Arrange Your Mac’s Dock Like Your iPhone Homescreen For Better Organisation

Whether or not you’re happy about the iOS-centric changes coming with the release of Mac OS X Lion, you can still benefit from organizing your current OS X dock a little bit more like your homescreen. Here’s how.

When most of my friends see my dock, the reaction I get is usualy “whoah, you have so much stuff in it!” For awhile I felt like they just didn’t understand how many applications I used on a regular basis. Recently, I discovered that there are only a few core applications I use all the time, a few I use often, and tons of others that are opened briefly every other day or even less. I realised I could benefit by taking the same principles I use in organizing my iOS homescreen and applying them to the Mac OS X dock.

My iPhone’s home screen consists of one page of commonly used apps and a second page containing a bunch of folders of apps I use less often. This has worked very well for me, so I applied the same idea to my dock: the left side has frequently used apps and the right side contains categorized stacks with the other apps inside.

Before:

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After:

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While this takes one extra click to get to these apps, I find them much faster because I know exactly where to look. A dock filled with tons of apps can make it hard to locate a small, specific icon. This method makes it much easier for me to launch what I want to launch quickly.

Got any clever tricks for organisation your dock? Let’s hear ‘em in the comments.

You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.