I’m laughing at myself right now because I’m completely overthinking a super-critical, life-saving, death-defying situation: the layout of the app icons on my phone. It’s a problem that ranks right up there with global thermonuclear war, right, WOPR?
As we all know, identifying the optimal solution to such super-critical problems can mean the difference between life and dopers. I’m still finalizing my solution, which I’m certain will be brilliant and will of course share, so while I go off to solve world peace, world hunger, politics, religion, abortion, and also what should the SF Giants do to win this division, I thought I’d kick off a Sunday morning (hey, left coast here) discussion.
So… what do you overthink? And if you don’t think you overthink anything, you clearly aren’t thinking about it enough.
Well, I wouldn’t call it overthinking, but the first page of the phone must be set up with the minimum number of apps possible so I can see the nice picture I put there in all its glory. Those are the calculator, the clock, the calendar, Merriam-Webster’s and thanks for reminding me that I can put the damn Covid Pass App further to the back. Then on the next pages you put the apps sorted by frequency of use or by functional groups (eg: plant identification apps, animal identification apps, bank apps, samsung apps, microsoft apps - no idea what those are for, I don’t think I ever use one, they sorted themselves into a folder, and so on). Those may change, I hope they settle to a steady state eventually before I have to change the phone.
Overthinking is what I do filling the dish washer, so I have been forced to leave that task to my wife (who does it wrongly, but won’t listen. Claims she is finished with filling the machine before I am half way through my explanation. But, frankly, she only would need to listen once. Attentively, of course.).
What I have been overthinking since 1995 is how to make a font that looks like hand writing. I am almost finished by now. I am not really happy with the Zs and the 7s. I have finally settled for the 8s that look like two circles on top of each other instead of an upright infinity sign, though my real hand writing is the other way around.
Now I am going to think about what has escaped my mind writing this answer. It may take a while.
When I was about eight years old, my friends and I were following a river and came across an old rusty bridge. There was a metal rod underneath that spanned the length of it, and we goaded each other into crossing hand-over-hand with our feet dangling about a foot above the rushing water. We did it successfully and collapsed on the other bank, realizing we didn’t have the strength for an immediate return trip. So, we rested there, panting and thinking hard about our alternatives, until it dawned on one of us that we could just walk across the bridge to get back! We felt pretty stupid.
I guess that was more like underthinking. I must have done some overthinking as an adult, but nothing’s coming to mind. Simplicity’s been important to me for a long time.
Sometimes you have a difficult problem that you need to solve. You know you can brute force the problem, but that will take a while. You can think of ways to try to solve the problem more elegantly that uses less direct calculation, but you’re not sure if such a method actually exists, and even if you find a better solution, you might not have saved time overall because trying to work out how to get the less-work solution takes just as much work as brute force method.
It’s tradeoffs like that which make me want to use brute force methods where they aren’t completely infeasible. Unless you know for sure it will take way too long to do directly, or that you’ll be faced with the exact same problem multiple times in the future and can reuse the work that you do to get a solution to the current problem, there’s no way to know whether trying to come up with a less-work solution will overall be less work, and spending time trying to determine whether it will be less work eats up any time that you may have saved, so you shouldn’t spend time on that analysis either.
So, this is what I was overthinking. I want only 2 screens on my phone: one blank, and one showing all icons and folders. This morning I started with this.
I wanted to organize them a little better, so I used colors for vertical groupings and then numbers for positions, for where I wanted them to be.
About 45 minutes into it is when I laughed at myself about overthinking. And then 30 minutes after that I was done.
And here’s my blank screen, so I can see my nice picture. Within 6-7 months (of Jul 2016) this iconic tree blew down in a storm. The tunnel was cut in the days when people in their infinite wisdom thought it was a good thing to do.
I tried that organization of my phone screen.
Then I thought how am I gonna remember where that icon is. It will cause confusion and take more time.
I said, ok I’ll rethink it tomorrow.
Then I thought I wouldn’t have time tomorrow and I’ll need to be speedy on the phone, so maybe the next day.
I forgot on that day. So I tried the fourth day. But I was thinking I would need to change my tablet icons too. Because they just naturally correlated to the phone. And then there’s my secret phone. It has to be involved.
I haven’t done it yet. 3 mos later. But I am still thinking about it.
I can’t imagine wanting a picture as the background of my phone screen; so distracting and confusing vs the icons. Can’t see the icons, can’t see the picture. Lose-lose in my book.
I have 3 screens of icons, and most of my apps are not even on screens, just under Android’s all-apps (swipe up) feature.
The home screen are the ones I use every day. That fills about half the 25 spaces on that screen, leaving gaps to create some sort of topical organization.
The second screen is all the crap I use for work. When I retire next month that screen and most of those apps are simply going to be deleted.
The third screen are the things I don’t use daily, don’t use for work, but do use ~weekly. That’s maybe 8 things on the 5x5 grid.
As I said, the other ~50 occasional-use apps are just behind the scenes in Android’s [All apps in alphabetical order] listing.
I only know them by their names. I found them at the app store by their names. Icons are generally generic squiggles that mean nothing to me. Often they’re not terribly distinguishable from any of another dozen apps with nearly identical squiggles.
But they all have a name, and Android naturally has a screen which simply lists every installed app in alpha sequence. So Home depot is under H and Target is under T, with Lowes under L between those two. I know it’s a novel concept, but try to have an open mind.
Cool, if that works then go for it. But I don’t think it would work for me. Different people think differently. I’m more categorical. For me my categories generally work, but there are times when I have to search for an app. If I always have to search for the same app, then I put it in a better category (folder).
Criminy, I’m thinking about work on a weekend, about which six databases I need to ‘air-gap’ tomorrow just to answer a simple question, balanced on what I need/want to eat for dinner tonight, balanced on what to watch for TV tonight, balanced on which store to run to first on errands this PM, balanced on just how much detail to put into this post.
I totally categorize my frequent use apps by visual groupings on my screens. It’s the other 50-100 apps that get used maybe once a year each that just live in the built-in default big-bucket-o-apps.
