How to Organize Your Apps for Maximum Productivity

Nowadays, we use our smartphones for almost everything – communicating, working, reading, learning, finding our way around, to wake up in the morning. The list could go on and on. Because smartphones have so many possible uses, they tend to get cluttered with seemingly endless pages of apps, making it essential to organize your apps.

Different people like to set up their phones differently. Some people keep their apps meticulously ordered and use widgets to streamline daily routines. Others’ phones look like a mess, but they say that their seemingly haphazard method works for them.

So, what’s the best way to organize your apps, so that you don’t end up wasting time trying to find what you need? Here are a few of the top options.

By Task

Perhaps the most obvious way to organize your apps is by task. You might use a different folder for each kind of activity, place similar apps in a row or just put them in the same general area.

Try dividing your apps according to their function. For example, you might have a folder for talking with people, another for listening to music and another for reading.

By Frequency of Use

You might also choose to arrange your apps by how often you use them. Place your most frequently accessed apps on the first page, then continue to the next page and the next until your run out of applications to organize. If you have a bar that stays static no matter what page your own but your most used apps there.

If you’re not sure what you use the most, try taking the decision-making out of the occasion with this lifehack. Every time you use an app, move it one position. After a while your top apps will find their way to the front page of your phone and the often neglected ones will fall back to the last one.

By Hand Position

You could also consider hand position in the way you organize your apps. You probably tend to hold your phone a certain way – most likely with your hands toward the bottom and your thumbs positioned over the screen ready to type.

Try putting the apps that you want to be able to access the quickest in the places that are easiest to reach with the hand position you typically use. For a lot of people, this would be towards the bottom of the screen and on the side of your dominant hand. That might not be your ideal spot though, so be sure to customize it to you.

By Color

If you’re a highly visual learner or you just love aesthetically pleasing color schemes, you might enjoy arranging your apps according to color. You could place applications of similar colors in folders together, put a different color on each page or set them up so that you move through the colors of the rainbow as you scan down the rows of apps. For this, you’d start with red apps such as YouTube and make your way to purple-ish ones such as the Apple podcast app.

Use Tools

When you’re organizing your phone, don’t forget to take advantage of the tools your devices offers. The search bar can make finding apps much easier, especially ones that you don’t use as often.

Folders are helpful, particularly if you have a lot of apps. If you have an Android phone, you can also use the widget or SmartBar tools to make finding the app you need a faster process.

We use our phones for so many different things in our lives that they can easily get messy, just like our homes and apartments can. Our devices have so many functions that keeping your phone organized might actually save you a fair amount of time and frustration. Try out a few of these methods and see which one works best for you.