My Home Screen to Start 2017

Where I started the year

Last year, I started with a pretty different home screen. It feels like home screens are the kind of thing that changes so slowly over so long that it doesn’t feel like it’s changed at all. However, looking back, a lot has changed, and changed pretty significantly. Last year, this is what my home screen started as.

Main Organizational Ideas

For my home screen this year, I wanted to adhere to better organization than before. In the past, I had one page of apps that I use most frequently, followed by two pages of apps sorted alphabetically with no folders. It worked okay, but I found that it too often led to fidgeting with the home screen, which is a great way to destroy productivity.

At this time, I saw a tweet from Alex Cox, of Cards Against Humanity, Refresh podcast, and Roboism podcast, about home screens. This original post was followed by many people sending in their homescreens for criticism. From this, I gleaned some major lessons which are pretty well succinctly summarized in the linked tweet.

My goals were: reduce badges (I still use them sparingly), reduce to one page of apps, and keep my most used apps smartly grouped around the bottom. I do still use a lot of apps, so in order to achieve this, I have an app drawer folder. This isn’t perfectly within Alex Cox’s recommendation, but it’s necessary for my usage.

Wallpaper Change

I switched from the green star field wallpaper to the perspective grid wallpaper halfway through the year. I really like black wallpapers, even though I recognize they don’t actually save battery on IPS screens. I think it just blends into the black bezel of my phone and looks pleasant. I also like the way the perspective of the lines gives a 3D effect, which matches well with the perspective zoom option on the homescreen.

App Changes

I began the year using Apple News as my feed reader of choice. I had been a Feedly user before Apple News was launched, but found that the design of the app in iOS 9 was vastly superior to Feedly. However, this summer I tested the iOS 10 Beta’s, and quickly found that the new Apple News app was simply not for me. I use feed readers to follow specific RSS feeds, and I’m not looking for recommendations or topics outside of what I follow to appear (that’s what Twitter is for). So I switched back to Feedly.

I ended the year, and will begin the next, using Reeder. It’s a brilliantly designed feed wrangling app for iOS and Mac that works with my existing Feedly account, and also integrates my read-it-later service of choice, Instapaper. Above all else, I love reducing two apps into one. But Reeder also has genuinely more efficient gestures and buttons for clearing out my feed every morning.

I was using Safari’s Reading List feature at the time for read-it-later, specifically because it removed the need for the Instapaper app, but I ended up having syncing issues with that around March, so I switched back to Instapaper.

I have found myself using Workflow for more and more tasks. In fact, in many cases I default to trying to rig together a workflow to do something before I even check an app to see if it can do that task internally. I find it to be really invaluable. My most used workflows are simple actions like logging caffeine intake or logging my weight, but I also have more complex workflows for downloading YouTube videos as .mp3 files and tagging them properly. It’s a great app that is really worth the investment. I’ve really enjoyed being able to launch workflow actions from the homescreen with a 3D Touch in iOS 10. That feature was a real productivity boost for me.

This year I started using a real GTD app for doing my definitely already GTD system that I was trying to hobble through using Reminders for. I started with 2Do, which is a really powerful GTD app that has almost all of the features of Omnifocus, but is cheaper. It’s really a great app, and in many ways I prefer it to the app I’m currently using.

Late in the year, I switched to Todoist, mostly because I was working on a Windows machine at my temporary job, and because Federico Viticci recommended it. There is definitely a lot to like about it, don’t get me wrong. There are sufficient tools for collecting tasks in an inbox, sorting them into corresponding projects, assigning due dates, seeing what’s coming due, deferring tasks, and prioritizing tasks. It does have power user features that are really handy, though. I really like, and use the hell out of, natural language processing of task input. It will take “Write this Post three weeks from last tuesday #writing !!3” and make a task called “Write this Post” in the “writing” project with priority 3. This greatly speeds up the GTD system. A serious potential advantage of Todoist is that it is a full web service, meaning it can be automated with IFTTT and Zapier. I thought I would use this a lot more than I ended up, but it doesn’t hurt the service. It also still interfaces with local automation tools like Workflow, which I do use a lot.

