Hoarding: A Lesson in Organization

The title of this post is a little misleading—I’m not discussing hoarding as a mental illness.  Rather, I’m discussing my habit of “hoarding” certain items, pens and Post-its to be exact.  After struggling to close my desk drawer due to all of the pens that got in the way, I decided it was high time to clean out the desk.  Plus, my husband asked me to (for the same reason), and he never asks me to clean anything (mostly because I’m usually so on top of things like that, it’s rarely an issue).

This is where all of the blogging magic happens my friends:

While this picture is a couple of years old, and the items on top of the desk have changed somewhat, generally it’s the same today.  (Excuse the Filo mess in the picture—it was the only one I had of the desk and I was just too lazy to take a new one.)  I don’t know if you can tell from the picture but the desk is a two-piece L-shape desk, so what you see isn’t even the entire desk.  The side piece that the picture does not show has one drawer and the length that you can see has two drawers.  So three drawers in total is what was in need of a little love and organization.

Here are before pictures:

Drawer #1 – A mish-mash of random items

Drawer #2 – All of my office supplies

The drawer organizer with all of my office supplies. 
You can see how many pens I have accumulated.

The pen stash in drawer #2 doesn’t even include the pens in the pen holder

Drawer #3 – all of my electronic gadgets and accessories

The after pictures:

Drawer #1 – Still a mish-mash of items, but a much neater stash

The drawer organizer after getting rid of all the extra pens and junk

I reorganized my Post-it collection as well.
 I didn’t get rid of any, but just having them organized is a great help

Drawer #2 with all of my office supplies, pens, and Post-its

I grouped, bagged, and labeled all of the electronic gadget accessories. 
There were so many items in there, I could never find what I wanted or what went with what.

The bags are labeled in the following groups:

Misc cords, Misc crap, and External hard drive

Mouse (an extra) and iPad/iPod Touch

Card reader and Sony MP3 player

This Vera Bradley bag (really a makeup brush bag that I made into a pen bag before I found this use) holds all of the cords and accessories I use on a daily basis, such as iPad and iPod Touch cords, camera cord, screen wipes, thumb drives, etc.

Drawer #3 – Not the prettiest drawer but at least I can find items that belong together

So there we have it—a way to keep all of my items organized.  I really need to cut down on buying pens to see if they’ll work.  More often than not, I end up not liking them and keeping them stock piled in a drawer simply because I don’t know what else to do with them (“I’ll use them eventually”).  But I never do, and in the end, I just throw them out anyway.  So not buying them to begin with is really the best way to handle to whole situation.

As for the Post-its—these I do actually use.  A lot.  So they never get thrown away.  I will buy them occasionally, especially if there’s a certain size or style I need.  But I will also buy them if I see a limited-edition style that I like (holiday themes and the like).  A girl can never have too many Post-its.

Now that the desk is more organized, I can move on to other little projects around the house.  And there are so many…