Organizing Your Electronics

Date Posted: May 12th, 2009

This week I’m doing a synchroblog on “Spring Cleaning” with Jason Fischer. A link to his post is at the bottom.

For those of us that do spring cleaning it’s often as much about organizing our stuff as it is about a general cleaning. When you open up the shed to find all of your tools in disarray or try to find your CD resurfacing device in your giant box of loose electronics you may think to yourself that this is the time to get this stuff organized. After all, it’s spring cleaning time. You don’t just want things clean, you want your place to look nice too. And nothing looks nicer than a well organized house.

In my house, the “electronics tub” has been essentially an odorless landfill. Have you ever thought about going to a landfill to find something you threw away? If the thought doesn’t fill you with dread, you aren’t thinking hard enough. You’d have to sift through piles and piles of rotting junk to find an object you aren’t sure is there. Take out the “rotting” part, and that’s pretty much how I felt about the tub.

The picture on the right is smaller, more contained version of what the tub looked like. It was a giant plastic tub containing all sorts of wires (in knots), hard-drives, old video game systems, and much much more. The tub was also fairly deep, so if the item you were looking for was on the bottom… good luck. The thought of trying to find a headphone adapter in there made me seriously consider just getting a new one.

(Btw. If you ever think it’d be easier to buy a new anything than to find the one you have, something is seriously wrong with your organization system.)

Version 1.0: An Attempt

I first became acquainted with Aaron’s giant tub of electronics just after we started dating, and not long after that I felt compelled to improve it. I was probably trying to find something in it, and that combined with the fact that we’d just started dating I was feeling helpful. So I got out a giant bag of zip ties, and started bundling all the wires together so at least they wouldn’t get tangled up. Aaron soon joined me, and we started cataloguing the stuff in the tub in addition to separating out the wires, as well as tossing the stuff the we wouldn’t use and wouldn’t miss. It was a good first step.

But the organization system didn’t last very long. Zip ties are great as long as you don’t use the wires, but if you need to use a zip-tied object, you’re going to have to cut the zip tie holding it together. It’s very wasteful, so we were loath to wrap the wires up again once were done using them. Also, we didn’t feel motivated to keep up the inventory spreadsheet since there was no way to track what stuff was and wasn’t in it.

Version 1.2: Minor Improvements

A year or so later, we solved the zip tie problem by getting these velcro cable ties. Unlike the plastic zip ties, they’re reusable. We still use them, and I highly recommend them.

We also got a smaller, flatter tub to fit under the bed. That saved us some space, and made it a little easier to see what was inside, but it had it’s own drawbacks. If we wanted to find something we had to move the futon. Also there was limited light and limited mobility. If your item was on the far side of the box seeing and reaching it wasn’t easy to do.

Version 2.0: The Awesome

When we moved, Aaron had an idea for how to better organize the electronics tub. We implemented it a couple months ago, and it works very very well. All it requires is a bit of closet space, some closet organizers, and a labeler (semi-optional). A picture does the system more justice, though.

As you can see, we divided the cables up by category. There’s a slot for USB cables, a slot for firewire, a slot of random AC adaptors, a slot for power cabels, and every other loose electronic object we have.

Finding stuff now is a whole lot less painful. In fact yesterday I was trying to find a hard to find item, the AC adaptor to charge the battery for my digital camera. I don’t use my camera very often, and while I knew the charger could be plugged into the wall I thought I might have lost that part. Lo and behold it was on the AC adaptor shelf. I did have to pull out a few adaptors first, but it was nothing compared to having the pull out everything in order to find what I’m looking for.

With this system there’s no need to do an inventory, either. We’d tried the inventory system before so that we’d be able to tell if what we were looking for was actually in the tub. With the new system, checking to see if we have something is easy, so that problem is non-existant.

While the labeler is semi-optional, I highly suggest that you get one if you don’t already have one. It makes labeling one or two random things simple, and if you want to relabel something you can just put a new label on top of the old one. Can’t do that with a sharpie. It also looks a lot neater than handwritten labels. Getting refills for the labeler isn’t difficult or that expensive, either. The office supply store that carries your labeler most likely also has refill cartriges. They last a long time, too. I’ve had mine for a year and have had to change the cartrige only once or twice. I’ve changed the batteries about as many times. Being a choir director, I do quite a bit of labeling. I imagine both would last longer for the average person.

Don’t Give Up!

So that’s our system for organizing our loose electronics system. I hope you find it useful. And even if you don’t have this issue there’s another more fundamental message here: don’t give up if your first attempt at improving an area of your life doesn’t work too well. Keep trying, keep improving. Eventually you’ll find something that works well for you.

Have fun spring cleaning!

Other members of the synchroblog:

Spring Cleaning for Your Finances — Jason Fischer writes about how you can clean up your finances.

Tags: Organization, Self-Discipline.
Posted at 10:27 am

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