Your life is in your phone and even more so in the many apps you’ve downloaded. There are the apps you use the most, the ones you rely on to communicate with others, and the apps you use to keep up with social media and news.

Take a look at your different phone screens. How are your different apps organized? Are they even organized at all? Chances are, you’ve got tons of apps stored on your phone and you’re just used to knowing where each one is. For example, you might know that your Mail app is located on the first screen, in the third row, to the right. There’s not really a good reason for its placement, but you know it’s there. And that’s good enough for you.

But think about it – is your phone slowly turning into a digital junk drawer? If you think of your device as a place that stores everything you need but there’s no real organization to it – then you might be treating it like the drawer where you keep old bills, scissors, pens, tape, and whatever handy things you need but don’t really care to organize. Now think about how satisfying it is to open your post-Spring Cleaning junk drawer and see everything neatly in place. Apply the same action to your phone apps and you’ll find that it’s a lot easier to take care of business and even be more productive when your apps are categorized in a way that’s neat and makes sense.

Here Are 5 App Categorization Tips to Help You Stay Organized:

  1. Function – Make different groups (or folders on Android) for your apps and label them by what they do. Keep all of your email/communication apps like your Mail, Gmail, or any others you use altogether and label them “Mail” or something to that effect. Anytime you need to send a message to someone, you’ll have all communications in one app group. Similarly, you can keep all Social Media apps together and all News apps in another group.
  2. Frequency – Another great app organizing tip is to organize them by importance and frequency of use. For example, keep all of the apps you use the most on your front screen or place your top 4 in your dock. The trick is to not group your favorite apps in one folder because then you’ll have to expand that group to get to your most used apps every time you need them. Instead, keep these apps in the free space on your screen and group the others that you don’t use that often.
  3. Color Coding – This tip might seem unusual, but it works. Colors are an important part of the way products are marketed. Certain colors bring out specific emotions. For example, blue is associated with being calm and collected. Red brings out excitement and is usually associated with restaurants (think McDonalds, Carl’s Jr, and In N Out). Interestingly enough, by categorizing your apps based on color, your mind will not only be put at ease by its visual order, but you’ll also be able to easily locate apps when you need them.
  4. How You Use Them – One of the greatest app organizational tips is to group your apps by how you use them. If you have apps you use for work like email, industry news, maybe a messenger app like Slack, or task manager app like Asana – keep them all in one group and label it with your company name. Then keep a separate group labeled Travel for Google Maps, magazine apps, and podcasts. And another one for Photography with Instagram and photo editing apps.
  5. To Keep Your Screen Clear – A surprisingly popular way of categorizing apps is to keep your screen as clear as possible. This means creating lots of groups and being picky about which apps you download – which could actually be helpful in preserving battery life. Plus, if you have a motivational background on your screen, you’ll be encouraged to go after your goals every time you unlock your phone. One way to organize your apps around your background is to keep only your most important apps in the free space of your screen and all others in groups on a separate screen.

So stop using your phone as a junk drawer for your apps! Make use of these categorization tips and add more organization to your life as a result. Since you look at your phone screen so many times a day, it should be a priority to keep it organized like any other area of your life.

Bonus Tip: Put the YouMail app in your dock and have direct access to your voicemails from any screen. Plus, categorize and archive your voicemail messages into different folders just like you do with email. Check out YouMail Visual Voicemail today.