Scrap those apps: a productivity hack

By Jeremy Porter

I’d always prided myself on the lack of crap I accumulate. I hate clutter and purge regularly. But slowly I was accumulating a lot of crap that was less visible — on my phone. My phone was full of apps … hundreds of them.

It’s easy to do. Both the Apple App Store and Google Play have more than a million apps. Most of them free, many of them on the surface appealing. The truth is there is a handful of amazing apps that really add value to our lives. The rest is guff.

Sometimes I yearn for a simple touchscreen phone that looks nice, makes calls, sends text messages and email, takes photos, browses the web, and has maps. Short of buying an original iPhone, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Besides, I like Instagram, my podcast app, and Runkeeper. I can’t have it both ways.

But I did have too many apps. I had four weather apps, two Twitter clients, five camera apps, and twelve news apps I never opened. I realized I don’t need to use LinkedIn on my phone. I don’t need Flight Control (the first app I bought on my first iPhone almost five years ago). I’m not going to watch Netflix on my phone. All up I probably had two hundred apps. I’m down to about fifty. That might sound like a lot — and it is — but count the apps on your phone. Look inside the folders — you might be surprised to find a hundred apps, or more.

Deleting the first fifty apps was easy. I had the Zappos app because there’s a belt I was going to buy. Delete. I had the Kickstarter app because I thought I’d look at it every day. Delete. I had the SkyScanner and Kayak apps because I like traveling. Delete. All these apps have great websites. When I need them, I’ll check online. They don’t need to live on my phone.

The next fifty were a little harder. Once I got down to a hundred apps I made the decision-making process easier: I deleted one app a day.

What I am left with I think I need. Tomorrow I will realize there’s another app that can go.

My phone is slowly catching up to the way I structure my real world. Every day it becomes a little less cluttered and I lose a distraction. One app a day. Easy.

Jeremy is a freelance communications consultant based in Brooklyn, but working as a digital nomad for clients around the globe. Read more of his stuff and get in touch here.