Once again, I have managed to decrease the number of things on my phone home screen.
I fully admit that this may look a bit extreme. Some explanation may be in order.
Contents
First of all, what are we looking at?
On top is a widget stack. It contains the battery widget, electricity prices, Mercury weather, and Apple's app suggestions.
Below that is a single row of apps. From left to right they are Messages, Reminders, Instapaper, and Photos.
The search indicator is turned on just above the dock, and there are no other app pages.
Finally, the dock contains a single app: Bebop.
Bebop?
Yes, Bebop. Bebop is a wonderfully clean and simple app for - basically - making notes without being distracted by things. It opens to a blank page and accepts text. When you hit the save button, the page clears, ready to accept new input. Beautiful.
Behind the scenes, Bebop by default saves each note to a new text file, but I have set it up to append each note to a text file named by today's date. You can save anywhere on Icloud drive, and I have unsurprisingly set it to save in my Obsidian folder.
This is exactly the same workflow I used Drafts for, which worked great. But Drafts grew and evolved and did so much more, and since I used only this tiny corner of its enormous power I did not feel motivated to upgrade to the modern subscription versions. Bebop, on the other hand, is a cheap one-time purchase, and since it does only this exact thing it feels even cleaner and nicer to use. I have a thought, unlock my phone, tap the one dock icon, jot the thing down, hit save, move on. (Plus any annoyances from the Iphone keyboard, of course.)
(A Kodsnack episode with Jack Cheng, creator of Bebop, will appear in the near future. Stay tuned!)
But why?
This whole setup is very much about trying to steer myself in directions I want to go. What I have on the home screen is essentially things I want to spend time on. I want to capture thoughts, I want to get my tasks done, I want to read saved articles, and I want to look at my photos. Messages is sort of an outlier or candidate for removal now that I think more about it, but I do want to communicate with people, and it is the one app I actually want to see notifications from right away, so I think it will stay.
There are of course a whole host of apps I use a lot which are not here. Ice cubes for Mastodon, Safari, podcast listening, home apps, maps, money transfers and banking, password management … But they fall in two clear categories: Apps I know when I want and need to use, and apps I can easily spend too much time in.
I will never forget and app I need, or be in that much of a rush to find it. I know my password manager and can easily find it by search or in the app library when needed. And the apps I spend too much time in I would actually like to forget sometimes. I do not need to be reminded that they are an option, and so I keep them off the home screen and give myself a small selection of "good" activities to choose from there.
In an ideal world, I would like to only pick up my phone when I already have the intention of doing something, and never just to see what I can find to distract myself.
Does it work?
It definitely does not hurt. I still frequently find myself swiping over to the app library looking for distractions, but I am working on ignoring the app library and getting into the habit of using only Spotlight to launch apps not on the home screen. That is why the search indicator is visible, I turned it on yesterday to try and remind myself. The clean home screen acts as a nice and calm speed bump when I unlock the phone, an extra check if I am actually intending to do something, or just looking for a random disctraction from the work of actually thinking about something. If I do not know what to do but write down a thought about it, so much better. Same thing if I go into Instapaper and read some article I deemed worthy of saving.
And if I still want to trawl through the oceans of Mastodon or Wikipedia, let me try to do so by thinking of them and lanunching them through spotlight, rather than swiping through the app library until something looks shiny enough.
(If I removed an app? I would probably put Books in its place, I have a lot of interesting reading stashed away there too which I could do well to look at more often.)