Reduce Distractions And Clean Up Your Phone With An App Purge

It sounds like the scariest proposition in the world if you use your phone or tablet a lot: just get rid of everything. We frequently wipe our phones (or desktops!), but BuzzFeed writer Charlie Warzel suggests something more simple: just uninstall all of your apps.

The idea is to strip your phone down to it’s most basic included functions, then slowly rebuild based on what’s absolutely necessary. OK, you definitely need Dropbox and Feedly. Your bank app should probably stay. Do you really need YouTube though? You never watch anything on your phone. As Warzel puts it, the process alone made him less likely to be distracted and more likely to use his phone for things he needed, rather than idle distractions:

At first this felt like a useful, but temporary, exercise — I could see, at least, which apps are truly most important to me. But as I lived with my new, lean homescreen for a while, something started to change. Fewer apps meant fewer distractions; I found myself checking my phone less frequently.

That’s not to say it turned my phone into a brick. By downloading only the apps I use regularly or rely on the most (Pocket for ‘read it later’ things, Simplenote for interview transcription and to-do lists, and Chromecast to watch videos on my TV) I felt like I wasn’t shutting out technology, but maximizing efficiency. More importantly, I was enjoying using my phone more.

In addition to reducing distractions, clearing out apps you only use once every three months (or check every 30 seconds for little to no benefit) can improve your phone’s performance. Fewer apps installed means fewer things running in the background, more free storage space and potentially less data usage. Android users looking for a quick way to uninstall apps can check out Easy Uninstaller, while iOS users can just head to iTunes.

The Case For Deleting All Your Apps [BuzzFeed]