20 Savvy Ways to Stay Organized

If labels make your pulse race, if you alphabetize your cookbooks, and/or sort clothes in your closet by color, then you might have what professional organizer Audrey Thomas calls a librarian's organization personality. You thrive on order and subscribe whole-heartedly to the motto "a place for everything, and everything in its place." But don't let your own perfectionism stop you from starting a project. Having a functional home is far more important than having a perfect one. Use these ideas to conquer problems areas in an efficient fashion. Plus, download our free tip sheet for streamlining your filing system.

Successfully manage the influx of papers and outerwear near your home's main entry point with a combination of drawers, seating, and hooks. A chest of drawers provides dual benefits: Its table surface gives you an immediate place to drop items, while the drawers below keep small odds and ends neatly contained. A bench encourages family members to remove their shoes before they track dirt into the house. Hooks keep coats and bags at the ready. If you have space, add cubbies up high to house baskets or bins. Assign each family member a container and use it store hats, gloves, scarves, and other small accessories.

Personal cubbies make it easy for the whole family to access and organize coats, bags, books, and shoes. Plus, they give young family members a sense of ownership that encourages them pick up after themselves. To get everyone on the same page about household chores, hang a weekly to-do checklist from a clipboard inside each cubby.

Make a habit of plugging in your electronic devices so you'll never be left without your tunes or a way to call home because of a dead battery. Set up a charging station in the location where you deposit your gear when you enter the house. To create a clutter-free parking station, drill a hole in the back of a bread box, insert a rubber grommet, and thread the power-strip cord through. Cut small slits in 1/4-inch medium-density fiberboard (MDF) to create a divider that conceals the power strip and chargers behind it.

Frame the television with a bounty of storage and it's easy to find the necessary gear for a fun-filled night at home. The trick is to realize the space around the TV is finite; save it for your commonly used media. Put the overflow in out-the-way storage. As your kids outgrow movies and games, swap them with friends or donate them.

Today's popular video games often come with a host of bulky controllers, such as guitars, balance boards, or steering wheels. Look for a lidded ottoman with a slow-release hinge to stash these items out-of-sight. Or gather them in a large basket in the corner of the room.

No matter how well-organized -- or accurately alphabetized -- they might be, movie and video game cases usually read as clutter when they're lined up on open shelves. Instead, store cases in boxes that look good and keep things organized. Set up separate boxes for kids' movies, parents' movies, and video games. Label each box so the cases get put back in the right spots.

Give your remote controls a good home and they'll be less likely to wander. Try a flatware caddy for TV and DVD player remotes and train everyone to put the remotes back in their home -- and nowhere else -- when they're not in use.

Declutter your counters for a kitchen that's calm, collected, and ready for cooking. Evaluate what you truly use everyday and find new homes for the rest. Consider storing small appliances, such as a coffee grinder or toaster, inside cabinets. Try lining up cookbooks on shelves built into an island or located above a small desk. Or clear the sink area by installing rollout shelves under the sink for handy access to dish-cleaning supplies.

Simplify weeknight meals and weekly shopping by developing a meal plan. Transfer favorite meals to standard sized note cards. Store the cards in a box or binder until it's time to pull out the recipes you plan to make for the week. Take the cards with you to the grocery store to ease ingredient shopping. Then attach the cards to a menu board that clearly lets everyone know what's for dinner.

Tidy up deep drawers with a space-saving canned-goods dispenser. Transfer the contents of flimsy bagged goods prone to spilling to plastic containers. Use dry-erase tags to make it a snap to relabel the containers.

Reclaim the territory under your kitchen sink with a wire stand designed to hold two baskets while slipping into the sliver of space beside a drain pipe. Fill the top caddy with kitchen cleaning supplies for easy grab-and-go convenience. Tuck rags and garbage bags into the bottom basket.

Use adjustable wire shelves to transform wasted vertical space -- in a pantry, the basement, the attic, you name it -- into useful storage for special-occasion china or seasonal dishware. Keep dishes neatly paired and free from dust inside size-appropriate quilted protectors. Hang tags from zippers for easy identification.

Stay on top of paper piles with a bounty of file drawer storage. When file folders have space to breath and grow, it's easier to use them regularly -- whereas overstuffed files generally result in paper stacks on top of a unit. Line up several two-drawer units to build the foundation for a desktop. No room to spread out? Opt for a four-drawer vertical model -- it offers twice the room in the same amount of horizontal space.

Stash your supply of greeting cards in an accordion file folder. Tuck cards under themed tabs to make it easy to see when you're running low on a genre. Small accordion files are also top-notch at organizing receipts. When receipts are stored in a single place, you won't have to tear the office apart to make a return.

A big closet is nice, but if it doesn't deliver the right kind of storage for your wardrobe, it can still fall flat. Take a detailed inventory of the number of hanging clothes, bulky sweaters, folded items, shoes, and accessories you need to store. Then reconfigure your closet with shelves, drawers, and rods that fit your needs. If awkward bifold doors make it hard to access the corners of your closet, take them off and hang drapery panels instead.

Make the linen closet easier to navigate by storing sheets in sets rather than by type. Stack fitted and flat sheets and tuck pillowcases around the center to hold each set together. Make the sets easier to grab by stowing them on dish-stacking shelves labeled with hanging tags.

Capitalize on the space inside vanity drawers with office-supply dividers. Jewelry stays untangled inside fabric-lined compartments, and there's no more digging for your mascara when makeup is separated in clear plastic boxes. Dividers also make it easy to transport your entire stash to another mirror if the bathroom's busy.

Attach customizable wall panels to a garage wall and, voila-- you can store hundreds of large and small items in organized fashion. Use open baskets to hold power cords and paper towels, hang rolls of tape from L-shape hooks, and add shelves for paint cans. As a complement to the open storage, introduce a lockable cabinet to hold hazardous chemicals, such as gasoline, oil, and paint thinner.

Improve the efficiency of a utility closet by adding shallow compartments to the back of the door. With all of your cleaning supplies conveniently located in one place, everyday and emergency cleanups are quick affairs. Attach hooks to the back of the closet to support rags and a dustpan. And organize those plastic bags once and for all with a bag dispenser installed inside the cabinet.