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Declutter and Tidy Your

Cell Phone

by Maria Gracia Updated November 17, 2023 Join our newsletter to be notified when new content is added to our website. Chances are, if you’ve had your cell phone for awhile, it’s getting pretty cluttered with photos, apps, text and voice messages, and music. It’s easy for this to happen because the clutter on your phone doesn’t look as bad to the eye as a filing cabinet stuffed with paper or a room overloaded with clothes or toys. That being said, digital clutter is real. It can cause our phones to malfunction. It can reduce our productivity. Here are 5 easy ways to declutter and tidy your cell phone: 1. Say goodbye to apps you don’t use:  Yes, apps like Angry Birds may have been important to you at some point, but do you still use it today? If so, that’s fine. If not, it may be time to let that app “fly the coup” so to speak. Take a look at each app one by one and decide whether it stays or goes. Bottom line, if you haven’t opened that app in the last three months, it’s likely a great candidate for deletion. 2. Tidy the apps you do use regularly: I have my phone organized so that the apps I use every single day are on the first screen, and the apps I use more occasionally are on subsequent screens. For instance, on my phone’s home screen, I have Phone, Messages, Contacts, Calendar, Email, Clock, Camera, Safari, Facebook, Messenger, Weather, Life360, News, and First Aid (for quick emergency care information). That’s it. On subsequent screens, I have apps organized into digital folders, like Shopping (Amazon, Target, and such), Tools (Calculator, Voice Memos, etc.), Social Media (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest), Restaurants (MOD Pizza, Subway, etc.) and so on. It’s very easy to find what I’m looking for on my phone. 3. Just say no to photo (and video) overload: These days, it’s super easy to take a photo (or video) with your phone, and leave it there…for the life of your phone! That’s a long time. Is taking up that storage space really necessary? First things first…get rid of any photos you just took randomly for social media…the photo of what you ate at dinner at some restaurant a year ago, the 52 selfies you took when practicing taking selfies…anything that is really unnecessary to store. For the photos you do wish to keep, upload them to your computer or an online photo storage service, like Smugmug, organized by subject and year. I realize this could be overwhelming if you have years of photos on your phone…do just a little bit each day. For instance, upload Billy’s birthday photos today…once they’re on your computer or your online service, delete them from your phone. (Note: On my iPhone, deleted photos go into an ‘album’ called ‘Recently Deleted Photos. From time to time, I delete the ‘Recently Deleted Photos’ as well.) 4. Delete music you no longer need that is downloaded on your phone:  Chances are, you aren’t listening to the same music you were listening to a year ago, but it’s possible that music is still downloaded on your phone. Delete music downloads you no longer need. 5. Clean up your phone’s contact list and messages: Clean up duplicate contacts. There are apps to help you do this automatically. Manually delete contacts you’ll never contact again or those you have no idea how they ever got into your phone’s address book in the first place. Delete old voicemail and old text messages. In fact, if you delete these weekly, they’ll never get out of hand again. Back to Organizing Technology Index