Be it in fashion, interior decoration, or home organization, trends have a way of coming and going.
One year’s great new way to declutter your house might become more trouble than it’s worth by the next year, and then you’re right back where you started, trying to figure out how to organize your house. (This is, of course, if you were even in on the organization trends to begin with, as many book-lovers who took umbrage with Marie Kondo’s advice from a few years ago can attest to.)
So while we all can agree that finding new ways to organize your living space or workspace is never a bad thing, sometimes the honeymoon period with some hot new organization trend has to come to an end. If this is starting to sound familiar at all, here’s a few of our recent organization trends that we’ve started to move away from:
Organization Trends to Move Away From
Rainbow sorting
Anyone on social media has surely been exposed to the idea of color-coded storage – taking all of your books, collectibles, movies, and the like, and organizing them by color. The impact was two-fold – it would create a more ‘cohesive’ look amongst your disparate collections, as well as helping to create a bolder look in a room that might not have a lot of room for decorations otherwise.
That said, we’ve found the impact of this method to be largely visual, and not exactly practical. Particularly if you’re the sort who likes to organize books and movies by methods like title, subject matter, or author, sacrificing that to create a more fun look might actually make it harder to find the things you’re looking for, which kind of…defeats the whole purpose. This year, take a look at your bookcases and living room storage, and organize your collections in whatever way makes the most sense to you. (This could also be a great time to declutter some stuff you’re never going to use again – you know, if you felt like it!)
Decluttering things, not rooms
A popular organizational trend over the last few years was the idea of decluttering a specific type of stuff, as opposed to going room-by-room. Let’s say you felt like trying to get rid of some old paperwork you don’t need anymore – outdated tax papers, files for jobs you no longer work at, junk mail from your old internet provider, and the like. This new method would have you look all around the house to gather up as much old paperwork as you can, instead of focusing on the clutter in one room and taking care of it all at once.
While this is great for one-off projects, it can very easily start to become far too time-consuming if you have bigger, house-wide organization projects to attend to. In most cases, it’s easier to just go back to the old ways – pick one room, go through all of the bookcases, wall shelves, and end tables, and get rid of everything you don’t need along the way, even if you’re going to encounter that same category of clutter in another room.
Ignoring digital clutter
Once a lot of us found ourselves working at home more often, this became less of a trend and more of a…necessity. As we all adjusted to creating a home office (even if it was just the kitchen table, or a corner of the basement), we started to focus more on getting together the stuff we needed to get our jobs done, and less on how well-organized we were about it.
Hopefully, by now we’ve all had time to really sink into a groove with our remote/hybrid work, so your next focus should be cleaning up your space a little bit. Go through your big pile of cables, chargers, and mice to see what still works, what you no longer use or need, and what does work but maybe needs a little better home other than just in a pile in the center of your computer desk. The stuff you keep can go in a nearby bookcase or on some corner shelves wherever is most convenient for you to reach.
Now, don’t get us wrong, there’s plenty of organizational trends we like (and still use ourselves)! But, as with any trend, once you get a little time away from it, you can start to figure out what trends really work best for you, your organization style, and your living situation.
(At least until next year, right?)