How to Organize Your Phone to Boost Productivity and Reduce Distractions

by Amy Cai

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Be honest. Have you ever stared at the staggeringly high screen usage time shown on your phone, and wondered where all your time had gone? Have you ever asked yourself how much of your phone time was actually necessary, versus the mindless activities that only gave you fleeting hits of dopamine?

All of us are culprits of spending too much time on our phones, unable to stay away from the tempting lure of TikTok, Instagram, or – in the case of my dad, a long-time loyalist since its Blackberry days – Tetris.

But if we want to live a life that isn’t dictated by distractions, we need to start taking control of how we use our phones.

We must learn how to use our devices to enrich our daily efficiency, rather than reduce it.

Here are a few methods to organize your phone, which have helped me tremendously with improving productivity and filtering out unneeded distractions.

1. Audit the apps on your phone screen

Start by reviewing the first two pages of your phone screen – there should only be apps that you genuinely need and regularly use.

If you don’t need the app, delete it.

If you do need the app but don’t use it very often, then move it off the first two pages of your phone screen. Group it with other less-used apps into a folder on the last page of your home screen.

It took me years to realize that I hardly ever opened the spend-tracking app sitting on my home screen, and that I was more prone to reading budget updates via email than on the app.

If you feel anxious about hiding your apps, remember that you can always look it up in your search bar – this is actually a much easier and quicker way to locate an app. Once you get into the habit of searching for your apps, you’ll realize just how much time you save by not having to sift through a sea of app icons every time you want to open something.

2. Hide your time wasting apps

Clean your screens by making it harder to access the social media or games apps that aren’t making you productive.

Group them into a folder, then move that folder onto your last screen page.

You can even go one step further and move your most addictive apps to the second page of the folder they’re in, so the app is completely hidden from view.

This simple trick recently helped me break my bad habit of constantly playing games on my phone. I couldn’t bring myself to delete the game app and thus wipe out my top scores, so I hid the game in a folder I rarely open. Surprisingly, doing this instantly curbed my behavior of mindlessly opening the game whenever I’m idle on my phone.

Simply move these apps out of side and out of mind.

3. Access social media using your browser and delete the app

It may not be practical to delete all your social media apps – I use the Messenger app to chat with friends, and it’s essential to helping me maintain long-distance relationships.

However, apps like TikTok are designed almost exclusively for solo use, and you can definitely get by with accessing them via the internet.

With a far poorer user experience on the browser, you’re much less likely to spend your time watching a never-ending stream of content on there.

4. Set up widgets for your most important apps

Widgets can help to break up the apps on your screen and remind you of your most important priorities.

My home screen features three widgets for my most commonly used apps: Google Maps, Notes and the Weather app.

Google Maps

This is quite honestly the most useful widget for me – it’s such a quick and easy shortcut that I’m always using.

I use my phone quite a lot for navigation, planning out routes and looking up places.

It’s super easy to tap the search bar and start typing my destination. When a friend brings up a restaurant or destination in conversation, I can also easily look up the place they’ve referenced and save it for a later date.

Also, when I’m out, I love being able to click the ‘Home’ tile below the search bar and jump straight into directions to get home.

Overall, this widget saves me heaps of time and helps me get moving fast.

Notes app

I love the ease of being able to jump into a virtual notepad and note something down.

The widget opens to app to the last edited note, and for me, this is usually set to ‘Article ideas’. I use this note as a brain-dump of ideas on things to write about, whenever inspiration hits throughout the day.

Weather app

One of the first things I do on my phone every morning is to check the weather.

By adding a widget that shows a summary of the day’s weather, it saves me the trouble of opening my Weather app.

This has helped me cut my phone interaction in the mornings to often a quick glance.

Some other productivity widgets you could also add:

- A half-page Calendar widget – this gives me a great glance of my key priorities every day.

- A half-page habit-tracking widget – I use the Habit Tracker app, which gives me a weekly checklist view of my habits.

- A half-page to do list widget – I use the Todoist app to track my tasks. I like seeing my tasks laid out in a checklist, ordered by due dates. It’s also super satisfying to check off my completed tasks from the list.

5. Set up Focus settings to limit notifications

Limiting unnecessary notifications is probably the most basic way to reduce distractions on your phone.

Consider implementing some of the following settings if you are an iPhone user:

Set up a Do Not Disturb setting for your evenings.

I have ‘Do Not Disturb’ turned on from 10.30pm until 8am the next day. This allows me wind down before bedtime and prevents me from being woken up by an unnecessary notification.

Set up a Work focus setting for deep work.

