My goal for the home screen is to stay focused on action by making it easy to quickly capture my intentions and to minimize distractions. With previous setups I often found that I’d unlock the phone, be confronted by a screen full of apps with notification badges, and promptly forget what I had intended to do. So, I’ve reduced my home screen to just two apps.

iPhone home screen

Drafts is on the right and is likely my most frequently used app. As the tag line for the app says, this is where text starts. Rather than searching for a specific app, launching it, and then typing, Drafts always opens up to a blank text field. Then I type whatever is on my mind and send it from Drafts to the appropriate app. So, text messages, emails, todos, meeting notes, and random ideas all start in Drafts. Unfortunately my corporate iPhone blocks iCloud Drive, so I can’t use Drafts to share notes across my devices. Anything that I want to keep gets moved into Apple Notes.

Things is on the left and is currently my favoured todo app. All of my tasks, projects, and areas of focus are in there, tagged by context, and given due dates, if appropriate. If the Things app has a notification badge, then I’ve got work to do today. If you’re keen, The Sweet Setup has a great course on Things.

A few more notes on my setup:

  • If Drafts isn’t the right place to start, I just pull down from the home screen to activate search and find the right app. I’ve found that the Siri Suggestions are often what I’m looking for (based on time of day and other context).
  • Some apps are more important for their output than input. These include calendar, weather, and notes. I’ve set these up as widgets in the Today View. A quick slide to the right reveals these.
  • I interact with several other apps through notifications, particularly for communication with Messages and Mail. But, I’ve set up VIPs in Mail to reduce these notifications to just the really important people.

I’ve been using this setup for a few months now and it certainly works for me. Even if this isn’t quite right for you, I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to really think through how you interact with your phone. I see far too many people with the default settings spending too much time scrolling around on their phones looking for the right app.