What Are You Organizing Too Much?
We start sorting things like kids: Hot Wheels, pencils, cutest boys in class. This is how we organize our rooms and get angry when our parents spoil them. And as we get older, we develop new sorting habits, some of which are helpful (chronological tax filings) and some are difficult (alphabetical hot sauce bottles).
As a child, I had an accurate taxonomy of everything in my life, but growing up broke this habit, and now I just sort my books and coffee mugs. I asked the Lifehacker staff what they were choosing and got a wide range of responses and surprising reasons behind them.
Files
If you couldn’t tell, I’m a fan of organizing and reordering my software, files, and applications. I usually spend an hour or two every weekend renaming, tagging, and sorting the photos I take or find online. My smartphone’s home screen is rarely full. I have folders full of GIFs, family photos with impeccable tags from the last decade or so, and a few zip files that serve as archives for all my time spent tediously batch editing metadata.
Patrick Austin, staff writer
Books
I sort the books on my bookshelf by color, admit this is what I learned on Pinterest, but I’ve been doing it for years and it works for me. I find this reduces visual “noise” and makes the living room less cluttered. Also, it is beautiful and I like beautiful things.
Alice Bradley, Associate Editor
Books too
I’m pretty messy, but I collect my books in several small piles around the house in order of importance for the next reading. They only go to the shelf when they are finished or have already been re-read.
Adam Powers, video producer
Laundry
I obsessively organize my laundry. Not my clothes in the closet – especially clean linens when I fold them. There’s a bunch of pillowcases, one for socks, one for exercise socks, one for a tank top, one for t-shirts that I can wear, etc. during the week.
Joel Kahn, Senior Video Producer
Music
I basically keep all my stuff in loosely themed stacks and groups, but I like to put together very specific playlists. I also sort my entries by genre and then alphabetically within each genre, not alphabetically across the entire collection.
Claire Lowe, Food and Beverage Editor
Music too
I don’t sort things obsessively either (I don’t feel like I have enough things to sort). For convenience, I think I try to arrange my Spotify playlists in the order of “most listened to” to “least listened to”: daily listens up to bottom and seasonal content on bottom.
Patrick Allan, staff writer
Laptops
The closest thing to organizing what I do happens in notebooks. I may have several dozen, but I dedicate only one at a time to be my main planner / journal / notepad. (This already takes a lot of discipline and restraint.) I number the pages. Most of what I write is ephemeral and / or garbage, but on the rare occasion that I want to refer to something later, I add a line to my table of contents in front.
Beth Skwarecki, health editor
To-do lists
I keep at least half a dozen different to-do lists at any time: my to-do list; apartment to-dos; “Life” tasks (from “renewing your passport” to “setting up a password manager”); They work in tandem with various current lists of things I need to buy, from clothing to grocery and home furnishings. There might be a neater way to do this, but I like having lists for different categories and a place where I can throw out ideas or needs that come into my head on the fly so that I don’t lose them, but don’t think about them either.
Virginia K. Smith, Editor-in-Chief
Everything
Living in a tiny apartment means I don’t have a ton of stuff, but I’m very attentive to what I have. I sort my books in the order I read them, and my unread books in the order I would like to read them. My closet is color matched (rainbow) and then sorted by sleeve length in each color, with skirts and dresses at the “end”. I also get upset when people load the dishwasher the way I like; Luckily, my current apartment doesn’t have a dishwasher, so I can spare my neighbors a headache. From a technical point of view, I hate to group apps in a folder on my phone, I prefer to see them all in rows and they are grouped by categories: finance, social media, health, news, games, etc. and my music is organized by month and the years when I “open” it.
alisia adamchik, staff writer
Nothing
I have nothing. I am not well organized in every department.
Michelle Wu, parenting editor
Food
Personally, I DO NOT think this is over-organization, but my boyfriend asks for disagreement. In our pantry and refrigerator, different food categories have their own zones: cheese has room, bread has room, etc. Once we have a general idea of where what is, it’s much easier to quickly check how much rice we have and whether we have used all of the cilantro (we never did, and never did). It also helps with food waste, because when everything is half-cleaned, we’re less likely to forget about the mushrooms stuffed in the back behind a box of La Croix and three different cans of pickles.
Caitlin Schneider, social editor
Mugs
I have a vague mental hierarchy of every coffee mug in my house that I put on top of the cupboard, putting “good” mugs (bigger, prettier) in front, “bad” mugs (smaller, ugly, one painful reminder of the election). Day) in the back. If someone empties the dishwasher, I come after and order mugs patiently and pointlessly.
Nick Douglas, staff writer
Everything, Subtly
Moisturizer bottles, Retin-A tubes, lipstick jars should all be labeled first on the bathroom shelves. They need to be purposefully placed in a controlled disorder – not all pressed against the wall, not organized in height, but freely organized by type (face material, hair, etc.). I do this with cans in the pantry. as well as food in the refrigerator. It’s about both being able to easily see and identify foods, and effortlessly leading a life filtered by Mayfair. The bleak product of the social media age is that we are all living our lives at the same time and seeing it through the eyes of an envious friend. When I tackle my shelves, I feel like I am in control and at the same time I feel superior. If someone went looking for cotton swabs in my medicine cabinet, I’d like them to rate how easy they could find them – of course, lined up on a shelf next to the face washbasin, which I poured into a more attractive glass bottle and the P-touch label, as well as a nod of approval at the jar of Nounos yogurt they are in.
Melissa Kirsch, Editor-in-Chief