One of My First Loves

Can I just say I LOVE organizing things??  Seriously, love it.  I can't tell you how many times I have gone into my closet or opened a drawer to look for something and then two hours later, I'm still there, organizing.

Now, some people may not believe that I'm so organized (mainly because the rest of my life is so ridiculously unorganized), but I am.  My classroom is a well-organized machine.  I even show the kiddos how best to organize their desks and folders.

My mom got me this book one time, The 15 Minute Organizer by Emilie Barnes and I swear I could have written half of the chapters myself.  But I still thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.

I would love to organize other people's papers, closets, homes, lives, etc for a living.  Except sometimes my laziness gets the best of me.

Anyway, today's challenge is Best Organizational Tricks.

Tip 1: Color code everything!  Seriously, it's so helpful.  In high school and college, each one of my classes had a different color folder or divider or notebook.  I also would label them, of course.  Now, I print out color coded labels for my students to attach to their folders and spiral notebooks.  Math is red, reading blue, science is green, etc.

Tip 2: Label everything.  Label makers are great, but a Sharpie will do just fine.  One time when I was home over break in college, my mom asked me to clean out and organize our storage room.  We had a bunch of those huge plastic containers, you know what I'm talking about?  

Well, I reorganized it and labeled each box with a number.  Then, I created a master list of each box with the contents of each box. It was beautiful and made everything so easy when going to look for something.  Oh, you need Easter decorations?  Check the master list, see that it's in box 11, then find it (of course they were in numerical order), pull it out and voila.  Fake easter grass and stuffed bunnies galore.

Then my mom lost the list and now the storage room is a complete disaster.

Tip 3: Have a junk drawer/basket/spot.  It's so obnoxious to have something small that doesn't belong anywhere!  Sometimes, it's just easier to devote one small area to junk that doesn't really have a place.

Tip 4: Make lists.  Not just to-do lists either.  When I was younger, we would travel a lot on the weekends.  Mainly to Savannah, where the rest of my family lived.  Anyway, I lose/misplace/forget a lot of things (even though I'm super organized...it's strange).  So I typed up a list of everything I would need to pack when going out of town and kept it in my suitcase.  It was so helpful!  Wouldn't you know it, too, once I got rid of that list, I started forgetting stuff to pack.  Cell phone charger, swimsuits, underwear (unfortunately this has happened more than once), shoes, you name it, I've probably forgotten it.  

So those are just some of the things I do to help me not lose my head.  Sometimes I'm pretty sure I'd be one of those people who truly would lose their head if it wasn't attached to them.

I'm excited to read about other people's organizational tips!