This post is a guide that teaches you how to organize your phone and boost productivity. It demonstrates how you can set up your phone for a smooth, productivity-activated Android experience. If these tips help you out, let us know on the forum!Does your Android phone need a re-organization? There’s a good chance it does. Getting distracted by the hundreds of apps that tempt them in the Play Store, people often forget to weed out distractions and configure their phones for maximum productivity. An organized smartphone is key to a smooth and enjoyable Android experience. When your phone is organized and tidied up, you'll have an easier time finding the apps you need and activating various features on the go.You don't need to do a factory reset to make your phone organized. You only need to set aside about 15 minutes of your time and follow through with the recommendations in this post.Below are some easy to follow, actionable steps to make your phone less cluttered and productivity-activated.
How to organize your phone for easy access
According to Yahoo Aviate data, the average Android user has 95 apps installed in their handset. Without any reasonable organization, you're going to waste precious seconds browsing through an extensive list every time you need to access a specific app - and since this is a task that you repeat hundreds of times a day, those seconds really add up, and end up causing a lot of frustration.There are two ways to organize your apps on Android. You can either do it manually, or you can use an app organizer (such as a launcher that displays apps in a specific way). This section focuses on how you can manually organize your apps. Jump to the next section to learn how you can do it with app organizers.Manually organizing your apps
- Functional folders – group apps into functional categories based on what they do. For instance, create a folder named 'Productivity' and put all your productivity-related apps in there. Similarly, you can put all utility apps in a folder named 'Utilities'. Some users find it more reasonable to give their app folders verb names such as ‘Talk’, ‘Listen’, ‘Shop’, etc. Whatever works for you!
- Alphabetical ordering – when your apps are organized alphabetically, you can easily access any app by navigating to the alphabet (letter) that corresponds to the name of the app you want to open For instance, you’ll need to go to the letter ‘P’ to access apps such as ‘Phone’, and ‘Play Store’.
- Arrange apps by frequency of usage – this is another cool way to organize your apps. Put very commonly accessed apps on your primary home screen. Arrange apps that are less frequently used in your other home screens.
- Color coding your apps – put similar apps in the same spot on your screen. For example, arrange all apps that have a green icon (e.g. Whatsapp, Google Phone and Messages on the same spot within your screen). Follow by putting apps that have blue-themed icons on another part of the screen. You’ll have a sort of rainbow smartphone, better than having your apps scattered everywhere!
- Merge Contacts – duplicate contacts make your address book messy and cluttered, which translates to an unnecessary time overhead each time you try to pull a number. Login to the Google Account that’s affiliated with your Android handset, and navigate to Contacts.google.com. Your contacts will be arranged in groups such as ‘My Contacts’, or ‘Most Contacted’. Click the ‘More’ button under each group, then select ‘Find & Merge’ duplicates. It should be easy. Once you’re done with this process, go back to your phone, and Sync your contact list. You’ll find that you have a better, ‘duplicate-less’ and tidier list of contacts. However, you might still see duplicates because your phone also syncs contacts from other sources such as Facebook. You can optionally remove or suppress these additional accounts.
Use an app organizer
If you're feeling a little bit too lazy to organize your apps manually, a good app organizer is all you need. Some good suggestions include Auto App Organizer, Apps Organizer, and Folder Organizer Lite. Personally, my best Android app organizer is Auto App organizer. This is a free app that lets you reign order into your smartphone.Auto App allows you to select multiple apps and perform a single action on them. You are also able to move certain apps to the SD card at the tap of a button, categorize your apps into sensible groups, and also customize app icons. One particularly interesting feature that makes this app outstanding is its ability to highlight unused and inactive applications. The app also handles all new apps in a separate folder, so it’s easier to make sense of everything app on your handset.Organize and backup your multimedia
Most people allow camera photos, WhatsApp image and video downloads, Facebook images, and all sorts of multimedia to pile up on their devices. Cleaning app your multimedia is one great way to make your phone less cluttered, and ready for productivity. Go through your gallery and delete everything that doesn't warrant a second glance. If you've private recordings on your device that you no longer need, get rid of them. Rather than having those awesome family photos from two years ago sitting idle on your handset, back them up in the cloud and free up space.If you have Google+, it has an ‘Instant Upload’ feature that backs app all your photos to the cloud. You can then access them via any device by login in to your Google+ account.Image: Greenbot
As a rule of the thumb, media files (images, videos, audio) should be stored on your SD card, not your internal storage.Keep apps in your internal storage
Moving some of your apps to your SD card storage is such a great idea, or is it? When your opening from the SD card, they're going to be a little bit slower, and that's not good for boosting productivity on your handset. Make a point to keep your apps in your internal storage, and everything else in your SD card. But what if I have limited space on my internal storage? Well, start by getting rid of apps you don't regularly use. All your photos and documents on the memory card, but apps should stay in your internal memory. Secondly, navigate to Settings>Storage (Storage & USB) and select your memory card as the default write disk. This way, everything new that you receive/download to your device will be stored in the SD card. You can always go back and put Internal Storage as the Default write disk whenever you need to install a new app.Image: PCWorld
I use DiskUSage to get a better idea of how my storage is utilized. This app allows me to easily browse directories and view how much space each file (or directory) is eating up. Since DiskUsage represents storage use information graphically, it’s always easy to get a handle on what’s taking up the most space. You may find that you have old files you no longer need on your handset.To remove or not to remove bloatware?
Bloatware is one thing that comes to mind when organizing your Android phone. Do you really need to remove bloatware to keep your device less cluttered? Personally, I think No. Here’s why? You’ll need to root your handset to be able to remove bloatware. Well, that sounds like a lot of work to me. Even more, attempting to remove bloatware comes with a risk of messing up your system.So unless you really really need to get rid of those pre-installed apps, leave bloatware alone. A few tiny apps won’t do any harms to organization and productivity on your Android handset.Make use of widgets
Image: Android Pit
You don’t always have to open an app every time you need to use a single one of its features. Whether you want to quickly share your thoughts on social media, or just check the weather, you can set up a widget for that.- Press and hold on your home screen
- Select the ‘Widgets’ option
- To add a specific widget to your home screen, press and hold on that widget then drag it to wherever you want on your screen