The Life Changing Power of App Spring Cleaning

The Life Changing Power of App Spring Cleaning (Or, what happened when I actually listened to my sister’s tech advice, with a researcher’s twist.)

One of the things that Jo, in her cyber wisdom, keeps telling me to do is delete apps I don’t use. There are likely icky, aging apps that haven’t been updated since we were all wearing skinny jeans and I probably have subscriptions to things I’m not using. (Both of these turned out to be true). What I didn’t expect was that this cleaning chore would radically change my relationship to my phone. Here’s how app spring cleaning played out. 

 As a researcher, I decided to expand the spring cleaning aspect of my sister’s advice  into a tech redesign. I have a phone, an iPad, a laptop and an Apple watch and realized they are all overrun gardens with a wilderness of apps and purposes and that were stressing me out. This was likely because I am a typical person who  expects all the things I hired for my phone to just magically work, like Cinderella’s little creatures, who help her bank, shop, and do the New York Times crossword puzzle. That’s just good design, right?

But I know all systems need maintenance. Jo knows this because tech changes. I know this because people change. So even the most well-designed tech stack is going to need some dusting. While the tech side of my was okay, the human side really needed an overhaul. I bought my first iPhone before there were apps and the last time I thought about cleaning my tech was because I had run out of storage burning cds to a MacBook. I hadn’t taken the time to design my own system and now my system was running my life instead of being my little cartoon bird helper. 

So, it was time for “cheater research.” There’s a set of research tools around “Jobs to Be Done.” There are fancy methods, but the principle behind them is easy: What “job” have you “hired” your service or device to do? The key is to write the actual job, not the one you would write on your expense report or run by your spouse to sound important, but to reflect on the actual job and usually fixes some sort of problem or annoyance.   Example. I “hired” a Sonos speaker to entertain me by playing music while I made dinner,  so I could stop getting pasta sauce on my record player.

Here’s what I got when I wrote my tech stack’s Jobs to Be Done. Some might sound obvious, but my goal was to pinpoint was the tech stack was doing well and wasn’t, so “tiny handheld computer that does everything” wasn’t going to cut it for this exercise.

Phone: 

• My phone is a short message and FaceTime machine so I can talk to my sister and friends. 

• It’s also my go-to local and beyond travel tool so I don’t get lost and can have reservations, e-tickets, paying for things, and find cute coffee shops while traveling. 

• I didn’t realize this until I got into a serious app audit, but I discovered my phone is a really great audio machine, which makes it a great music player/remote control and a meditation tool. It’s also a great portable camera. 

I also made a list of things that are annoying the crap out of me, and where I need to “hire”/change something to make the lovely features of the phone actually work. 

• I feel like I’m spending a lot of time scanning and checking things that don’t need to be viewed as often. 

• Do I really need to check in on my stock portfolio daily? My bank accounts? Nope. 

• I also am finding it to be a stressful browsing and reading machine. The screen is tiny and I am finding I scan instead of read using this machine. 

• Is this really the best video machine? Why do I have all my television apps on my phone? 

IPad: 

•  Most of the time its a portable tiny television that can go anywhere in the house

• a back-up “work” machine (responding to email, writing documents, working on spreadsheets, planning. 

• It’s also a good digital cookbook

• way better e-reader than the phone

• superior doing general research tool, browsing, and shopping 

The thing that’s not working that I want to change. 

• This tool feels really underutilized. What can it do way better as my digital house buddy and travel computer that I’m defaulting to on my phone? 

Laptop: 

• This is the serious work machine, like the things I use to play around with data in R, actually format documents, want a big screen, play with Figma and create documents or spreadsheets.

• It’s also a really lovely Zoom and video conferencing machine. I used to have a Facebook Portal, that served this purpose beautifully, but Facebook stopped sending updates, so it doesn’t meet tech security barriers. Sigh. 

That thing that’s not working that I want to change:

•  I haven’t had a dedicated laptop in a few years, having defaulted tasks to the iPad (and, really, iPhone). I love the idea of this being a creative and learning tool. How do I set that up? 

Watch:

• I bought it to be my sports watch. So far, so good. 

• It has turned out to be a great machine for getting notifications while doing something else. Aka, knowing that dinner has been delivered while I’m cleaning the house. 

The thing that’s not working that I want to change: 

• There’s a lot of apps on my Apple Watch that don’t really seem necessary and are cluttering up the space. Do I really need them?

•  Are there things that could be good on my Apple Watch that I’m ignoring? 

So, I had theories about what I wanted my machines to do and not do in my life. Now, it was time for this week’s big spring cleaning task: The app audit. Here’s how I went about actually looking at the scary digital closets of my devices. 

