When it came to my first smartphone, I was always on top on the design and the “flow” of the device. Everything had a folder, a spot, or a place. It was part of the whole “feng shui” of the device, but somewhere along the line I got pretty lazy. My apps are here, there, and everywhere; I have a couple of folders all filled with random apps that don’t make any sense. My phone might win most disorganized phone in the history of disorganized phones.

I’m not sure exactly why I started to lose organization of my phone, as it was a lot easier to navigate otherwise. I had a media section that included apps like YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, my native music player, and the Kindle app; A messages area where I could access texts and e-mails with the widgets; and a phone area where I had Google Talk, Skype, and my native Phone app, all easily accessible for one area. I think because I would change the areas around so much I just got burned out from actually organizing my apps at some point. That and the fact that Android allowed for widgets and iOS doesn’t, and widgets were my main source of organization. Never underestimate the power of widgets!

My organization has gotten so bad that I haven’t even taken the time to delete unread or spam e-mails. Honestly, the notification count on my home screen for my e-mails is ridiculous: 3,454. That’s a pretty big number. At about 2,000 I decided I would try to make it to a personal record of 10,000. It’s a far cry from how I am in real life – I’m extremely organized and everything does have a place. My phone no longer reflects that I am in the least bit an organized person. I mean, really, I even have a folder called “Stuff” that’s just filled with apps that I use on a daily basis. The only reason I created that was because I didn’t feel like scrolling through so many pages to get to the apps I use most. (Technically, I would count that as some sort of organization… don’t you think?)

I once read that organizing your phone would help you be more motivated to stay organized in your life. For me, it seems that I always have to have one “messy” element in my life. When I organized my phone more often, I put off organizing my surroundings and was much disorganized. When I stopped organizing my phone, I focused more on organizing my surroundings. Personally, I like it better this way. It’s much easier having a messy phone than a messy living space. It would be easier if I could just delete or touch-and-move the things I wanted to rearrange in life, but life’s not that easy!

I will say that organizing my phone was a great way to express myself. Changing wallpapers, moving widgets and apps, and just making my phone look nice made me pretty happy. Over the next few days I will probably rearrange my device and get rid of those pesky e-mails I keep skipping over. I suppose I’ll never reach my own personal record of over 10,000 unread e-mails, but perhaps that would be too much of a workload at that point and I might just show up on “E-mail Hoarders: Buried Alive”.

What about you, PhoneDog readers? Do you take pride and joy over keeping your phone nice and tidy? Or does everything just kind of fall into place and stay there? Let me know how organized your phone is (or isn’t) in the comments!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have many an e-mail to get rid of.