To find the perfect productivity setup, working well with my habits and changing style of work, once per a while - around every three months - I’m trying to optimize tools I’m using and my workspace, e.g. I switched between different task management software or text editors.
Recently I’ve changed they way I’m accessing apps on my phone. I like both clean screen with a lovely wallpaper and an easy access to the things I need and use most often. With this in mind the standard choice on Android for me was to keep one folder with most used apps on main screen and an app drawer under the home button to access the rest.
Unfortunately such a setup had at least two drawbacks:
- it was hard to decide which apps are crucial and find the right size of the working set in the folder on main screen
- because of seeing all the apps in the app drawer I’ve wasted to much time attracted to some random app B, when looking for the app A.
After a while I’ve found a launcher (Evie) that fixed both issues at once by:
- replacing the “working set folder” with gestures
- and full view of apps with search bar and a short list of recently found&run apps.
The result was much better than I expected. First, since then I’m spending much less time using my phone. Next, the number of easily accessible apps is constant, determined by the number of gestures I can configure, so I had to select the most important ones and eventually I’m using only around five of them per day now. Finally, as it’s much harder to remember all the apps on your phone than just tap on one of many icons, I’ve stopped using and uninstalled more than twenty of them.
A bit later I’ve also realized that it’s almost the same as my desktop - where I’m using several shortcuts for most imporant apps and rofi to search for the rest of them - just tailored to the touchscreen environment :)