How to organize hundreds of iPhone apps onto a single home screen

I break my home screen into three sections: The Dock, Shortcuts, and Folders.

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The Dock features my four most important iPhone apps.

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In this case, it’s Apple’s Phone and Safari apps for calling and web browsing, respectively, as well as Edison’s AI-powered Mail app for email (replacing Apple’s default Mail app), and Spotify for all my music needs (replacing Apple Music).

Above the Dock are all my Shortcuts: I use these 12 apps very often, so I don’t organize them into folders — out of sight, out of mind, you know — and I keep all of them lower on the screen so they’re easier to reach with my thumb.

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My shortcuts consist of:

— Uber, for getting from A to B

— Splitwise, for keeping track of all of the bills I split with my partner

— Apple’s Notes app, for taking quick notes

— Slack, for communicating with coworkers

— Google Hangouts, for chatting with friends

— Twitter, because I’m a glutton for punishment

— Apollo, the best Reddit app there is

— Apple’s Messages app, for texting friends and family

— The App Store, for finding new apps and updates

— Things 3, for keeping my entire life organized

— Settings, to quickly make system-wide changes

Above all my shortcuts are my folders. I batch all new and lesser-used apps into 12 categories.

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My 12 folder categories include:

— News, for reading up on current events (19 apps)

— Buy, for wallet and financial information (10 apps)

— Food & Health, for ordering food, recording what I eat, and tracking my overall fitness (23 apps)

— Films, for watching videos and trailers (16 apps)

— Sports, for following news, games, and scores (9 apps)

— Music, for podcasts and other audio apps required by certain headphones (13 apps)

— Games, for giving my mind a break (30 apps)

— Find, for navigating and getting around cities (15 apps)

— Tools, for tracking time, the weather, and my documents (33 apps)

— Contact, for social media apps (17 apps)

— Foto, for storing and editing photos and videos (12 apps)

— Work, for organizing all the apps that help me do my job (20 apps)

When I download new apps, I’ll usually keep them on a second page for a short amount of time so I remember what my new apps actually are. After awhile, if I deem them useful enough to keep, I’ll organize those apps into folders — or, on the rare occasion, an app might come along and supplant one of my shortcuts. Things 3 supplanted Pokémon Go from my home screen most recently.

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This isn’t the only way to organize your iPhone apps, but if you’re like me, and you have hundreds of apps, this might be a helpful place to start.

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Plenty of people organize their apps in different ways — some people do it by the color of the app icon, or just by the order in which they were downloaded. My fiancée doesn’t use folders at all; she just keeps all of her apps on separate pages.

Everyone has their own system, and this one’s mine. It’s not perfect, but I like knowing that everything I have is on a single home page. And if I don’t immediately know where it is, I can just pull my finger down on the screen and search for it.