Studies show that cleaning room or desk is not just something your mom used to tell you to annoy you.
Marie Kondo has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon for introducing the world to the art of decluttering your physical space. Studies show that cleaning room or desk is not just something your mom used to tell you to annoy you. Turns out, removing clutter from our physical spaces and lives, has been proven to help increase concentration and lower potential risk of stress.
Similarly, the set up of your phone’s homescreen has a similar effect on the mind.
Unlock up our phones between 50 and 100 times a day, our home screen is the first thing we’ll always end up on. Imagine walking in a messy room 100x times a day. That’d be a nightmare. Typically, homescreens will be just this one big messy pile of apps. It usually has a lot of unnecessary apps and potential time-wasters that should not be one finger tap away.
Instead, we propose a more minimalistic way and deliberately which specific apps you should be able to access immediately.Here’s a few things that we suggest, pick & choose as you please.
1. Tools not feeds:
Keep the so-called ‘in & out’ apps which you use for a specific task or purpose and after which you go out of the app. Move all the apps with a scrollable feed to a second or even third page on your phone. Try to really be picky with the apps you keep on the homescreen.
2. Bundle in folders:
All the other apps on your second / third screen should be organised in folders. This does not only looks much tidier, the more ‘opaque’ folders also reduce the visual stimulation from all those shiny app icons. We also recommend using the pull down search function, which is more intentional than relying on that swipe muscle memory.
3. Do a background check:
Pick a soothing image for your background. There’s a some great very minimalist free wallpapers or choose a picture of a recent nature scene on holiday for example.
In the digital age we are being bombarded with constant information & stimuli.
The art of decluttering on & off screen, does show that indeed less, is more.
