Spring Clean and Organize the Apps on your iPhone or iPad


Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share my process for “spring cleaning” my iPad and iPhone.  I’ll show you how I determine which apps to keep and how I organize my screens.
I try to do about 15 minutes of organizing every weekend just to stay on top of the chaos. This weekend I chose to do a little digital organizing. My iPhone and iPad were overflowing with apps that I don’t use and it was time to purge and organize my digital space. Unfortunately, for me this took MUCH longer than 15 minutes, but this may be a faster process for you. 
Okay — before I reveal the embarrassing number of apps that I had on my iPad, let me just make a couple of excuses for myself 1) I DO constantly download new apps to try new systems and solve tech problems. I probably end up using something like 10% of the apps that I download.  And 2) by far the biggest issue is that in Settings I have Automatic Download turned on for apps. What that means is that if I download an app on my iPhone, it automatically also downloads on my iPad. More importantly, since my kids and I all share the same Apple ID, the apps that they put on their phones automatically download to my iPad. I set this setting deliberately since i like to know what my kids are doing on their phones. But it means is that I have A LOT more apps on my phone than I need.  
So, I counted — on my iPad alone I had 264 apps. Yikes, right?  Okay — the way I have always done this before is I just go through and delete a bunch of apps.  Then I stick the apps I want to keep in folders.  This time, I really wanted to do a thorough cleaning. Kind of the equivalent of taking EVERYTHING out of a closet and starting from scratch rather than just rearranging things a little. So here is what I did.

1- Listed all of the apps

I created a new Google Spreadsheet and listed all of the apps on my iPad. You can do this by going through your iPad and folder by folder.  I went by the app list in Settings, but it didn’t include every app, so going through each folder is probably the best bet. It is so much easier for me to make decisions and organize when I have the apps listed out away from my phone. Okay — once I did that, I made some determinations. I tagged each app with one of three designations:

2 - Keep, Delete or ?

I don’t know if you can tell, but I have a slight hoarding tendency. Not terrible, but my instinct is always to hang onto things in case I might need them later. The nice thing about apps is that once an app is deleted, you can always download it again from the cloud if you need to. That makes it much easier to make more ruthless delete decisions. The ? means that I don’t know what the app is, or I need to do a little research into it. There were a lot that fit into this category. As I researched, I tried to fill in the comments column with a little more information about what function the app performed. For example, this app, Magic Eraser, allows you to remove the background from photos. It’s not terribly clear from the title, so it’s helpful to have a description in this column. Once I’ve determined whether I’m going to keep or delete each app, I focus on all of the Keep items and decide the

3 - Category

For the apps that I use daily or weekly, I consider those main apps. I want them to be easy to get to and prominently displayed. More about that in a bit. For those apps that I do not consider my main apps, I’m going to put them in folders. Now — I have made the mistake of creating too many folders.  If you do that, you won’t be able to find anything and it’ll drive you nuts. The folders should represent broad enough categories that you have more than a few apps in each.  Here are my categories:
  • Audio - music, podcasts, books on tape, etc.
  • Video - TV, movies, TED talks
  • Communication - email, video chats, digital voice, social media
  • Productivity - word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, PDF apps
  • Photos - apps to manipulate and edit photos
  • Money - Mint, Bank app, app for my kids’ allowance
  • Shopping - any app that helps me buy things: Amazon, Dominoes Pizza, the Apple App Store, OpenTable
  • Tools - utitilies like a flashlight, screen changers, find my iPhone, dictionary, Google Home
  • Don’t Use - any innate Apple app that needs to stay on my iPad, but that I don’t use. Calendar, Maps, Notes, etc. 
And then some folders that are fairly self explanatory: Travel, Grad School, Guitar, YouTube, Work, Kids School, and News & Articles.  Once I have everything in a category, I

4 - Delete and Put in Folders

So, I take my spreadsheet and based on the choices that I’ve made, I delete apps and pull them into category folders for categories. Now that I have that step done, they are still kind of a mess, so I need to

5 - Organize

Here’s my organizational schema.  The first 2 pages of my iPad are for my main apps. The ones I use weekly. Mostly these are stand alone apps, but I do have 2 folders that I keep here as well: Audio and Money. The third page is all folders organized alphabetically with one exception, the “Don’t Use” folder is always at the end.  
So, now I have accomplished several things:
  1. Reduced the number of apps on my iPad from 264 to 152
  2. Ensured that my most frequently used apps are easy to find and get to
  3. Created a nice organizational structure to follow for screens and folders, and finally
  4. Created reference spreadsheet to consult in case I forget what app is where or what app does what
Next I’ll do my iPhone with very similar organizational structure so I don’t have to switch gears when I switch devices. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

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