One of the best things about modern smartphones is that there are so many ways that they can make your life easier. Your smartphone means that you never need to carry a camera, mp3 player, or notepad. You’ve already got them in your pocket. You can use them for banking, tracking, and making appointments, and there’s an app for near enough anything.
Yet, despite our iPhones having the ability to make our lives easier, many of us use them primarily to pass the time. They are filled with pointless apps; we spend more time on them wasting time than we do being productive. Without care, far from making your life easier, streamlining your days, and helping you stay organized and in control, your iPhone can instead add clutter, distraction, and mess to your life. It could even negatively impact productivity and add extra time to your processes.
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Why Use Your iPhone to Streamline Your Life?
Most of us lead busy lifestyles. We’re always on the go, heading to work, meetings, school runs, playdates, date dates, parties, dealing with our friends’ dramas and family crisis, and completing all of those days today errands that fill up our time. It’s hard work.
In your pocket, you’ve got a tool that can make life easier, reducing your stress levels, and saving you time. Why wouldn’t you want to make the most of that?
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Organize Your Phone
iPhones today have loads of storage. You could download every app that caught your eye, keep every photo, email, and text message, and even if you did ever manage to run out of storage, you could utilize the cloud for a nominal fee.
This means that we keep everything. If your home screen is a mess, your phone is filled with photos and apps, and you can never find what you are looking for, it’s time to get organized.
Organize Your Home screen
If you are running an older iOS, your home screen organization might be limited to sorting apps into folders (still a good idea), but if you’ve recently upgraded to iOS14, you can use an app library, widgets, and smart stacks to clear your home screen of all but the most important (to you) apps and tools. This makes it harder to get distracted and easier to find what you need when you need it.
Sort Your Photos Out
If you’ve got about a million photos on your camera roll, you aren’t alone. Spend some time sorting these out, send some to the cloud, delete things you don’t want, hide things you don’t want other people to see, and create folders to stay on top of things. You can learn more about hiding images if you need to.
Turn Off Notifications
If you are constantly getting distracted by social media posts, text messages, emails, and app updates, it’s time to turn notifications off or to set do not disturb times. This can help you to work more productively and stay focused.
Reach Inbox Zero
If your email or text message inbox is overflowing, it’s time for a clear out. This makes it easier to see new messages and to group important documents together.
Delete Unused Apps
If you’ve got any apps that you don’t use, delete them.
Have a Social Media Clear Out
If you’ve got tons of friends that you don’t know, or worse, don’t like, delete them. Declutter your social media profiles using your iPhone for a more streamlined feed.
Get the Right Apps
There are plenty of apps available for the iPhone, which can help to streamline your life. Here’s a look at some of the best.
Trello
There is plenty of productivity and list-making apps out there. But, if you are looking for something that’s easy to use but offers plenty of helpful features, Trello is a great place to start.
Pocket
Pocket gives you a place to save all of those news articles and blog posts that you want to read, but don’t have time for.
Evernote
Evernote is perfect if you use your phone for work. Make notes on the go, sync them between devices easily, and even add files, tables, photos, and graphs.
IFTTT
If This Then That is a fantastic tool. You can use it to create your own applets that respond to specific controls. For example, you could send a photo to Instagram every time you post on Pinterest. At home, you could turn your smart thermostat off when you leave the house or change your lighting at dinner time. You can even use it as a savings tool, saving a little money every time you post to social media, like a modern-day swear box.
Depending on what you use your phone for, banking apps, quick payment apps, invoicing and tax apps, scheduling tools, and Echosign could also be helpful.
Delete Some Apps
If you find that you are wasting hours a day on social media, ask yourself if you really need the apps on your phone? If social media is killing your productivity, delete some of the apps, and just check in once a day on your desktop or laptop. Many people find that spending less time on social media is freeing and a great way to streamline.
Set Social Media Limits
Another option is using your iPhones screen time settings to set specific app limits. Give yourself set times to be on social media and gaming apps, avoiding them before bed or when you are busy during the day.
Sync Your Devices
Why waste time sending files and photos to yourself? Sync up all of your devices to make things run more smoothly.
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