At a workshop I attended recently, the speaker talked about being organised, and made a very brief reference to how disorganised someone he knew was with their phone.
He said, “I looked at his home screen, and it was littered with icons for apps - not just on one page but several pages full of icons, and there also several random pages with only one or two icons on them. I don’t know how he ever found anything on his phone!”
As he spoke, I felt the urge to surreptitiously slide my phone off the desk and into my bag, “Move along…nothing to see here, folks!” style, because my phone was exactly like that, and I often had trouble finding the right icon for parking apps, or tools such as my stopwatch or calculator.
He told us how he organised things on his phone - he had little folders of apps grouped in a way that makes sense to him. He even showed us how to do it - you just drag one app over another and it automatically creates a folder you can name.
That evening, I was staying in a hotel room, and I spent a good hour organising my phone icons into folders. (I even organised them alphabetically because it added a good 20% to the overall feeling of smugness.)
I must say, it’s been a total game changer for me!
It’s quite amazing how much time and effort it saves when you have all your apps accessible from one screen in neat folders such as Messaging, Work Apps, Google Apps, Parking, Entertainment, Shopping, Finance etc.
It took a few days before I brought up the subject with Kev. I felt a bit silly sharing my breakthrough as he is one of the most organised people I know.
I was convinced he’d look at me with a “What the hell? Everyone does that except you!” reaction, but he pulled out his phone sheepishly flicked through several pages of icons - some of them with one or two on them.
He has really enjoyed putting his phone in order, too.
I know it sounds like a very minor thing, but the majority of us open our phones several times a day to find things, and little improvements can make a big difference over time.
It’s not just the lost seconds that add up to hours of wasted time over the course of a year, but also the frustration factor of not being able to find the correct app easily.
For example, I have no idea why Just Park thinks it’s better to use a P symbol on their icon instead of a J, because it really used to throw me off when I was searching for it among all my other apps. I now find it effortlessly in the Parking folder with only a few other icons in it.
Now, it’s quite likely I’m the weird one, and there are far more people who are organised like my tutor rather than all over the place like I used to be, but it’s been such a simple win for me that I thought I’d share it just in case you find it useful.