend less time aimlessly scrolling through Instagram in down-time.

• Overcast (Podcasts)
• Medium (Reading)
• Notion (Knowledge Management, Note Taking)
• Craft (Beta App I use for writing)
• Airmail (Email, wish I could ditch this)
• Drafts (quick capture of ideas)
• Carrot (the weather App that keeps me in my lane; if you know, you know…)

I kept the ‘I need to get to this quickly apps’

• Monzo (Banking)
• 1Password (Password keeper and 2FA)
• Files
• Timery (Time Tracking ) [I promise I will write about this soon]
• Spotify (I live with headphones in, Lo-Fi Beats — always)

5. Tidied up my ‘Today View’

• Placed focus on Time Tracking, Idea collection in Drafts, Files I’m working on and the weather.

[Apologies for the sass of the weather app but it’s why we all love Carrot Weather, right? I have my ‘sass-factor’ set to Overkill]

This has removed so much of the clutter from a device that we use more and more each day.

I won’t be claiming I’m a minimalist any time soon, but it’s a step in that direction.

I made the screenshots using this Shortcut, if you’re interested.