Beautility, My Ultimate iPhone Setup

A guide to balancing beauty and utility on your iPhone

While I understand and appreciate the value of disconnecting from the digital world, so much of my life happens through the 5.5" screen on my iPhone that I’ve become addicted to it. Even as a tech nerd, I hate the constant buzzing and the incessant need to check my phone every 5 minutes, so I decided to change things up a bit and modify my phone to serve me, not the other way around.

To start, this is my home screen.

This is what I see every time I unlock my phone. There’s an abstract landscape in the background, but most of my home screen is, well… nothing, by design.

Gone are the pages of app icons littered with little red badges beckoning me to pay attention or take an action.

The two hard-to-see dots above the bottom app tray are the bare minimum because there’s a default page to the left containing useful widgets, more on that later, but I intentionally resized the wallpaper graphic to conceal the dots as best I could.

My home screen makes me calm. It feels like a blank canvas which, for a creative person, is inspirational. I played with a variety of solid-colored wallpapers, but something about this simple landscape hit the target for me.

You might have trouble in making the dots less obtrusive with this background in a scenario where iOS changes the dots from black to white. Fortunately, there is the work around. This happens due to some Apple magic that only gets triggered when the background behind the dots is pitch black. If you rearrange the background so that the background is merely very dark grey, then you’ll work around this feature.

Step 1: One folder to rule them all

Put all of your apps, except three, in one folder named “Apps.”

The single folder shown above containing all ~130 of my apps, alphabetized, was the most drastic change with this setup. 135 is the maximum amount of apps you can put in a single folder, 15 pages with 9 apps on each page. Coincidentally I had about 130 apps on my phone after I deleted around 10 or 15 while moving them into this folder. I have no idea if that’s more or less than average.

I organized them using iTunes, which I assumed would be faster, but I’m not sure it was as the UI was buggy and slow. Also, alphabetizing the apps was unnecessary because now I use search to do pretty much everything.

I hardly ever used search on my phone before this change, but now I use it for finding and launching apps, pulling up a contact to call or text, searching the web, etc. Swipe down, start typing, and tap the result you need. Searching for everything felt laborious at first, but after a few days I felt like I had a new superpower and I’m still surprised how quickly I can get to exactly what I need. (Note: If you use the Slack app and search on your phone doesn’t work well, or at all, try this fix which worked for me. cc: April Underwood!)

The other three apps on my home screen represent the 3 things I will choose to do on my phone if I’m not responding to a push notification: Chat with friends or family (Messages), see what’s going on in the world (Twitter), or work via email (early private beta of Superhuman, my new favorite email client).

You might choose different apps than I chose. There’s definitely a school of thought that Twitter and texting are interruptive time-sucks. If you feel that way, maybe you should choose the Podcast and Kindle apps.

Step 2: No-no-notifications

After I put everything into one folder, notification badges plagued me because they would appear on apps several pages deep in my folder and I couldn’t tell where they were without swiping through the folder.

Turning all notifications off isn’t an option for me, but this setup made me realize how many notifications I received each day that did not require my immediate attention. Spoiler alert: most of them. So for the next few days when a notification arrived I did one of three things…

If the notification was important and time-sensitive (Slack mentions, voicemails, etc.) I kept notifications enabled for that app and moved the app to the first page in the folder. If the notification was important, but not time-sensitive and wouldn’t appear often (Settings, Testflight, etc.), I left the app where it was and kept notifications enabled. If the notification was not important or time-sensitive (IG faves, Medium claps, etc.) I kept the app where it was and took 30 seconds to disable all notifications for that app in Settings.

After a few days, I had my most important apps on the first page in my app folder and most other notifications disabled. I added a few of my most-used apps on that page also like Phone, Google Maps, etc. though I still search to launch those apps as well.

This is the first page of my Apps folder.

Alternatively, if you are ready to give up all notifications in one big push, you can go straight to your Settings, find the Notification section, and then go app by app.