Having a place where I can do work that is more portable than a laptop has long fascinated me. I did it with my early Handspring, and moved through the various devices since then. I purchased an iPad some years ago, and love the flexibility of having a lightweight tablet that has apps that I can use on my PC. Unfortunately, my iPad became disorganized to the point of unusability, and I was always struggling to find what I needed. I recently reclaimed my device and spent time reworking my tablet screens.
Why I Love My Tablet
I love my iPad. I generally have it with me wherever I go. It can access all of the files on my various cloud services, including all the files on my home PC thanks to OneDrive.
I love that I can set up the device with a portable keyboard and take notes in any meeting, sending them directly to the team OneNote. I love that I can pick up the pencil and draw diagrams, doodles and hand write things as the situation calls for it.
I am currently on my fourth iPad, and it is a mainstay for everything I do. I use it for blogging, fiction writing, meeting notes at work, designing cross stitch patterns and more. The amount of software out there is staggering, and I can always find an app for what I am trying to do.
Bad Habits With the Tablet
I had developed some bad habits when it came to maintaining and using the tablet:
- I allowed all apps I downloaded on the iPhone to automatically download on the iPad. This left me with dozens of apps I would never use – including ones that I was simply trying out on the phone.
- I let the iPad determine where the apps would live. Even before the app library – of which I am not a fan – I would let the iPad throw apps wherever there was room on the screen. As a result, I ended up using search to find everything.
- I kept a lot of apps that I thought I might use at some point. These came from recommendations as well as things I was trying out.
All three of these habits left me with a mess. So it was time to step back and come up with a plan for reworking my tablet screens.
How I Reworked My Tablet Screens
Reworking the tablet started, oddly enough, with a piece of paper. I took a half hour and wrote down general groups of all of the things that I did regularly on the tablet. Here is my list:
- Work activities
- Blogging
- Fiction writing
- My morning routine, with all of the apps that I use to go through SAVERS
- Fitness,
- Watching videos
- Reading
- Taking notes
Cleaning Things Out
After I had the basic list, I went through the list of all apps in my app library and decided if each one fell into one of the above groups. If it didn’t, I either had to add another group – or delete the app.
I deleted over 60 apps from the tablet during that purge – and only added two new groups of apps: one for creative apps, and one for the apps that I use while playing Animal Crossing.
You Don’t Have To Have A Single Place For An App
The thing that I found while doing this is that I can have the same app on multiple screens. This allows me to keep everything that I use together without having to switch screens or give up valuable dock real estate.
My Kindle app lives in both my Morning Routine as well as my Reading screens. Notes lives on my home screen and in my Morning Routine screen.
Setting Up The Screens
I looked at my groups of apps, and realized that some things went hand in hand with others. For instance, I never watch videos on my iPad unless I am on exercise equipment, so those two groups merged. Same with Reading and Taking notes.
I set up one screen for each group of activities and ordered them with how much I would use them. Here is how they fell into line:
- Morning Routine: MultiTimer (meditation), Kindle, Morning Pages, Morning! (gratitude), Sudoku, DuoLingo and Notes
- Work: OneNote, Zoom, Teams, Skype, Google apps (Drive, Sheets, Docs) and Microsoft (OneDrive, Excel, Word)
- Blogging: Notion (writer), Unsplash, Canva, WooCommerce, ConvertKit and Patreon
- Fiction Writing: Scrivener, Post-It
- Fitness: Fiton, Disney+, Apple TV and Britbox
- Reading: BookBuddy+ (for tracking what I have read), PDF Expert, Libby, Kindle and Nebo
- Animal Crossing: Nookazon, Nintendo Switch Online, Discord
- Creativity: Procreate, Stitchly, Notion (composer)
My Home Screen and Dock
The only apps that are left are the ones in my dock, and the ones on the first screen of the device. I save these for the things I use all the time.
Dock
The dock contains my 6 most used apps:
- Goodnotes
- Remember The Milk
- 1Password
- Google Calendar
- Spark (email)
- Freedom
The home screen has just a few apps: Settings, Trello, Safari and Notes.
After doing all of this work, I found that my tablet was much more usable. I was even able to set up focus times using the screens. I can hide everything except the work screen while I am in work mode, for example.
It has also made finding things on the tablet much easier. I simply navigate to the screen for the mode that I am in, and everything is there.
