15 Organizational Life Hacks You Need Now

We all need organizational help, no matter what personality type we happen to be. Whether it’s keeping your laundry system in order, handling a busy schedule, cleaning out your closet, or making sure your home office is functioning to your advantage, everyone could use some life hack advice to help them through the various home organization hiccups that happen when life has other plans. In this article, we’ll show you fifteen different tips to keep your hectic life running as smoothly as possible.

1. Use old prescription bottles to store small items like Q Tips or bobby pins- We all know the rule about bobby pins: You use ‘em, you lose ‘em. Plus they end up everywhere — the bottom of your purse, the floor of your living room, the drawer of your desk in your home office, etc. If you have a place to keep and retrieve them, you’ll not only save money from not buying new ones all the time, you’ll stop the bobby pin madness mess you’re unconsciously making every time one falls out of your hair.
2. Find a shoe storage unit and place it in your entryway: You can find a nice one at Ikea. Not only are these functional, they instantly spruce up a space.
3. Are your boots drooping and taking up more space in your closet or on your shelf than you’d like? Stuff them with all of your homeless and mismatched socks and they’ll be upright as soldiers in no time.
4. Hair bands tend to go the same route as bobby pins — to the point of no, or random, return. Hang them on an old shower ring and hang the ring on a doorknob in the bathroom. Hair tie chaos, begone!
   
5. Those ice trays that make tiny ice cubes are so adorable, but in the summer months, you need about a million of them to keep that white wine cool. Instead of watered down wine, use the trays to store your earrings. That way, you avoid the mismatched and homeless sock trend that can also happen with these small jewelry pieces. Orphaned earrings are just sad.
6. Organize the cabinet underneath your sink by installing horizontal shelving or by hanging a rod across the top of the cabinet and hanging each spray bottle on the rod. This will save a ton of space below for things like disinfectant wipes and the like.
7. Use shower hooks to hold necklaces- I am sure that you know how frustrating it can be to attempt to untangle a bunch of necklaces that have been thrown in a bowl or box somewhere. By using hooks, the necklaces stay separate — and tangle-free.
8. Every year around the holidays, something annoying happens, and it has to do with lugging Christmas lights up from the basement and — again — untangling them, which takes time and often causes major frustration. Store these and any other important cord items in old toilet paper roll holders, and make your life a whole lot easier next December.
9. Use bright and sparkly nail polish to paint your keys different colors. This will forever avoid the ‘fumbling’ that inevitably happens when you have four similarly shaped brass keys on a ring.
10. Use a transparent magazine holder as a stand-up kitchen organizer. (This hack is PERFECT for Organic and Smart types who have visual memories and need to see everything to remember it.) Put your boxes of tin foil and plastic wrap in these and never have to rummage around in drawers, searching for them, again.
    
11. Make your own goal list using post-it notes so that you can easily move things around and adjust them according to what you’ve accomplished. Post it notes make it easy to adjust your priorities (and we all know that if we are busy running a household, this phenomenon happens… often).
12. Decorate old CDs, labeling them with the days of the week and slip them on your hangers based on the day. This sounds elementary and only good for the kiddos, but trust us: it will make getting dressed in the morning that much easier.
13. Buy some stick on magnetic strips and put them on the back of your medicine cabinet. NO more random tweezers or bobby pins (in case you decide to skip the pillbox route) lying around and taking up space!
14. Remember Ikea Billy Shelving? Well, they are multipurpose in and of themselves — but add a tabletop onto them and voila! You’ve got yourself a new desk.
    
15. Paint a cheese grater your favorite color and hang your earrings on it. We know. It sounds insane, but it LOOKS awesome, and your wallet will thank you for it when it is time to (not) buy new earrings because you can only find one of each.

There are, of course, a ton more life-slash-organization hacks out there, but we thought these sounded the most creative, fun and practical. So remember: no matter what type you are, you can benefit from at least one of these. Go on. We dare you to find one hack you’ll get giddy thinking about. And remember: all of these are designed to make one of the core Pixie Principles — retrieval — easier. So get out the glue gun, find all of those rogue bobby pins, and have at it! It just might help you feel more organized — and you’ll have a blast in the process.