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 | 1 Comment »

Cataloguing Your Library

Date Posted: April 30th, 2009

After a few years of collecting books, movies, and CDs it can get a bit difficult to keep track of what you have. Eventually you’ll find yourself browsing the bookshop, looking at one of your favourite books only to realize you aren’t sure if you already own it. And if you move in with another book lover, such things get even more difficult. You may know what you have, but chances are you won’t know what stuff your Significant Other has. Do you really need two copies of Lord of the Rings?

To solve this problem, six months ago Aaron and I catalogued our combined books, DVDs, CDs, and video games. We were moving at the time, so we had to uproot all of our stuff anyway. As of today our system still works, and is almost effortless to maintain. In this post I’ll share with you how we keep track of all our books and digital media.

Cataloguing The Books

To catalogue our books we use an online service called LibraryThing, and, let me tell you, it is an excellent tool. Signing up for the service is simple, and once you have your profile, adding books to your personal library catalogue is just as easy. Just type in the ISBN (or title or author or library of congress number) and search from a wide variety of book databases. I was able to find the vast majority of books in our library almost instantly. Once you find your book, just click on the title and the book will get added to your library. LibraryThing also lets you know if you’ve already entered that book in your library. Very useful when you’re adding a bunch of books. You’ll quickly find which books you have two copies of!

On the off chance that your book isn’t in some book database (and I have a handful that aren’t), it’s pretty easy to make a new entry for the book. There are a lot of fields, but you don’t have to fill them all out.

Once you have books in your database, searching for books in your collection is just as painless as adding them. Just type the title of the book (or the author name) into the search box on your profile-page and the books in your library that match your search term will appear. As a rule, I’ve found searching by author gives the best results.

The cost of the service is really reasonable. With a free account you can add up to 200 books, and the lifetime membership with no book-limit is all of $25. The value/dollar ratio here is very high. The system is very intuitive and reliable. I highly, highly, highly recommend it.

If only there was a LibraryThing for digital media…

Cataloguing The Digital Media

Alas, LibraryThing does not have a direct way to catologue other media like DVDs, CDs, and Video games. (I’ve heard that it’s possible to add non-books to your collection, but the system isn’t intended for it.) So for this stuff we just used old-fashioned spreadsheets. Google Docs is our spread-sheet system of choice because we wanted to be able to edit the same document simultaneously and we wanted the ability to view the spreadsheet online. Google Docs does both of these things fairly well.

We have a separate spreadsheet for each type of Media: DVDs, CDs, and Video games. The reason for this is that there’s different information we want for different stuff. For instance, we only rip CDs, so while there’s no need to track whether or not a DVD has been ripped, it is nice to see this info for the CDs. I won’t say what fields we have for each type, because it’s really up to you. We don’t care about cataloguing things by genre, but maybe you do. I will suggest you add one specific field for every item you have, though: the UPC. It serves as an ISBN for non-books. Very useful if you want to quickly check the going price on your specific edition of whatever you have. You can search by UPC at almost any online retailer.

Stickers

The most important thing about maintaining a catalogue of your books is keeping it up-to-date. Once you’ve created the catalogue, you’ll probably feel confident that everything in your library is also in there for a few weeks, but after that you’ll start losing confidence. You’ll buy a new movie and forget to add it to the spreadsheet, or your SO will get a book and put it directly on the shelf with out adding to LibraryThing. It won’t take long for you to lose faith in the completeness of your catalogue, and as soon as that happens you’ll stop updating it. I mean, what’s the point? You’d have to recheck every book in order to make sure it’s there. That’s a lot of time, and isn’t a catalogue supposed to save you time?

The way we combat this problem is with stickers. For every book, DVD, CD, and Video game that’s been catalogued we put a small removable sticker on the back. That way we can quickly tell which item has been catologued and which one hasn’t. New stuff doesn’t get a sticker until it’s been catalogued. Once in a while we’ll forget to put a sticker on a book that’s been catalogued, but checking one book isn’t nearly as bad as checking every book. With this solution it’s very easy to feel confident that the books on the shelves are also in the database.

Of course, once in a while you’ll put a sticker on a book without cataloguing it, and unfortunately the system won’t catch that. Chances are it won’t happen that often though. If you’re worried about accumulating these errors you could do a check-up on your collection ever few years. Verifying won’t take nearly as long as entering everything in, and you can find out just how error prone you were. Maybe you’ll find that you didn’t have any errors!

If you decide to go with this system I’d suggest you keep extra stickers on hand, so that you can enter new items into the database and sticker them at any moment.

So that’s our system. It works very well for collections of things that don’t get used up (wouldn’t work very well for food, for instance), don’t get washed very often (stickers wouldn’t work well for silverware or clothing), and are easily distinguished (How do you tell apart 8 identical white socks?). At some point I’d like to expand this sort of system to other things, but I’m not sure how yet. If you have any ideas, let me know!

Tags: Organization, Self-Discipline.
Posted at 12:19 pm | No Comments »