How You Can Take Command of Your Digital Clutter Take on Today

How You Can Take Command of Your Digital Clutter

Find out why you should organize your phone and get the latest update on the shutdown of 3G service

AARP

Bob Edwards: Hi, I’m Bob Edwards, with An AARP Take on Today. Today, we’ll discuss how to organize your smartphone apps to help you improve your productivity and de-stress. But first, we want to share an important announcement. As major mobile carriers transition to 5G networks, 3G is being phased out. AT&T was planning to shut down its 3G service as early as this week. T-Mobile’s 3G network is scheduled to retire at the end of March, and Verizon’s at the end of December. But it’s not just cell phones. Millions of life-saving devices still rely on 3G. If you have a medical device, home alarm system, medical alert bracelet, or a GPS navigating system, you may lose service without realizing it. Or you might have lost it already. We covered this topic earlier this month, in episode 153. Take a listen for more details, or visit AARP DOT org SLASH 3G. We’ll have more resources in the show notes. Take command of your digital clutter! According to the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, 80% of the items we keep are never used. Our guest today says we treat our smart phone apps the same way. Ed Baig: Of the 40 apps you may have on your phone, you probably use well under half that number Bob Edwards: That’s Ed Baig, contributing writer for AARP and co-author of the book “iPhone for Dummies.” He says that being organized can help reduce stress and improve productivity in your daily life. Ed is here to discuss how to improve your smartphone organizational skills and why it’s so important. Welcome to the program. Ed Baig: Nice to be with you, Bob. Bob Edwards: Ed, where can you begin when it comes to organizing your apps? Ed Baig: Well, just like you would hopefully declutter your closet once in a while you should do that on your phone too. A good place to begin is to kind of set aside a few minutes and just go through your device and look at the apps that you have on there that frankly you haven't used in a week, a month, a year, and just get rid of them. It's just the same as cleaning out your closet only you're cleaning out your smartphone. Bob Edwards: How do you recommend we organize our folders? Ed Baig: People have different and methods of doing that. You put those apps that again you do use regularly just on that first home screen, but folders are a useful tool because you put all the kind of like-minded apps in one place. So you might put all your music apps or entertainment apps in one folder, or your travel apps in another folder. And some people will even go deeper than that. Okay, you have travel apps but subdivide those into maybe airline apps, or hotel apps, or even translation apps. Everybody has a different way of organizing things and it's just a matter of how deep you really feel comfortable going. Bob Edwards: If data storage is a problem do I need to delete apps from my phone? Ed Baig: Well, that's certainly one thing you can do. A lot of apps themselves don't take up a lot of room, but the data sometimes does, especially photos and videos. You can keep a lot in the cloud and keep a very small number kind of full resolution on your device. You could always access the photos or videos that are in the cloud when you really need them, you don't want to view them on your device, but they really do hog a lot of room. So that's a good place to start is just upload everything to the cloud. And then again, get rid of things you just don't use. Bob Edwards: Can I reclaim the data from my deleted app? Ed Baig: In most cases yes. The one thing to be careful of though for an app that you may sort of send off to pasture as it was, suddenly discovery you know what, I miss that app after all, and you can reclaim it if you've already bought it, or certainly if it's free. The one caveat though is it still available? Some apps do go bye, bye, and if they do you will not be able to reclaim them once they're gone. Bob Edwards: Some apps require subscriptions to use them. How can I check if I'm unknowingly paying for something? Ed Baig: There are places to go in settings to find out if you are subscribing to an app, and there are ongoing subscriptions people easily can forget about. I would just go into settings. Certainly on the Apple side you can go into iCloud settings, Google, you can look in the Google accounts, and you'll see a listing for the apps that you are actually subscribing to there, and certainly unsubscribe to anything that you're not getting any use out of. Bob Edwards: Do they always tell you how? Ed Baig: Well the short answer is no, they don't always tell you now. If you get it through the legitimate app stores you always have recourse through Apple or Google, but certainly there are shall we say less than reputable developers out there who make it hard sometimes to unsubscribe, which is why it's important to actually trust the app developer and where you're getting that app in the first place. Typically again, through the official app stores rather than getting it on the web, which is a little but dicier at times. Bob Edwards: It's not just about removing items, are there apps we can add to help people stay organized? Ed Baig: There are, there's a whole bunch of reminder apps and to do apps, you could easily find these in again the Google Play Store or the app store, but a lot of stuff is just built into your phone already. Apple has a reminders app for example on the iPhone, it's kind of like a to-do list. So that's a way to organize and just not only organize what's on your device but organize your life. Bob Edwards: We all know that using the same passwords could lead to security vulnerabilities, but how do you keep track of them all? Ed Baig: It's not easy, that's the biggest security dilemma of all. People not only use passwords that are too simple or easy to guess, maybe their pet's name or their birth dates, those are all no-nos. But they use those same passwords across all the devices as you've suggested. So that if you're breached in one place, guess what, you're in trouble everywhere else. I would recommend using a password manager, there are a number of them out there. Some of them are free, some of them you do have to pay for it, but it's a good place to store your passwords and in some cases encrypt them or scramble them so they're not easily you know ,breached. And I think that's a good, smart thing to do for folks. Bob Edwards: You could get more pets. (Laughs.) Ed Baig: You could do that, yes, absolutely. Bob Edwards: What other phone tips and tricks should they know? Ed Baig: Well, another interesting thing that's on your device and you probably don't know it's there is using your phone as a tape measure. It kind of uses augmented reality, which is kind of layering fake stuff on top of the real world, you can actually use the measure apps on iPhone and Android phones to actually get distances and things like that. Certainly I use a phone a lot as a voice recorder. I use it for fitness reasons, pedometers. It's amazing all the things that a smartphone can do that has nothing to do with making phone calls. They’re called smartphones because guess what, they’re pretty smart. They do a lot more than make phone calls, as we all know. The phone is becoming a replacement for physical wallets. In many cases, you can certainly pay with your phone, or if you actually have a smartwatch, you can do that too. Very easy to do, both on Apple and Android devices. It is also a wallet, in the sense of photos. We talked about storing your photos, which people used to do in physical wallets. Of course, you can keep a lot more photos on your phone. You can also now, in some places, even use it as a digital driver's license. You are going to see more of that going forward. Bob Edwards: Thanks for all this good advice! Ed Baig: You’re absolutely welcome. Bob Edwards: Ed Baig is a contributing writer for AARP, he’s the author of “Macs for Dummies” and the co-author of “iPhone for Dummies” and “iPad for Dummies” That’s it for today’s show. You can find more resources in the show notes. If you like this episode, please let us know by emailing us at [email protected] Thanks to our news team producers, Colby Nelson and Danny Alarcon. Production assistant, Lindsey Johnson. Engineer, Julio Gonzales. Executive producer, Jason Young, and my co-hosts Mike Ellison and Wilma Consul. Become a subscriber on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher or other apps. And be sure to rate our show as well. For an AARP Take on Today, I'm Bob Edwards. Thank you for listening. The same approach that you would take to decluttering your closet can be applied to your smartphone applications. Today, Ed Baig, a contributing writer for AARP and co-author of the book “iPhone for Dummies,” explains why people should want to organize their phone applications and provide us with efficient ways to do it. We also provide an update on the shutdown of 3G across the country. If you have a medical device, home alarm system, medical alert bracelet, older cell phone, or a GPS navigating system, you may lose service without realizing it. Or you might have lost it already. For more information: , an online discussion forum led by Senior Planet AARP article: AARP article: Subscribe:

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