ORGANISING YOUR SMARTPHONE

BY NATALIE - FOUNDER OF TEAM TIDY

JUNE 2020

Have your ever taken the time to clean your smartphone?

Digital Clutter is one of our most commonly overlooked forms of stress with apps often being automatically transferred from one phone to another often going unnoticed and forgotten about.

With the number of apps that are available it is easy for a smartphone to become disorganised and out of control!

If you are totally unaware of what is stored on your smartphone allocate some time to do some digital deep cleaning.

Here are some tips to assist –

1. Delete Apps – Are you storing apps that you don’t use? Delete them! Cluttering your smartphone with unused apps can make your daily life feel disorganised so be ruthless with this process. If you are worried that you may use that app one day- you can always re install it later!

2. Organise Apps – If your smartphone has a main page or navigation ensure your top four used apps are displayed here. You can then have your other apps presented on separate pages for example; banking page, social media page, fitness page etc. Use your smartphone as a digital filing system! Collate like apps by colour or category in folders.

3. Turn Off Notifications – Do yourself a favour and turn off notifications on all apps except for the essentials. The red notifications can invite individuals to open up the app and respond on many occasions throughout the day leading to wasted time and inefficiency. Notifications and updates clutter the feed of your smart device and can leave you feeling with an endless ‘I will get to that one day’ mentality.

4. Transfer Your Photos and Videos – Does your smartphone have the option to store photos and videos on a cloud system so you can still access them easily? Do you have a hard drive or laptop where you can store your photos from the past few years? Photos and videos take up a lot of space on your smartphone so it is best to store them elsewhere, allowing for a full decluttering whilst relieving storage space. Are you storing doubles or blurry photos? Photos you took but don’t need anymore? Do not hesitate to delete them there is no point in keeping these photos.

5. Tidy Your Music – Dedicate some of your downtime to sorting your music into playlists for example; RNB, Acoustic, Party etc. Whilst sorting through your music libraries and allocating into playlists make sure that you are deleting doubles and labelling songs correctly. It is important that you select one music streaming application rather than having multiple allowing for confusion and a large amount of music stored over three different applications. 

6. Select One Calendar App – It does not matter what calendar app that you choose to use to organise your daily life just choose one and stick to it! Add your classes, appointments, meetings etc. to enjoy reminders and notifications.  

7. Clean Up Your Contacts – Waiting for an appointment or sitting on public transport? Dedicate a few minutes to deleting past contacts that you do not need anymore. This could be the most testing task of all as individuals often ignore the fact that they keep adding contacts but never deleting them. Whether it be old work colleagues that you don’t correspond with anymore or your hairdresser from when you were 18 a major decluttering of contacts will help lift your mood.  

8. Too Many Messages – Whilst you at it go ahead and sort through your text, voice and social media messages. Delete message threads you do not need anymore and delete any old voicemails that are irrelevant. This will give you a clean slate to easily respond to those messaged you need to when they come in.