Posted by Organizing your life these days means more than just organizing your pantry.
It also means organizing your life digitally as well.
Digital organization is so important for keeping your whole life organized and one of the most crucial areas of digital organization is to organize your cell phone. Cell phones are these AMAZING resources that we have in the palm of our hand but to make the most out of them as well as to try and keep our lives more organized it is super important to learn how to organize your phone.
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Clean up your contact list
This includes adding everyone’s REAL names. If you got a co-workers cell phone number on the first day of work and added them in as “Kallie from PR” but now you know her last name then update that.
Part of organizing your phone and cleaning up your contact list also means deleting contacts that you never need and will never need.
For example- your middle school biology lab partner? Yep you don’t need their number now that you are 23 and have not spoken to them in 8+ years. It simply clutters up your phone to have super old contacts plus there is a high chance their contact information is not even correct anymore!
Sort & Purge photos
You do not really need the screenshot of a funny meme you sent your friend 8 months ago. Don’t delete anything you think you could ever need in the future but clear out pictures that are making it difficult to find the photos you do want.
The next step to getting your phone more organized is to create albums for your photos. I find that themes work the best like “Pinterest graphics”, “funny pictures”, “important screenshots” etc. This allows you to easily find any photos that you might need.
And a huge part of WHY it’s so important to get your phone digitally organized is to help you save time! No one wants to scroll through 10,000 pictures trying to find that screenshot with the doctors information from 3 months ago.
Organize your inbox
Organizing your email inbox is a very necessary step especially if you have only 1 main email address.
Go into your email and create folder for important things like:
-Banking
-Work
-Bills
-Kids/ or pets information
-Usernames
and then start moving everything into those folders. I start at the most recent and start moving. If an email doesn’t have a folder it belongs to BUT it’s still important then make a “Misc important” folder for those emails. If something is unimportant and/or no longer useful then delete it.
Unsubscribe
Something that is very important to digital organization is to unsubscribe from emails or text messages that you don’t want anymore. Did you sign up for a emails to get a discount code from a toy company for your nephew for Christmas? Then it’s probably time to hit that unsubscribe button.
Some email providers are making it really easy to unsubscribe through them but for most you will just need to scroll to the bottom of the most recent email and hit “unsubscribe”. Depending on the company the wording may not be as clear- they could call it “opt out” or “change your email preferences”.
Some scam-y companies won’t give you a visible way to unsubscribe and in those cases I go in and block the senders address to try and stop from getting emails that are cluttering up my inbox.
Push Notifications
Push notifications can clutter up your phone and deciding which ones you actually want is very helpful to organizing your phone. To figure out which push notifications you want follow these steps:
For 2 days don’t swipe away or clear any push notifications.
Then after those 2 days have passed go onto your main notification list (pull down on an iPhone screen) and look at what push notifications you got. If you have ones from apps that you know aren’t helpful and you never actually click on them then turn off those notifications.
*** to turn off push notifications on an iPhone go into settings > notifications > select the app you want (they are listed alphabetically) > toggle off the “allow notifications” option
Remove apps you don’t use
The first step to figuring out which apps you don’t use is to start on the first page of apps and just give each app a couple seconds of thought.
Can you recall the last time you used the app?
Can you imagine using it in the near future?
If you answered NO to both those questions then delete the app. You can always re-install apps but having apps you never use on your phone not only causes clutter but it can also slow down your phone AND drain your phone battery.
If you are curious about what apps are draining your phone battery (and you have an iPhone) then you can go into settings > battery > toggle to “last 10 days” > and it’ll give you a % next to each app that has used any battery life in the last 10 days.
The first time I did this I was shocked at some of the results. There was a weather forecasting app that I hadn’t actually used in a year that was using 8% of my battery because it was always on and always pulling information.
Create app folders
Saying to create app folders might seem like a basic step but I see way too many people walking around with hundreds of apps and the only folders they have are the ones that were auto-installed onto their phones.
On an iPhone to make an app folder just hold down any app until a list of options pops up > select “edit home screen” > then select the first two apps you want to group together > drag one of them on top of the other > then a large gray square will populate with both of the apps in it > name the app (like health, shopping, food, etc) > drag any additional relevant apps to the folder.
An added bonus of creating the app folders is you can get a better idea of what apps you have. When you are putting the apps together you might notice that you have 3 collage creating apps but you only really use one of them. This can help you sort it down to the apps that you really, actually use.
Organize the notes app
The notes app on a phone can be very helpful for everyone especially those of us that HAVE to write things down or else we forget them.
But it’s easy to end up with 100+ notes on the app that make finding the one you need to go back to difficult. So organizing the notes app when you are organizing your phone can lead to an easier time using the notes app and improved productivity!
To organize the notes app start by making different folders like:
-Work
-Financial
-Progress Tracking
-Important dates
Then in the iPhone notes app on the main page go to the default folder names “notes” > select the 3 dots in the upper right hand corner > click “select notes” > pick the ones you want to put in the first folder > click “Move to…” > select the folder.
The whole point of organizing your phone is to help you generally stay organized and have more productive days by spending less time searching for things on your phone and by helping minimize distractions on your phone.
Since you are spending the time to get your phone organized make sure it’s looking nice and cute too!
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