I tend to hoard apps on my phone. As of this moment I have 345 apps installed on my phone and I’m not certain how many of those I need. However, whenever I think I have too many apps and decide I should go through and delete some I run into a problem. “Well what if I want to create a 3D CAD map of my home? I can’t delete Canvas!” This is the sort of thinking that creates physical clutter in one’s home and also tends to cause digital clutter.

Recently I’ve started a new strategy for deleting apps off my phone. I am one of those people who usually reads the release notes for apps when updates come through on the App Store because I want to be aware if a cool new feature is released for an app I use. Sometimes when I’m scrolling through the apps that need to be updated I realize I don’t care about what changed for it or I realize I didn’t even know that app was installed on my phone. In either of those situations I will almost always delete the app. On top of those I will also usually challenge myself to delete one app from the list of available updates since there is usually at least one good candidate to remove. Using these three criteria for deleting apps during the process of updating apps has allowed me to slowly and steadily remove some of the digital clutter in my life.

Important tip: in iOS 13 Apple added the ability to delete an app right from the update list instead of needing to remember to go back and delete it later! See below: