The Apps on my Home Screen for 2017

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From time to time I like to reassess the apps on my phone’s home screen. For an app to be on my home screen I either need to use it already every day, or want to start using it almost every day. My home screen apps reflect where my mind is, what my goals are, and how I’m going about optimizing and organizing my life. (HT to Jeff Hilimire for posting his screen and reminding me I should do a post about mine again)

The Apps I’m using the most / most excited about in 2017:

Food.com – this is a new app for me. I downloaded it because I want to learn to cook in 2017. So far I love it. It’s easy to find cool recipes, make shopping lists, etc.

MileIQ – this app tracks all of my driving. Then I open the app and swipe to the left if the drive was personal and right if the drive was for business. Each month it produces a report that I can use for my tax write off or to be reimbursed if needed. I love this app!

Waze – I continue to use Waze as my main navigation app because I can setup Planned Drives. Planned Drives are when I want to be downtown tomorrow at a certain time, I can punch that into Waze the night before, set the time I want to get there, and Waze will tell me how long it will take at that time and remind me to leave then. I love that.

Blinkist – this is a service I’m about to sign up for. It is like Cliff’s Notes for current books, and you can read them or listen to them. The summaries are really good. Since most of today’s books have about as much content as a blog post or white paper, I like the idea of this service to weed through books that have deep content and those that don’t.

Audible – this may be my favorite app! My goal this year is to listen to one book per week on Audible. My drive time has never been so productive or enjoyable.

Sheets – This is the app for Google Sheets. It may seem odd to have this one on my home screen, but it’s there for a specific reason. In 2017 I have decided to track some personal KPI’s (key performance indicators) for myself and using an old school spreadsheet to do it seems best. I’m tracking things like the time I go to bed and when I get up, how many meetings I have per day, if I exercised each day, etc.

Trello – this is a great app and service to use to organize stuff. I used it personally and with my team at Sideways8 to organize blog post ideas.

Slack – If you haven’t heard of Slack, it is an amazing messaging app for teams. None of the teams that I’m a part of could function without Slack. It eliminates the need for internal email and speeds up internal communication.

Social Media Row – I have a row of social media icons that I have a love/hate relationship with. I check Facebook from time to time to see how friends are doing. I use Twitter and Snapchat mostly to look at the news. And, I use Instagram mostly to post #hatselfies on the other platforms.

Cloze – this is an app I just started using last week. It is a personal CRM (Client Relationship Mangement). I like it so far because it integrates everything about my relationship with a person into one snapshot. I can go to a person in the app and see all of the meetings we have had, all of the emails we have exchanged, all of their public social media posts, all of my notes from our meetings and all of the contact information. Cloze does a good bit more than that, but that will be another blog post for another time.

Clash Royale – this game has held my attention longer than most. It’s a fun, card-like game, that I can play when I need to take a three-minute break from my day. The trick is not binge playing games back to back to back!

Inbox – this is Google’s Inbox app. Inbox is a slightly different way of approaching email. I like it because I can easily create groups of like email and bundle them together in the app. Then I can archive the entire group, let’s say it’s theoretically called “Promos,” all at once! I also like that you can take an email and snooze it for a day, to later in the week, or to next week.

OmniFocus – this is still my go to personal task list and has been for years.

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