By Laura Schluckebier from HackCollege.com
I'm not sure if y'all can tell by now, but I dislike living in dorm rooms. I've given tips about how to make living in dorms bearable, such as the best ways to clean your room, ways to get to sleep in a noisy environment, and wrangling those pesky cords.
So, today I'm going to talk to you about some organization techniques that you can use to help make your room a little more livable. Dorm rooms are small. Some are itty bitty. In such a small space, when a room gets even a little bit messy and disorganized, it seems to take over the entire room. For me, keeping my room organized helps me not only feel more at home in a dorm but helps me work better too.
White Boards and Bulletin Boards
If you don't have one of these babies, you should go out to Target or some local megastore and get one. They are fabulous and I will tell you why. First of all they take up wall space and make your walls look less blank. My dorm walls have always been this kind of horrid prison grey and so I've always been eager to fill the space up. White boards and bulletin boards do just the trick. Obviously, they can do more than just take up space since you can tack on little decorative things as well.
As far as organization goes though, they're a great place to keep important sheets of paper. Unlike keeping things on your desk where things may or may not fall off/behind/under/into Narnia, magnets and thumbtacks keep your papers in place. Keep your boards in a place you often look at like next to your desk or the wall in front of your bed, and you'll have to look at them every day which will be a good reminder that you need to take care of whatever paper you've tacked to your boards. Additionally, I use my white board to organize not only my papers but my day-to-day activities. Every week, I make a long list of things I need to do by the end of the week. Seeing it every day reminds me what I need to do and so I keep myself organized and on track.
If you ever have trouble hanging up bulletin boards or white boards you should simply refer to my next point.
3M Command Brand Products
(Full disclosure: Command Brand contacted me after reading this article on HuffPost and sent me some of their new products to peruse.)
In my post about organizing cords, I mentioned how much I love these things. They do so much more than just holding my laptop cord. I use the mini hooks to hang up my bulletin board and white board. Most boards will come with some kind of loop on the back, so all you have to do is measure where the loops are and place the hooks accordingly. I also use them to hang up my towels on the back of the door in my closet since there isn't enough room in our small bathroom for both my towels and my roommate's. Additionally, I recently attacked a hook to the inside of my shower to hold my loofa. Having the thing that gets me clean sitting on the bottom of the shower floor is just gross, so I enlisted one of my trust Command Brand hooks to help me out.
The best thing about these hooks is that they work. They don't fall off if you put them on properly and they're incredibly strong for being such little hooks with just those little adhesive strips. I mean, I have one in my shower for goodness sakes and it's as sturdy as a rock. Additionally, they don't leave marks on the walls when you take them off and you can reuse the hooks. I've been using the same hooks in my room since my freshman year.
If you're looking into getting yourself some Command Brand stuff, look into their other products as well. They have some rather nifty organization products including Picture Hanging Strips and Cord Bundlers. I'm especially looking forward to putting the Cord Bundlers to use since my Ethernet cord is always all over the place and keeps tripping me. The hooks come in a variety of sizes and even colors. They offer plain white ones, but also some very nice looking ones with brushed nickel finish and some that are "vintage teal." Those might be my favorite.
Keep Your Stuff Contained
Perhaps a more general rule for keeping your room organized is to just have a designated space for everything. As elementary and obvious as that may seem, it's important to really sit down and decide where you are going to keep certain things. For example, I have a designated basket where I keep my books and folders for my classes. Even if they're all just tossed into it, I at least know that all of my folders and books that I'm currently using are all somewhere in that basket. Just keeping your stuff contained in certain spaces can help you find stuff faster and it can help it from spreading all over your room.
Keep the stuff on your desk contained also so it doesn't keep spreading all over the place. I put my pens and pencils in cups so that they're all in the same place and I can easily reach for a spare one when I need one since I know exactly where they are. I keep my scissors, scissors, and tape in a SpaceMaker. Yes, one of those super old school things we used to bring to the third grade to keep our crayons in. Old school, yes, but they are incredibly amazing for keeping everything together when you have limited drawer space in your desk.
How do you keep your room organized? How do you use 3M Brand Command products? Let us know in the comments!