I decided to do the audit on paper, making a simple graph of what to delete, keep, or install on each of my devices, starting with what was installed on the bloated iPhone. Basically, I was playing a game of “Cliff/Shag/Marry” with my own tech. I was very surprised to write EIGHT PAGES with a whopping 90 apps just on my phone. Here’s the summary. 

Phone 

 

Keep 

Local and beyond travel apps — Seattle Transit, AirBnb, Delta, Clear and other obvious travel apps. Navigation apps, like AllTrails and Google Maps; My favorite weather app, Clime. 

Messages, FaceTime. 

Merlin Bird ID —- Because identifying birds in the wild may be the best use of my phone. 

Doctor’s office apps: Like having super portal medical records/access. Feels like safety feature. It didn’t make my original list, but keeping them on the phone. 

Patreon — Kept and upgraded to see notifications. I realized I was missing content that I wanted to see and was underusing this service. 

All the meditation apps, podcasts, and music apps. I realized the phone really is a great audio tool. I love being able to connect things to smart speakers, listening to music and podcasts on the go, and having a portable meditation library. 

Kept, but flagged to possibly delete: 

Gmail. Can I make this an iPad activity?

Google Drive. I may need to see docs, on the fly, but deleted docs and sheets in a decision to not edit them on the phone.

NYTimes —-I’m not into reading on the tiny screen, but do like to play games, and sometimes do this remotely. 

Delete - 

Amazon. This is no longer a browsing/shopping machine, so Amazon goes to the iPad. 

Every video streaming app. The phone is a terrible video player, so I’m not going to use it as one. 

Reading apps: Kindle and Play Books. NYTimes cooking. Seattle Times. Slack.  Tiny screen, no need for these. 

All banking apps. If I really need to know bank account balances on the fly, which is almost never, I would log into the web app.  

Stuff I wasn’t using, or isn’t getting updated: My beloved Google Keep which isn’t being updated was deleted in favor of Notes. IMovie. Google. Keynote. A bunch of pre-installed Apple Apps, Clips, Files, Health, Home, Messenger, Numbers, OneNote

Stuff that definitely needed to be deleted: My old banking app from a bank that doesn’t exist any longer. Lensa this year’s $35/year mistake that doens’t need to be next year’s. Songshift. Again, paying for something that I am not using. 

Reacreation.gov and planning apps —- moved to iPad. 

I deleted Chrome, but found out I couldn’t delete Safari, so I listed it as a blocked app and can toggle it back on if I really need it. Could I actually have a phone that didn’t need to browse? (This ended up being the life-changing app deletion decision. So far, having a phone with no browser is wonderful.) 

IPad

I had very few apps here so there wasn’t anything to clean, but I added a number of things that had shifted from the phone: all shopping, browsing, banking, cooking, reading, watching. Aka, anything that needed to be a lightweight, portable, visual activity and anything that needed periodic checking, like paying bills. 

So far, this is working well. Putting these activities on a machine that is better suited for them makes them easier. I also just use my iPad differently - it’s a quieter machine with fewer pop-ups, messages, and distractions in how I have it set up. The best part is I’m doing less of these things on my iPhone, and spending more quality and less “junk food” time reading articles and then doing a bunch of “junk browsing.” I’m guessing I’ll spend less money. 

I also subscribed to my local paper, the Seattle Times. There has been a huge difference in perspective for me on seeing news here, versus the tailored Google News. Bank failures and tech layoffs seem less bad when I look at them maybe once a day, and there are articles about cherry blossom trees and recipes alongside them. 

Computer

The computer is weeks old, so I haven’t had time to add anything silly to it. But it doesn’t make me realize how messy my Google Drive is. Time for another major cleaning project there. 

Apple Watch

I figured out how to delete everything off of this that was possible, except Music, Messages, and Fitness. There are so many weird apps that don’t need to be on my watch. Apple also has a bunch of things that I can’t delete easily, so I’m flagging that as another spring cleaning project. 

On a closing note, this is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I’ve spent a few days with a really boring phone, including a weekend away, and I love it.  I didn’t realize how often I pick up that tiny device to fill time, asking it to constantly entertain me. I make better choices when I’m a little bored. I’ve read more books, looked at more sky, talked to more people, and have a cleaner house. The best part? The feeling the drug-like dread that I may be missing something or just need to check one thing isn’t a thing. Has spring cleaning my phone changed my life for the better for good? Can my tech actually do the jobs I literally hired them to do? With a little home system design, the can, but I don’t think they are going to do that without effort, out of the box.  I realized I will have to design the human part of behavioral change, like making sure I carry a big enough purse for a book at all times, but more on that and the life changing decision to live without a phone browser in the next blog post.