The Perfect Iphone Home Screen Guide

This video is brought to you by our friends at NOLA. If you're looking for a beautiful, practical, and easy to set up iPhone home screen, then stick around. This video is for you. Hi, my name is Rich, and I make easy to follow videos on how to use your iPhone and iPad without going nuts. And it's that without going nuts part that's the main thing. My videos only cover a handful of useful tips, nothing complicated, and today's video is no exception. While so many other YouTubers talk about adding a hundred really cool apps to their iPhone, I'm always looking for ways to pair back my iPhone to only the stuff I find useful. The older I get, the less clutter I want in my life. I need things to be easy to use and make sense to me. It's been a while since I've shown you my home screen. Today's video is a bit of a show and tell. However, you can certainly learn something if you pay attention. Mostly though, since setting up an iPhone is a bit on the personal side, I hope this video inspires you to think about how you use your iPhone and what layout might work best for you. I have a really simple approach to setting up any iPhone. It all comes down to four things. The today view or widget view, I'm not even sure what Apple's calling that anymore. The home screen itself, the app library, and control center. Now, after a bit of cleanup and wallpaper installation, I'll show you how I've moved my iPhone from a cluttered mess to a clean, easy-to-use tool that works for me instead of me working for it. And if you stick around until the end, I'll show you a quick tip on how I use the action button. Okay, let's get started. Okay, like every iPhone I get, I just have to clean everything out. And it'll take me a minute, but I do get rid of all of the apps. I put them in the app library and get rid of all the widgets and stuff. So let me start there. So that only took a minute to get rid of all of that stuff. I like moving all of the apps. I didn't delete any of the apps. I just moved them all over to the app library. I did get rid of the widgets and I'll add mine back. The goal is to get the phone to look like this one, where I have my important widgets and today view, a nice clean home screen, everything else in the app library. So let's start with that and I'll show you how I set it up. So I'll set this aside for now. We'll move this over. First thing I like to do is just get a nice wallpaper. Nothing wrong with this wallpaper, but I tend to like something a little different. So I'm going to go into my photos app and I'm going to choose a wallpaper. I'm going to start with that one and I'll add this as a new wallpaper. I'll put use as wallpaper and I'm going to set this. I like to have a kind of a colorful time up there. And if you tap on solid and you hit this multicolor little icon right there, you can get that. I don't like to have any widgets at all. So I'm going to click add. I don't like it blurry. I like it clear on the home screen. So we'll take the blur off and now we're done. And now we have kind of a new pretty wallpaper, at least to me. I do like to have all of my apps dark. So I'm going to tap on the screen again. I'll go to edit. I'll go to customize. I'm going to make them all dark like that. And now I've got a wallpaper. I've got no widgets over there and I've got everything in the app library. And this is a good starting point. So from here, the thing that I like to do is keep my home screen clean, but I like my widgets over on the widget view or today view. And I'll show you how we add those in. So if you notice when you slide over, it gets kind of blurry. That lets you know that you're in the today view. And here you can add any widgets that you want. So I'll show you the widgets that I like in my today view. So I'm going to tap and hold. I'll go to edit. I'm going to add a widget. And I'm going to go down and add my email. I use an email program called Hey Email and it shows me if I have any emails waiting for me in my inbox. I'm also going to add weather. I'll add a widget for weather. Whoops, right there it was. And I'll add that. And I like to have a couple of different weather widgets. So I'm going to edit and I'm going to add that widget again. And now you see I have two of them like that, but I'm going to tap and hold. I'm going to edit the widget. I'm going to change my location to Myrtle Beach. And so now I've got Myrtle Beach weather and Raleigh weather and I'm going to just make a stack. So I'm going to just drag that over on top of that. And if you'll notice, sometimes you can't do that. See how it's jumping around and you're trying to do that? I think that's sort of a glitch or some sort of a bug with Apple. So sometimes you have to actually take them over a screen and let go, take it over to the home screen. And now you'll notice you can create a stack and then you grab it and you bring it back over. And now you've got a stack. I don't know why. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. But if you're fooling with it and you can't get it stacked to act the way you want, then you can just drag it over to the home screen. One thing I always do in stacks is I tap and hold. I edit the stack and I turn off widget suggestions because I only want weather widgets here. I don't want anything else. And I usually turn smart rotate off as well. So now I've got the two weather widgets. I've got my mail widget there. And now I like to add reminders. So I'll show you how I do that. We'll add widget. And I'm going to go all the way down here to the reminders app. And I like this slightly larger one. So I'm going to put that there. And now I've got my reminders, but I have, if you go into my reminders list, you can see that I have a number of different lists, Monday through Saturday and Sunday. And I like to add all of those lists into my widget. So again, I'll do this quickly. I'll edit. Okay, now I've finally completed that big stack. And I'm just going to move that over to the widget side by sliding over and dropping it right there. And now I have everything here. I've got my reminders and I can scroll, see what I got to do on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday, that kind of stuff. If I ever want to just get into the reminders app, I can just tap on it and it takes me straight to Friday or whatever day that I'm on in the widget. I