It’s Organizing Week here at House Outlook! Get ready for decluttering techniques, space-saving solutions, and efficient storage ideas. Our goal is to help you go from overwhelmed to organized, one practical hack at a time.
Trying to locate a single item in a wall of storage bins is as difficult as searching for a needle in a haystack. Even worse, you may end up emptying all the bins before finally finding what you’re looking for, leaving you with the painstaking task of repacking everything.
To borrow a catchphrase from TV infomercials — there’s got to be a better way! Well, thankfully, there is. Here’s how you can simplify storage and find exactly what you’re looking for at the click of a button.
Use Your Phone’s Notes App
A lot of people just use their notes app for writing grocery or to-do lists, but it can also serve as a simple and free organization tool for anyone with a smartphone. While this hack involves a little work up-front, it’ll make your life much easier in the long run.
First, gather your storage bins and clearly label each one with a large number on the outside. At the same time, create a new note on your phone, dividing it into sections that correspond to each of those numbered bins. As you place an item into a specific numbered bin, write it down in your notes app under the appropriate section.
Once all the bins are full, you’ll have compiled a list of every item in each numbered box. When you need to track down one of those items in the future, just go into the notes app and use the search function to pull up that keyword. It will show you which numbered box the item is in, allowing you to easily retrieve it.
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If you’d rather not use your smartphone, consider creating a similar document on your computer using a word processing program such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Alternatively, you can keep a running list by hand — but the major downside to this method is that you can’t easily search through the list at the click of a button.
Hopefully, this helpful numbering system makes home storage as easy as one, two, three.
What About QR Codes?
Instead of numbering your bins, consider affixing QR codes to their exteriors. These codes are easily generated using free online tools, and when scanned by a QR code reader (your smartphone’s camera, for example), they’ll take you directly to the webpage they’re connected to. You can even connect QR codes to a cloud service such as Google Docs, where you can write out lists of each bin’s contents for safekeeping. That way, whenever you’d like to know what items are in any given storage bin, just scan the code, and it’ll take you to the appropriate online document.
