When I had that 8 hour blackout of ZERO electricity, I decided to take the time to completely declutter all my junk drawers.

You know what I am talking about…

The boxes you stuff on the shelf with random things…

I used to open the flap of the box and just slip random things that I thought fit into that box inside, rather than taking the box off the shelf and putting it in its spot properly.

The drawers you open and quickly shove things in there because it is convenient…

…and you don’t want it sitting out (expecting company maybe?), and you just need it stored away and ‘safe’ for the moment…

The shelves full of stuff you just.. push into the void to deal with at a later date…

Much like my current feelings about the state of the world.

GET IT ALL OUT

I took everything out of all of the boxes and drawers, and dumped it into a huge pile onto the floor

MAKE GENERAL PILES

I made piles of things that I culled from various spots – like all my cables were half in one box, half in another drawer, some on the shelf… NOPE. I put them all into one big “cable pile”.

I put all the electronics together, and then all the “sewing/clothing repair” items, and so on.

I made piles that made sense to me.

Maybe to someone else, tape should not have been in a category on its own, but when I think of tape, I am thinking of not only all the kinds of tape, but also stickers, or little pieces of special tape that you can use to hang up picture frames without using nails, or tape that you use to clean the screen of your phone to remove dust.

SUB-ORGANIZE SAID PILES

It is all well and good to make a ‘cables’ pile, but some cables don’t make sense with each other.

I had a cable for my electric sweater shaver, that have nothing to do with my cables for my computer, so I separated those. I ended up putting the sweater shaving cable with my sweater shaving heads and all the ‘clothing repair’ things.

DESIGNATE AREAS FOR THE PILES

Rather than try to cram everything into various boxes or shelves because I went too deep into a rabbit hole of categorizing and sub-categorizing, I decided to designate one side table as my “electronics” bar of sorts.

I put all the cables there in their boxes, cable ties, charging cables for my computers, and my spare keyboard and mice. That way, if I need anything for my electronics (meaning for my computer or any electronic device), I go straight to that side table and it should hold it all.

The exception were things like my sweater shaver (as mentioned) and my toothbrush charging station. Those made no sense there.

..OR DESIGNATE BOXES FOR THEMES

For now, I don’t have all my things with me, so I put everything OFFICE + TOOLS into one box for easy access; all my tape, rubber bands, notepads, spare refillable ink barrels for my pens, my jewellery pliers, wrenches… you get it.

Like AN Art Box…

I designated another new box as “ART”, meaning I put my good-intentions crafting rope in there (I want to start on macramé for some odd reason, and make a hanging hat thing), all my watercolour pencils and brushes, and my watercolour papers.

Or a Travel Box…

I made another box I also themed as “TRAVEL”, where I put all of my travel-required items, such as hard boxes to hold jewellery and things, my scopolamine patches for motion sickness, my individually wrapped tea bags (I use a strainer and loose leaf tea at home, but on the road, this is more convenient (please make sure to check if the tea bag is microplastic free!!!), my neck pillows, that sort of thing).

If I need to travel, I pull down that box and pick out of it what I think I would need, depending on the length of trip and location.

FINALLY.. IT ALL MAKES SENSE!

My shelves are now clear and they make sense, such as the Self-Care Shelf (on it I put my K-beauty items, a hairbrush – I absolutely swear by this one, all my hairbands, headbands and allergy pills for easy access), my drawers finally have designate purposes, and I know where everything is… more or less.

If I want something ‘Office’ related (like a notepad), I open the box that holds that, plus all my jewellery tools. It would make more sense to put the jewellery tools in the “Art” box, come to think of it, but I actually use those tools for more than just jewellery fixing, and so I didn’t want to muddy it up by mixing it into a very specific Art category.

All in all, it was a good 3 hours spent. I felt very productive and clean at the end.

I plan on doing a digital cleanup of my phone, now that my power is back…

(You can read about how I handle all of this in my post on organizing my random brain dumps and pictures)..