Creative tips for organising your phone

Organising your phone can be a chaotic task, but it can also be a necessity if you’re constantly finding yourself scrolling through a thousand pages of apps.

Even if bulk apps aren’t the problem, having a better organised and well-planned phone has the potential to make you more productive, efficient, and in control of the benefits your mobile phone technology can bring to your life.

How to organise mobile apps the smart way

You might be surprised how much space unused apps are currently taking up on your phone. Or how much time you’re actually wasting sorting through a bunch of options trying to find the app you’re looking for each time. So is it time to finally organise those apps?

Begin the process by culling the apps that you don’t need. It’s pretty easy – you just have to uninstall those apps you don’t use anymore (or never did – we’re looking at you, well-meaning fitness app from 2015). So that game you used to be addicted to 3 years ago? That app you downloaded 6 months ago to get a freebie but haven’t opened since? They can all go.

After you’ve shed some deadweight from your storage, it’s time to get organised. Utilising folders has a lot of merit, but how exactly to group those folders really depends on your way of thinking. Some ideas of the kinds of folders you could create include:

• Action-based: perfect for those who can quickly departmentalise their apps by the function they provide. This kind of categorisation could see you creating folders like ‘social’ (featuring all your social media and messaging services), ‘productivity’, ‘health, ‘entertainment’, and ‘admin’, to name a few.
• Colour schemes: if you’re more a visual learner, grouping your apps by their colour could work for you. Of course, this only works if you can test yourself right now and remember the colour schemes of your most used apps – if you can’t, you’re probably going to be constantly losing your app locations.
• Prioritised by use: this works by keeping all your most popular apps either on the first screen or within their own folder. Secondary or lesser-used apps would then go on the following pages, or in their own folders. This can provide quick access to your most used apps, but only really works if you have a more patterned approach to your thinking
• Alphabetised: another way to organise your apps that can provide quick-access (again, depending on how your brain operates) is ordering and grouping your apps alphabetically. You don’t need a folder for every letter; in fact, if you don’t have too many apps, you could simply put them in alphabetical order without utilising folders at all

Enhancing productivity

We spend a lot of time on our phones. In the graph below, you can see that more than half of 19-35 year olds spend more than 3 hours on their phone every day. Even 50%+ of older age groups, like 56-76+ year olds, use their phones for 1-2 hours each day.

With that being said, it’s important to make the most of your phone time. With just a couple of adjustments, your smartphone can turn into quite the productivity tool. Two areas you can see real change with minimal effort are your calendar, and your finances.

Firstly, there’s a lot you can take advantage of when it comes to reminder technology. For example, did you know that you can set location-based reminders? Using Reminders for Apple users, or Google Keep for Android users, you can set your phone to remind you to send that email when you get back to the office, or buy milk when you get to your local grocery store. As soon as you arrive at the location in question, your phone will deliver the alert. It’s important to make sure that your reminder system is automatically synced on all your devices, so you don’t miss any reminders when you’re on the move or at an office.

Apps can help with your insurance admin too. The Suncorp Insurance App helps you check policy info, make claims, update details and more.

Discover the Suncorp Insurance App

Limiting distractions on your phone

It’s not necessarily bad that we’re using our phones more than ever – with the technology we’ve got access to, it makes a lot of sense. But with that being said, limiting distractions is still an important part of keeping your phone usage on track.

There’s not exactly one foolproof, simple way to get rid of smartphone distractions completely, but there are some simple changes you can try to live more intentionally with your devices:

• Turn off all notifications except from actual people. Keeping those annoying and random app notifications away can help you focus on completing the task.
• Go greyscale, and stop being distracted by striking reds, greens and other bold colours. Both iOS and Android offer this option, and while it may make the screen look drab, it could curb your desire to visit apps without needing to.
• Charge your device outside the bedroom. Although simple, this can be an effective hack. Blue light can affect your sleep, so keep it away. If you need an alarm, you could go old school and find a clock to wake up to.  

Productivity apps to help you focus

With so many great ‘focus apps’ on the marketplace, using your phone to be organised and productive is easier than ever. Some apps use the popular time management hack based on the Pomodoro Technique. Too attached to your smartphone? Ironically, there’s an app for that. For the more distracted types, there are some apps that can help you block out time – literally baring you from a list of time-wasting apps, like social media and games.

Check out more ideas for how to streamline your life with productivity apps for living efficiently.

You spend enough time staring at that small screen on your smartphone that making sure your organised can be a pretty big gamechanger – to your productivity, efficiency, and even stress levels. By following these tips, you might be surprised the change a bit of phone organisation can bring to your life.

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