The thing that has greatly increased my productivity is the gamification in Todoist through Karma points. You get points for each completed task, there are daily and weekly task goals that you can set which give you more points, and there are levels based on how many points you have. This has encouraged me to get more tasks done each day. I know it’s silly, but gamification really works. I look forward to Todoist doing more with this in the future.

One of these days I’ll get around to posting an article/review of GTD apps that I’ve used and how they’ve specifically improved my productivity. Eventually.

Last year, iCloud Drive had a prominent spot on my homescreen. In many ways, I’m actually using iCloud Drive for even more than I was last year, but it’s not on my homescreen anymore. This is because I’ve switched to using Documents by Readdle to view and access my documents, as it’s a much more feature rich “finder” type application.

I’m going to make an unpopular statement, but Apple’s default mail app is actually really good. Most people won’t have need for anything else. I chose to switch to Spark for my email this year, specifically because I thought the interface played well with the notification style of iOS 10. I stayed with it because of all of the powerful email management tools it has, and how it integrates with my email accounts. You can read more about what my specific email app eccentricities, and why Spark is what I chose to stick with here.

I was using the Podcasts app from Apple to listen to podcasts at the start of last year. I simply hadn’t found the advantage of Overcast over Podcasts, even though I had tried it. Smart Speed is pretty cool, though, as it turns out, though I’m not a fan of the backwards ideas that Marco holds about technology, so I didn’t want to support him. As soon as PocketCasts 6 came out with support for removal of pauses, I switched. It’s been the best app for podcasts I’ve ever used. I subscribe to 106 podcasts and have so far saved 12 days of listening time through trimming silence and listening at 1.5x speed. I also love the layout of the app and the way that I can choose which episodes of a podcast I download. In many ways, the “mark as played” without downloading option in PocketCasts removes the need for Castro’s podcast triage feature. It’s a great app, and you should give it a shot if you listen to more than about 5 podcasts.

Last year I told myself that I wasn’t concerned with when specifically it was going to start raining. I was wrong. Knowing down to a 10 minute interval when the rain is coming is a godsend for me commuting to work and class. As such, I switched back from Weather to Dark Sky. I also found Dark Sky’s hyper-local weather data to be more accurate with regards to heat index, wind chill, and air temp. Dark Sky is staying.

Apps I find myself no longer using are: Tumblr, GroupMe, Remote, and Phone. I have switched all of my writing to Twitter or Medium, so I no longer find myself browsing Tumblr. I graduated university, and no one outside of the school setting uses GroupMe (in fact, most in that setting don’t either). The app is simply not any better than a group SMS message, and it’s significantly worse than a dedicated chat app like Slack or WhatsApp. I didn’t use Remote that often before, honestly, but I found that with the fourth generation Apple TV, I never had a need for the Remote app. I also stopped wirelessly controlling my music library on my computer and just used Bluetooth speakers for much of 2016. I just got a Sonos speaker, so we’ll see next year if that changes my setup. Lastly: phone isn’t on my homescreen because who realistically calls anyone anymore? I certainly don’t, and when I do, it’s a quick search or Siri statement away.

iPhone

The new additions to my iPhone homescreen this year are:

