Digital Minimalism - Home Screens

Nowadays, everything is on our electronic devices. I can use my phone to read, text, watch TV, draw, journal, play video games, plan doctor’s appointments, do online shopping, book a train, set reservations for a restaurant, and do mobile orders for many fast-food chains; the opportunities are borderline endless. However, having a lot of things on your phone can be overwhelming. Full transparency, I have a phone with 256 gigabytes of storage to be able to have more apps, bigger apps. While I haven’t found an exact number of apps on my phone, the App Store shows that I have 76 apps that just need updating! I have many more than that.

I think we all do. I minimize the amount that I am impacted by it by having notifications off on most apps, such as anything social media-related. I do not have notifications for a single one of my social media apps.

I’ve created profiles on my phone that only show a small amount of apps so if I need to work on homework, I don’t have any apps unrelated to school on my home screen. It’s super cool! I love it. Now I want to teach you how to do it.

You know that a lot of phones have a “do not disturb” setting that you can enable to make sure you get zero notifications. On iPhone, you can set up multiple “focus settings.” When you do it, you can choose which apps to silence/which apps to only get notifications from. You can move forward to customizing your home screen in those settings, so only apps and widgets you choose can be seen. All apps can still be accessed through the app library! They can all have their own wallpaper and lock screen to make it easier. 

My favorite thing to do with each of the profiles I have made is to make custom icons for each app to have themes, and my school profile’s theme is to be pretty but with less stimulation so I am more likely to put it down. 

You make custom icons by finding some on Google, then you use the iPhone Shortcuts app to make home screen “shortcuts” that are designed to open the apps you want on the home screen. I made my own icons on Canva, rather than searching for a set/theme I wanted.

Here’s my home screens created for digital minimalism! (Featuring the theme I made for November). Beige is for school, and fun fact, I don’t care for pink much!