Increase Productivity By Organizing Your Android Home Screen
With such a small screen and an ever increasing number of useful apps, it is easy for your Android device’s Home Screen to become cluttered. Yet, if properly configured to suit your needs, an Android device can be a potent tool for GTD. Zainul, from How-To Geek, has assembled a great collection of tips for optimizing your Android productivity.
Folders, Folders, Folders
Depending on the version of Android your device is running, you will be able to have anywhere from 3-5 home screens. Many will find that, when installing apps, they will run out of space fast and will benefit from creating folders, i.e., collections of home screen shortcuts that are accessed via quick, pop-up menus.
To create a folder on the home screen, tap and hold the home screen until the Folders menu pops up.
Select the New Folder option and you’ll now see an empty folder on your home screen.
To rename the folder, tap it and then hold down the folder’s header to enter a new name.
To add an app to it, drag the desired app onto the folder.
The Folder Organizer
If creating and organizing folders sounds like too much work, you’ll want to try Android’s Folder Organizer. This handy utility groups your apps’ shortcuts by labeling them. Better yet, each app can have multiple labels and, therefore, belong to multiple groups, allowing for some pretty granular organization.
To install Folder Organizer, try searching for it in the Android Market. There are two versions of the app, a free lite version, and a premium paid version, but for our purposes here, the lite version is sufficient.
After installation, Folder Organizer automatically labels some of your apps with its default labels (e.g., Angry Birds would be labeled with the Games tag). To create your own customized labels, open up the Folder Organizer screen from your app screen, and tap the Labels icon.
Then, tap the plus icon to add a new label.
Once your labels are complete, tap the arrow button next to a given label to bring up the label menu.
Select Items to decide which items you would like to assign a label to. For our purposes, select Apps, and proceed to choose the applications you would like to label.
Once complete, you will have a new folder with the label’s name that contains all the apps you chose to label.
For more tips on getting more out of your Android home screen, head over to How-To Geek.
Source How-To Geek
