4 Ways To Declutter Your Android Device For Better Focus

20 Mar 4 Ways To Declutter Your Android Device For Better Focus

Did you know that your disorganised phone could be affecting your focus and productivity?

According to Princeton University, clutter and disorganisation affects the way you process information in addition to increasing stress levels. Disorganisation and clutter overwhelms your senses and causes stress hormones to spike.

Digital clutter, aka your disorganised phone, inhibits your ability to focus on one specific task, curbs productivity and impairs creative thought.

Yes, your untidy phone could be affecting your brain and your moods.  So it’s time to make cleaning out your chaotic phone a priority.

Now that we use our smartphones for nearly everything from storing memories to keeping in touch to completing tasks, the amount of data that accumulates over time is phenomenal. This means that in order to save our brains from digital clutter, it is important to organise the data on your smartphone and remove any data that isn’t required.

Here are four of the quickest and easiest ways to tidy up your Android phone and improve your productivity:

Deleting the Junk

SD Maid

Sometimes when you delete an app or a file it leaves data behind.  While the tech savvy among you probably could dig deep into the depths of their phone and eliminate these remnants, most of us don’t know how or simply don’t have the time.

This is why SD Maid is such a great little invention.

SD Maid trawls through both the SD card and internal storage and presents the user with a glimpse of used and free space that’s available on different directories you have on your Android. It also offers users a simple way to browse all of the files saved on the SD card.

The main function of the app, the aptly named “CorpseFinder”, scans the device for any leftover files that are no longer used by any of the apps currently installed. It then displays these files in a list, allowing the user to open a single file to find more information about it and delete it or delete all files in the list.

SD Maid offers a host of other features to help you manage the files saved on your device, with the paid version offering extra features such as App Cache Cleaner and Duplicate File Finder.

To download SD Maid on the Google Play store click here.

Clean Master

Similar to SD Maid, Clean Master makes it easy to find what’s eating up all the space on your device and get rid of it.

The Clean Master opening screen shows your used space and free space on both the SD card and the internal storage.  This makes it easy to understand how much space you have and where you have it. It also shows four tabs, history, privacy, tasks and app manager.

The history section of the app allows you to see the cache size of all of your apps.  From here you can pick caches to delete individually or you can hit ‘clean’ and clear most of them out a once.  Obviously, anything really important will be saved.

Did you know that some apps record your personal information? The privacy section of Clean Master can help you to delete all of this information and keep your private information private.

Clean Master’s task manager allows users to see all of the apps and processes running in the background of your phone draining your precious battery life.  It also allows you to easily kill all the unwanted ones.  This is a great feature for those who constantly find themselves with a dead phone.

The app manager lets you easily clear out all those pesky residual files left over from apps you’ve deleted off your phone.  It also allows you to quite quickly uninstall any apps you don’t want.

This app is a must for anyone that uses their phone heavily. It will greatly improve the speed, battery life and function of your phone.

It’s free in the Google Play Store. To download Clean Master on the Google Play store click here.

Creating Folders

When you have 10 pages of apps and you can never find what you’re looking for, it makes sense to start moving things into folders.

This is incredibly easy to do on an Android, so next time you’re waiting for the train or have a spare minute on your lunch break, instead of mindlessly perusing the internet, start organising apps.

For those of you who don’t know how to create folders, just follow these simple steps:

1. Tap the App Drawer on your screen to view your apps.
2. Select the first app you would like in a folder by dragging it over to the home screen, hold down the icon until it comes out of the drawer and the home screen slides in beneath it.
3. Place the app wherever you prefer on the home screen and release it.
4. Go back into the App Drawer and select another app to add to the folder.
5. Instead of dropping the second app on the home screen, put it on top of the first app.  The second app should move behind the first app and create a folder.

Merging Your Contacts

This is an important one.

Not just because it will save you time in the long run but also if you have six contacts all titled “Sarah”, you might end up calling a dead number or the wrong person.  And that’s always a little bit embarrassing.

Merging duplicate contact information may seem like an impossible task but it can actually be remarkably easy.  Click here to see last week’s article on merging contacts for Android devices.   In it we’ve outlined how to merge your contacts using the link function on your phone, an app and Google contacts.

 

Organising Your Photos

Going through your camera roll every time you want to show someone a photo from last Christmas can quickly become a frustrating exercise in swiping and tapping.

You can sort everything into albums but let’s face it, having to individually select every photo you’d like to single out is time consuming.

Fortunately there’s a nifty little app that will help you arrange your ever growing photo collection.

It’s called Tidy and it’s here to make your life easy.

Tidy works by analysing all of your photos and sorting them using three filters (time, space and shape).  From here you can tidy up and create albums with just a swipe.

For example, if you’d like to put all your screenshots in one album, hit the shape filter and it will group all of your photos by size. Swipe the ‘screenshots’ section to the right and voila, you can put all of them into an existing album or create an entirely new one.

Or, let’s say you want all of the photos from a holiday in one album.  Select the filter to group by distance and pick the distance you’d like. As before, swipe right on the group and you can put all of these photos into an album in one go.

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No more sifting through your endless camera roll.

Best of all, this app is free!

To download Tidy from the Google Play Store click here.

Do you have any other tips for how to clean and organise your smartphone? Let us know in the comments below!