Last week, I shared with you my favorite bit of organizing advice: allow into your life only things you use, need, love, or find beautiful. This week, continuing the series of my top 5 tips, I’ll focus on another organizing guideline I love.

Keep things close to where you use them
This sounds blazingly obvious: of course it makes sense to store things near the spot where you’re most likely to use them! If you take a close look at the spaces in your home or office, though, you might be surprised at how often the items you need for a particular task are located somewhere other than the spot in which you normally do that task. This means it’ll take more time to do the task at hand, as you’ll need to retrieve the supplies you need before you can get started; it also means that clutter is more likely to build up, as it’ll take an extra step to put the supplies away when you’re done with them, and many of us (yours truly included) often skip this step.

When things are stored close to where you use them, you’ll be able to do things more efficiently and prevent clutter. You’ll also make better, smarter use of the spaces throughout your home or office.

Putting this tip into action
Often, we set up our spaces once (generally right after we’ve moved into them) and don’t make significant changes to these set-ups over time. This means that if we’ve put something in a particular spot (perhaps because there was room for it there, or because it seemed like the best spot at the time), it’s likely to remain there, whether or not that location turns out to be effective. As such, the first step in putting this tip into action is to do an audit of what’s where throughout your home or office.

• Take a tour. Start by walking through each part of your space and making a list of what you do there. Your kitchen, for example, is likely where you store food, cook, clean, and eat, and perhaps also where you take care of family business. In your office, there are probably specific spots where you use the computer, take and make phone calls, store papers and files, store books, and perhaps meet with visitors. During this tour, also note anything you’d like to be able to do in a space that you don’t currently do there.
  
  
• List what you need. Once you’re clear on what you do (or would like to be able to do) in each space, make a list of the items you need in order to be able to do those tasks. If, for example, the family room is where you read newspapers and magazines and clip coupons and articles, you’ll need your reading materials, scissors, and a recycling bag. If there’s a particular stretch of countertop in the kitchen where you do most of your food prep, items like knives, bowls, spoons, peelers, and cutting boards should be close at hand.
  
  
• Look at what’s where. With your list of spaces, their functions, and the supplies you need for each in hand, repeat your tour, this time noting the things that are currently stored in each space. Are they the things you need, or are they items that get in the way of the tasks you want to do in that space? Use your list to start moving things around so that each room (or each part of a particular room) stores primarily the supplies related to what you do in that room. Though it’s not always possible to get everything exactly where you need it (especially when dealing with small spaces) or to limit all rooms to storing only the things explicitly related to tasks that happen there, aim to keep each room as “pure” as possible in terms of what you keep there.
  
  
• Label. Finally, consider labeling closets, drawers, cabinets, and shelves with their contents to help you acclimate to the new locations you’ve chosen for things. This can also help others in your household or office figure out where to find things and where to put them away. You might also want to create a simple storage map, which is essentially a list of the storage spots in a room and what’s in each one (such as “lower cabinet to right of stove: pots and pans, lids, food storage containers”). Keep this storage map posted to the inside of a closet or cabinet door, or in the front of a file cabinet, to make it easy to find what you’re looking for.
  

This week, reacquaint yourself with the spaces in your home or office and what you do in each, then take a look at what you’re storing there. You might be surprised at what’s where, and equally surprised at how easy it can be to increase your efficiency and make tasks more enjoyable when the supplies you need for each are close at hand.