• Lightroom Mobile: I’ve been getting really into mobile photography the past couple years, but I’ve generally been editing in Photos. With the support for RAW DNG file capture in iOS 10, I switched my capture format. At first, I did this with Lightroom Mobile’s built in RAW camera, but eventually settled on ProCamera 4 for capture. But I needed a tool for RAW editing and export. At first, Lightroom was about the only app that handled this. As the year went on, more apps were supporting this including snapseed. I’ve tried a lot of the apps, but nothing has come close to the power of the tools in Lightroom for me. It has earned its spot on my phone.
• Timely: I’ve been working a couple different jobs as either a completely independent contractor this year, or as a mostly independent contractor where logging hours and sending invoices is important. I settled on Timely because it has an Apple Watch complication to start timers, and it also has free export of the tracked hours. I don’t think it’s the best time tracking app, but it had the key features I was looking for.
• OneFootball: This was an app that I’ve been using for years, but it’s traveled in and out of my homescreen. This past year, I’ve had room on my homescreen, and I’ve been very into following soccer — specifically the English Premier League and Major League Soccer (Sounders fan here). Having the app easier accessible (fewer taps) has been really nice.
• Instagram: I was using this app enough even last year to be a main-page app, but I couldn’t bring myself to move the ugly and outdated icon to my beautifully curated homescreen. This year, we got an app icon update, so the app got a promotion to the main screen. Simple as that.

One thing that I will highlight is that Snapchat is still on my homescreen. This is not because I like or “get” the app, but because my friends are still using it. I receive too many messages via Snapchat for me to get rid of it. I don’t like it, but that’s where I fall in the millennial generation, I guess.

Notably, my dock is the same as before, just with a different email app. I think it’s interesting that the layout of the dock hasn’t changed in a year. I don’t know why, but I think this is something to pay attention to.

iPad

I didn’t write about my iPad homescreen last year, because I was just “replying” or responding to a post made by MG Siegler, and he only talked about his iPhone. As such, I’m not actually sure what all has changed.

I tried to adhere to the same design rules for my iPad homescreen as I did for my iPhone. I use the same wallpaper, the same app drawer folder, and the same badge-less app layout.

I use my iPad Pro 12.9" as my main computer for getting work done. This may change as I transition jobs, but especially for school I found this device to be essential. I was able to do all of my work and all of my note taking in one ultraportable place.

I can say that Todoist is in my dock now because GTD is central to my life. I’m using Todoist now for that system, as explained in my iPhone section. I also have Reeder in my dock, because the iPad makes an amazing reading device.

Notability is the app I use for note taking and hand writing with Apple Pencil. It can be used to write on documents, which I used for completing homework assignments, as well as plain writing or drawing. All of the documents sync via Dropbox or iCloud Drive, and can be exported as .pdf’s. I stuck with Notability because it has the best ink processing engine out of the apps I’ve tested. It’s well worth the cost.

Buffer: Schedule Posts for Twitter & Instagram made the home screen because I use it to prepare future twitter posts. I have literally no idea if it improves my social media engagement, but I like it. Mostly it helps me not post 100 articles at once at 3am. Pinterest also made the homescreen because I started using the service this year, and I really like it. I use it to collect everything from geeky Star Wars things, to awesome industrial designs, to skateboards, to Raspberry Pi project ideas and learn to code tools. It’s a cool service that you can kind of turn into whatever you want. I like that. OneFootball also made the homescreen on my iPad for the same reasons it made my iPhone homescreen.

At the end of the year, I finally purchased iA Writer, which is a powerful plaintext/Markdown editor that works cross-platform. It’s a really amazing app, which I used from writing all of my end-of-the-semester projects in university. I was able to do this due the built in .docx and .pdf export of the app. I have also been able to use it for blogging due to the markdown export to Medium functionality, which I love. There are plenty of markdown apps on the App Store, and you should check them out, but I really love this one.

I’m testing out MeisterTask on my iPad right now (though not on my iPhone) to see if it can help me with project management. I love that it combines time tracking with task-lists and Trello-style boards. It’s also open to IFTTT integration for some base level automation. That being said, I like Todoist too much to give it up just yet, and I still wish MeisterTask was open to Workflow automation.

I don’t even know if people still care about home screens, but I find them fascinating as a window into peoples’ workflows. As such, I hope you were able to gather something from how I operate, even if it is that you simply cannot work the way I do. I think that’s totally cool. In fact, I would love to see you reply to this post with how your home screens look, and how you work.

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