You might have noticed that over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at ways I can improve the way I work  in an attempt to be more productive. Last week, I shared a little about using accessible document storage to improve the way you share information.

This week, I loaded up the apps section on iTunes and it surprised me that I had over 150 apps installed on my iPhone!

We have so many applications available on our phone and in my case it had turned from being useful to being a complete waste of time. I had 4 pages worth of icons and folders and if it wasn’t on my home page, I rarely used it. In fact, I figured that if I wanted to use one of these ‘forgotten’ apps, it would be faster for me to download it than find it on the phone.

This afternoon, I spent the time to delete everything on my phone that I didn’t need. If it fell in the “It might be useful in a few months” basket, I deleted it. I shrunk my apps list from 150 to just 30. I turned a 4 screen iPhone into one with just 1. Everything is now on the home page.
I found that I had 5 weather apps, 3 twitter clients, 4 running apps. Consolidating apps is a great place to start. Chances are, you don’t need duplicates. Now, I have the 1 running app, 1 weather app and 1 twitter app. Fantastic!

Now that I all my applications are on the one screen, it has become very evident that the automatic action on my phone is to unlock it and swipe to the second screen. Now, there’s one less swipe to get to what I want.

Cleaning up my iPhone apps has also helped me remove a whole heap of distractions. For example… Angry Birds and Pacman.

My goal now is to spend the time I would have used to play a game into time reading blogs or organising to-do lists. I have placed the tools that I value and want to use more prominently on the home screen with distractions like Facebook placed away in a folder.