Four effective ways to declutter your phone today

Most of us spend way more time on our phones than we need to. According to a study on 11,000 active users of the RescueTime app, most people spent a daily average of 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone. This especially affects productivity levels among frequent phone users because they get distracted from their regular daily activities.

We always find ourselves idly scrolling through social media, holding onto thousands of images taken ages ago and keeping applications that we've never opened since the day we downloaded them – six months ago!

Below are five suggestions for an effective phone cleanout that will free up your phone storage space, and more importantly, your mind.

Cloud storage is honestly heaven-sent. You can access your files from anywhere without filling your devices with thousands of throwback photos, Whatsapp videos and Microsoft Word documents. Although free cloud storage plans have a limited amount of space, you can opt to upload only large files that quickly fill up your phone memory, plus the big secret in all this is to have more than one cloud storage account to double up on space.

Android users can use Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive or Amazon Drive. iPhone users can use some of the above storage options, as well as iCloud. These services are typically free unless you exceed the free storage space allocated by each application.

We sometimes download new applications with the intent of using them and then forget to uninstall them months after that first day. Browse through your phone apps today and differentiate between the apps you can’t live without and the ones you can live without.

You will save so much more phone memory when you do away with games that were never played past level two, social media apps that were never logged into and photo editing apps that keep crashing right before you save the final image.

You know those songs that you always skip and never stop to listen to? It’s time to let them go. Your life would even be easier if you only had to browse through songs that you love and actually listen to.

To save up even more space, subscribe to a music streaming service such as Apple Music, Deezer or Spotify so that you can listen to all your favourite tracks in “cloud storage”. The best part is that the above streaming services have an endless variety of high-quality music, with album art (if album art is a big deal for you). All you need is internet access, or better yet, download your absolute favourite songs within the apps so that you can listen to them offline.

Get organized and compartmentalise all your applications into specific categories. You can create folders based on social media, photo and video editing, games, utilities/services, and miscellaneous. This will declutter the appearance of your homepage and menu page, and give you an easier time accessing the exact application that you want to open at the time.