It’s not Lodwick’s Standards single piece of paper, but I’m starting with a bit of a standards mission of my own. My first step was the iPhone since I spend a lot of time randomly checking it each day. I reshuffled the apps that appear on the homepage and this is how it has looked like for the last week.

You’ll see I have moved all of the communication apps to the top, away from the default bottom. The second row is all about navigating the city. The third row is recording photos and audio. The fourth has the utilities like Clock and Settings.

The default bar at the bottom is the most important because everything there is within easy thumb reach (this reach includes Yabble). There is Things for the actionlist, Calendar for the actions that have times associated with them, Spend for logging dollars and Notes for logging everything else.  This is a huge departure from having the communications apps being the most common, but it’s really nice because like Eddie my DunbarX is already too big to manage!

Another aspect of the shuffle was moving some of my formerly ‘most used’ apps to the 3rd screen so that there is a bit of friction to use them. This really makes you realise which apps you are hitting the most and then lets you be a bit objective about it – Tweetie (Twitter) has been shunned to the back page and will be staying there for a while!

None of these homepage apps have counters, except for the action list. None of them beep at me except Phone, Calendar and SMS. My Contacts and Calendar are cloudified but Mail only updates when I’m ready to see it. I have Gmail on the homescreen now because that threads the messages very nicely, and it’s actually a very fast app and keeps everything in one piece without making it too available. The Google Wave interface is still a bit buggy through the mobile interface so it’s not there yet – but it probably will find a place soon I think.

Clock is my alarm clock. I actually go into ‘Airport Mode‘ when I sleep now – so that I can fly away into dreamland without being interrupted by random messages, and also so that when I start the day I have a barrier between me, twitter and email! It’s straight into the action list I prepare the night before.

This has been a super useful experiment even just for the week, so I’m going to continue with it. I’d love to hear what you think and what mind-hacks you are using for productivity and focus at the moment.

By Ross Hill - October 6th, 2009 at 10:41am with 690 views