also like to add the calendar in here. So I'll add that widget too. Cause I kind of like to know what's going on in my schedule. That's a simple one. And then I like to add a shortcut too. A shortcut widget. And I've created a number of shortcuts. I'm not going to go into that in this video, but I've created four shortcuts and here they are. And it allows me to take a quick note or add a calendar event very quickly. Or if I need to add a new reminder to the reminders app or if I need to scan a document. So this is widget view. So now I've got a clean home screen. And if I need to get over here, I can check the weather. I can check my email. I can see what I've got to do for my tasks. I can take a look at my calendar and I've got my shortcuts down here and I can add a note, a new event, a reminder, scan a document, anything I want. But now a lot of the actually heavy lifting of the things I do are in the today view or widget view, whichever you want to call it, but it's out of sight. So I still have this clean look and it just sort of helps me use my iPhone a little bit better, but it's pretty simple. So I would suggest you just take your time and set up into the day view, any of the widgets that you find helpful for you. You know, just like having a clean home screen is a good foundation for your iPhone, having a high quality mattress is your foundation to a good night's sleep. 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This is a communication device mainly for me, so I can do calls, I can do FaceTime, and I can send text messages, and that's it. So again, heavy lifting over here, home screen with just a few apps down here makes it so simple. I'm not looking at all that clutter, and then, of course, the app library is over here, and all of the things that I cleaned off of this screen at the beginning of the video are still here. I can still get to all of them. I didn't delete anything. When you slide over, you can see them all grouped in the way Apple likes to group them, but if you don't like to see it that way, if you slide down, you can just get a list, and you can go through, and you can see all your apps, and you can open any one of them from there, but most of the time, these are the apps I use. These are the apps I use on the home screen, and then if I need something unique or every once in a while, it just lives over in the app library, and that just makes the most sense to me. Now, one other thing that I actually use quite a bit is Control Center, and if you slide down from the top right, you'll see Control Center, and when your phone comes in new or if you haven't really messed around in Control Center, you'll see a bunch of stuff in here. You've got a bunch of things here, and then if you tap on that, you get to a little music section, and if you tap on this, you get to some Wi-Fi and networking stuff, and honestly, I don't use any of that stuff, and when I'm in here, I get kind of confused, so I use a cleanup procedure here just like I did with the app, so let me show you how I do that. First thing you do is you tap and you hold, and now you can remove stuff, so I'm gonna remove a whole bunch of stuff, and now I just have my favorites, and they're kind of up sort of towards the top, and I don't like that, so you can move these, and I'm gonna do that. This is volume. This is the brightness of your screen. I do like to know about dark mode because I like to keep my phone usually in dark mode, and if you move it, you can make that a little bit bigger. I'm gonna do the same thing here with focus modes. I'm gonna bring focus down. I don't want that app. I do like silent mode. I'll bring that down here, make that a little bit bigger. I do bring the camera in. There's a lot of different ways to get to your camera, but I always put it in here just in case I forget, and that makes sense, so I'm gonna bring that down to right there, and I have my focus modes there. I like the camera to be kind of a bigger button because I use it, and I'll bring the silent down right there, silent mode, so that's it, so I have volume, which I can get to with my hand pretty easy, the brightness of the screen. Whether dark mode is on or off, and I can just turn the phone off if I want silent mode on very quickly, or I can get to a focus mode right there just like that, so now I have, again, everything in the today view. I have a clean home screen. I have all my apps over in the app library, and I've cleaned up Control Center, and I've put stuff in there that only makes sense to me. Pretty simple, really. Okay, lastly, I just wanna talk to you about the action button. If you have a newer iPhone, you may have an action button on the side of your phone. This phone that I'm using is an iPhone 17 Pro, and you can program that action button to do something, and I just wanted it to do Do Not Disturb. Okay, to set that up, you go into Settings, and you go down to Action Button, and here you can choose whatever you want. You can choose the camera. You can make it turn on the flashlight. You can do a bunch of other stuff, but I have it set to a focus mode, and I have the focus mode set to Do Not Disturb. If I'm out somewhere and I just don't want my phone to ring, I don't want anybody to bother me, I can just press this and hold, and Do Not Disturb comes on, and if you'll notice, the screen turned red, and that's because within that focus mode, I've chosen the screen to be red, and that just reminds me that it's in Do Not Disturb, because half the time when I turn this thing on, I forget that I've turned on Do Not Disturb, and then people call me, like, I can't get through to you, so I made the background sort of reddish, and that reminds me that I am in Do Not Disturb mode, and then I just remember when I wanna turn it off, I just press and hold that button again, and now I'm back to my regular home screen, and that's just a cool little tip. I've made other videos about that, so you can find those and see how I did that, but that's pretty much it. That's how I like to keep my home screen clean. I like to keep things organized, and it just gets rid of the clutter and makes using my iPhone so much easier. So what do you think? This clean home screen setup has worked wonderfully for me. Let me know in the comments below if you think this setup might work for you. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.