10 Easy Ways To Declutter Your Phone

This post was most recently updated on September 19th, 2022

Your phone is probably your lifeline – there are people who can’t live without their phone just in an hour. Your phone is your way to connect with others, to get work done, or just to spend waiting times – playing games, listening to podcast/audiobook or find something on the internet.

Research from RescueTime in 2019 claims that people generally spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes on their phones every day, with the top 20% of smartphone users spend more than four and a half hours.

Have you ever felt that you’re phone getting slow when you want to open an application? Do you feel like your phone is a cluttered mess? And sometimes you just can’t really find what you’re looking for?

I’ve been there! I used to don’t even remember downloading new apps, files, photos – whatever it is. And when I realised that, my phone is really in mess and taking so slow!

And the most effective way to limit the amount of time you spend on your phone is decluttering it and getting rid of all the useless things.

SO, are you ready? It’s time to declutter your phone and maximize usage to get more done!

Delete unused applications

When you get a new phone you will usually unknowingly download applications that are not important or that you will rarely use. I several times unknowingly did that and started removing applications that I almost never use. I used to love playing games, but now I can play once every two weeks so I decided to delete them and some other learning applications.

Delete your unused apps is one of the besy way to declutter your phone.

Go through who you’re following on your social media

I recently checked who I followed on Instagram, I haven’t done it for almost a year, because I don’t follow many people, maybe around 300, many of them are online shops.

I started to check which ones were really interesting to follow and which were not important, thereby reducing 50% of my following.

Organize your playlists

I have around 300 songs on my phone, old-new western songs, Chinese, Korean, Japanese. The songs that I like are mostly old songs that I don’t want to deleted – it brings memories to me.

Whenever there is a new song that I like, I will automatically add it to the playlist, so that my playlist becomes so large. I began to see which songs I had rarely listened to in the past few months and delete it.

Unsubscribe from unimportant emails

Sometimes, when you surf the internet, you will find interesting things and if you want to keep updating, you have to subscribe, just like when you create an account for facebook, instgaram, twitter, and other interesting websites.

Automatically, the website will almost every day send e-mail notifications or maybe just advertisements to you, which are not important, and in the end, will fill your email inbox. Like what I did.

I schedule once a week to check email in detail, is there an important website that I really have to subscribe to or not, because sometimes online shop advertisements or website information is important and sometimes not, so it will be confused to decide whether to subcribe or not.

Empty recently deleted files/photos

I have a habit of taking lots of photos of the same object at one time. Because I haven’t found the right angle or the right color that I want. As a result, the same object may have 5-10 photos on my phone.

You can clean your gallery every 3 days or once a week. Delete photos that you no longer need or have backed up. But don’t forget to delete the photos that you deleted. For example, I have a “me” photo folder, there are 3 photos that I delete. But the three photos have not been completely erased on my phone because the three photos entered the “trash” folder. Just like when you delete a file on your laptop that will automatically enter the “recycle bin.”

The files that are still piling up will fill your phone’s memory and slow down the phone’s performance.

Back-up Photos & Delete

I believe the huge source of phone clutter is photos. We take more photos just in five minutes! The number of photos taken to date is in the trillions! That’s a lot of photos.

It’s tough to narrow down photos and even delete them, especially your family photos or even photo of yourself. Many of us want to keep every single moment – memories. But keeping so many also diminishes the importance of truly special photos.

So, here what I’ve done. Connect and backup your photos on your phone to a photo storage service like Google Photos or Flickr. Delete duplicates photo – keep only the best of the best. Back up your photos rather than keeping them on your phone.

This way alone will drastically improve your phone’s performance and declutter your phone.

Delete call log

Deleted your call logs every day or it’s up to you for the schedule. Sometimes you will only let call logs pile up because you don’t care much about it.

Shelving rows

I have so many applications on my phone, either from the phone itself or the one I downloaded. So, what I did with them is to create a folder, which helps me keep everything organized on my home screen.

You can create folders based on usage or type of app or any system you find useful. I find it’s even helpful to put my social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Wechat into the ‘Social Media’ folder.

Move app icons into the various folders by simply holding and dragging them.

You can also organize your apps by the task. For example, since I’m a blogger, so I put Pinterest, Twitter, WordPress, Notes, other apps I always use into one folder. That way, I can find exactly what I need when I need it. It’s also saving me from distraction. I won’t get tempted to play a game when I open my social media folder.

Use cloud storage

To save memory on your phone, back up information to the cloud. Choose your highest areas of memory usage—usually photos, music, and video, and store them in a cloud service rather than on your phone.

For Android users, check out Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive. iPhone users can use iCloud or OneDrive as well. Google Drive for iOS and Dropbox is also available for iPhone.

Clean your cache

The “cached” can easily take up more than a gigabyte of storage space. These caches of data are essentially just junk files, and they can be safely deleted to free up storage space.

After playing games, checking social media, watching video on youtube, or checking something else on the internet, remember to clean up your cache.

Wrapping Up

Our phones are amazing tools to help us lead better, more productive lives. Keeping your phone organized and apps prioritized will help.

Photo credit: Georgia de Lotz

Declutter your phone, so it truly becomes a tool to help you live a smarter life!

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Happy Organizing!