Our smartphones are now central to our everyday existence. It may not be overly healthy for us, but the need to stay connected to friends, family, colleagues, work, the news, entertainment, and everything in between compels us to spend hours on the small screens. Accepting this, we can still, at the very least, improve our digital life without going on an all-out digital detox. Best of all, these improvements can be achieved in just a couple of hours.
Achieving a mental declutter starts with your phone
Many of us are guilty of filling pages of their phone with apps that haven’t been used, were opened once a long time ago, or have only sparingly been opened over the last few months. Still, there’s that little voice in the back of our heads saying that one day, that app might be useful for this specific circumstance. However, the very presence of all of these options – especially since we rarely use them – creates mental clutter.
Picking up your phone and thumb-swiping across the many apps without much intent to click on any is something we all do and is only made possible by cluttering our phones. We can repress this subconscious over-reliance on smartphones to fill time by, firstly, deleting all apps that haven’t been used within the last 30 days. Just about every piece on decluttering your phone, including from the nytimes.com, starts here.
If you suddenly need it again, you can find it in your app store history and download it in seconds. For what’s left, create folders. It’s a simple step that not only allows you to organize and perhaps get rid of more apps where you see a clash, but also puts another barricade between your swipes. Folders make losing time running through app pages just a bit too inconvenient. From here, you can look to try to consolidate to improve functionality further.
Attempting to consolidate
One of the big issues with how we engage with smartphone apps is how spread out it all is. Unlike in many Asia-Pacific nations, as forbes.com goes through in this article on apps, we don’t have a super app that consolidates everything. Smartphones are for convenience, and we gravitate to the most convenient options. Even without a super app of sorts, we can still bring different genres of app together.
There are many great apps that combine two or more elements that will save your space, increase convenience, and reduce wasted swiping and scrolling time. Some of the leading apps in online entertainment have gone all-in on this. Anyone who claims the stake.com signup bonus will find this in their app. All the platform’s games, of which there are over 5,000, are on one app alongside its sports betting platform, tournaments, and promos.
In other realms of entertainment, consolidation is much more difficult. It seems that there are more streaming platforms than there were once premium TV channels now, and getting them all, ironically, costs more than the classic TV bundles. While you can’t consolidate the viewing, you can narrow down the search time. Streaming guide apps are plentiful.
The best one of these apps not only lets you directly search for content but also has a roulette feature to randomly get you into something new that you will want to watch. For productivity, Aiseesoft MobieSync helps a great deal to organize everything from photos to messages and can be exported to your computer. In theory, committing to this app could allow you to delete at least ten other apps!
Ridding yourself of mental clutter in the modern day begins by decluttering your smartphone. Take the simple steps above to cull apps, set up blockers, and consolidate activities where you can to live a better digital life.