For about four hours every day, I set my Work setting to filter out emails, social media alerts and messages. Unlike ‘Do Not Disturb’, I have a small list of people who I allow to receive notifications from. Seeing the focus setting come up is also a good reminder for me that this is my time.

6. Turn off or reduce your notifications

You’ve almost definitely been told to reduce your notifications in order to cut down phone distractions.

If you’re someone who can’t live without notifications, consider making these changes:

Turn off notifications for Instagram and Tiktok.

For me, I don’t use these platforms to message my friends. They’re more for sharing silly memes or videos. As such, it’s much less important to respond to messages on there in a timely fashion.

I’ve completely turned off notifications for both platforms. I’ll get the notification when I open the app, but otherwise I don’t need them to distract me.

Turn off sound and vibration for notifications.

I still receive push notifications from my Facebook Messenger app, but I have these notifications silenced in order to reduce their interruption to my day.

I’ll see the notifications on my phone screen when I pick up my phone, but if my phone is facing down, I won’t get alerted.

Set up your notification center.

This is useful for less time-urgent apps where you want to check notifications maybe once per day. It’s also convenient to be able to scroll and catch up on all your notifications in one go.

I use it to receive alerts from my news apps for breaking news headlines. You could try setting this up for social media apps, if neither of the actions listed above work for you.

However, it’s important to limit your notification center to only the most relevant apps, as it can easily get quite cluttered.

7. Install an app-blocking app to reduce phone time.

I use the One Sec app, recommended by productivity guru Ali Abdaal, to set up shortcuts that prevent me from mindlessly opening my time-wasting apps.

When I try to open Instagram for example, the app will interrupt me with a message asking me to breathe for 10 seconds (or however long you want to set it for). Once the time is over, I can then choose to open Instagram or leave the app.

Usually, 10 seconds is all I need to recognize that there isn’t a genuine necessity for opening the app, and I will exit out and do something else.

You can also set up protocols to go to another, more beneficial app instead.

On the occasion that I do choose to continue to the app, I’m then prompted with a question on my intention for using the app. If the 10 seconds weren’t enough, asking this question is another step to prompt mindfulness.

This app has helped me to significantly reduce my automatic phone habits.

What really sets it apart from other app-blocking apps out there is that it encourages more mindful phone use.

Even if this doesn’t prompt you to re-consider your intention, adding a process that slows down how easily you can open an app is still enough to deter you from incessantly opening it.

8. And finally…learn to turn your phone off.

At the end of the day, no matter how many apps you download or widgets you set up, learning to spend time off your phone is still the most effective way to boost your productivity.

Turn your phone off during dinner or when you’re with friends.

When was the last time you actually turned your phone off, without needing to save battery, force a restart, or to stay silent during a movie?

This is the first test. Can you turn your phone off when you’re hanging out with your friends?

I once had dinner with a group of friends and we all decided that we would head to the restaurant and spend the night without our phones.

It felt a little daunting at first – what if we couldn’t find one another? What if we got lost and needed directions?

But humankind has been able to navigate and arrange meetups long before the smartphone was invented.

Many of us did it as kids – we can do it again.

Intentionally switching your phone off can feel so daunting, but it can also feel extremely liberating once you realize you don’t need to rely on your phone as much as you do.

Get your admin work done on your laptop.

If you need to type up an email, get in the habit of doing it on your laptop instead. You type faster using an actual keyboard, and you can also use shortcut keys to speed things up.

Laptop use has gone down over time, as the growing versatility of our smartphones has driven up our phone use, but laptops are still the most productive.

We tend to associate more serious work with working on a laptop, likely because we all did our schoolwork on laptops growing up, and many of us with office jobs have continued that tradition.

Find the joy in using analog productivity methods

Apps that replace your notebook or planner can be more efficient, there is also great joy in writing things down by hand.

Try using a physical planner, calendar or to-do list to organize your life.

If, like me, you struggle with object permanence (i.e. if you don’t see something, you easily forget it), then having things written down and placed somewhere significant in the physical world can really help remind you of your tasks.

Writing in a journal or notebook can also spark new ideas that don’t come to you when you’re typing on your phone. Splurge a little and get yourself a nice pen and notebook. There can be something so joyful about holding a weighty pen in your hands and putting words down on thick paper.

With the exponential growth of digital products in the past decade, we’re starting to see the rise of a digital minimalism movement, driven by people who are sick of spending their days stuck on their phones.

People are increasingly seeing the beauty of living life with fewer digital distractions. And who can blame them? There is so much waiting for us in the physical world, if only we remember to look away from our phones.

Productivity