How the Strategist Staff Stays Organized

We use two of these storage racks for our home gym.

These Penco boxes are truly the best for literally all ages. I mostly use them for pens and art supplies, but the bigger ones can store some priceless kiddo objects. They make great kids’ jewelry boxes or just boxes for all the little bullshitty objets they seem to gather. Also good for organizing a junk drawer: They can hold batteries, rubber bands, etc. They just look so good that you can put anything in them and leave them around.

I also really love these from Ikea for both my stuff and kid stuff. I’ve been using the same ones for the past seven years, swapping them around for different things, and they look great. Also very easy to wipe clean with a Magic Eraser.

I use a label-maker for both the Penco and the Ikea boxes since I sometimes move the contents around. It’s kind of my favorite thing.

I love my fridge turntable. I have a lot of condiments and jarred goods, and they do not all fit on the slim shelves on the side. Any time I put one in the fridge willy-nilly on a regular deep shelf on its own, it ends up sliding to the back where I forget about it and then it inevitably expires. This fits a ton of stuff and, of course, turns, which means I can see and grab everything easily.

I likely have more spices than the average person, but regardless, this expanding tiered organizer has been a lifesaver. This was probably the trickiest problem to solve in my kitchen. For a couple of years, I had all my spice jars stuffed into a cabinet haphazardly on top of one another; it was impossible to see everything or reach the ones in the back without taking out entire layers. Now, that is remedied. This is expandable, so I was able to fit it snugly wall-to-wall to the exact dimensions of my cabinet.

I’m a hugetray collector; I have them in every single room of the house for various things. In the kitchen, I use this one from Falcon Enamelware to collect ingredients I keep out for everyday cooking: a bowl of kosher salt, a bowl of flaky sea salt, a bowl of Aleppo pepper, my pepper grinder, and honey. It’s super-durable, which makes it perfect for the kitchen. It inevitably collects grains of salt and pepper and dust and splatter, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to rinse or wipe down, which I do every few days.

I also make use of baskets in many places around my apartment. Anywhere there’s open shelving, they help keep things together — and they look nice! I have two in my living room: one with tools, the other with random household things like stamps, envelopes, etc. And perhaps surprisingly, I have one in my kitchen on the shelf of an old Ikea butcher block. It holds all my tools (exceptcooking utensils, which I keep in crocks on my counter). I have my mandoline, citrus juicers, funnels, a can opener, peelers, my chef presses, and more.

Trulyorganized people would say this is chaotic, but it has worked for me for five years. They key is not to let it pile up with too much random stuff. Because I use it regularly, I can reach in and find something in just a few seconds. I only have two small drawers in my entire kitchen, and this really solved that issue.

Purchased exclusively on sale because they’re expensive, these are my holy grail for important things. I have a couple of them in the attic with Christmas ornaments and the kids’ toys and books that are deemed worthy of holding on to. I have one full of newspaper-wrapped ceramics made by my 8-year-old. We had basement flooding issues for a while, so we use them there, too.

These are the most basic, but the handle shape is important. I am allergic to the pill-shaped cutout. (My one exception is theKartell Componibili.) The straight sides are also key — can’t be wasting space with flared sides.

These are my favorite shoe racks, also annoyingly expensive but good for specific spaces. I have very particular aesthetic requirements around lines and angles and mesh, and these meet them.

I’ve tested a lot ofdrawer organizers, and these are the best. They come in a million sizes and are mega-durable; I’ve used a set in my bedside-table drawer for about five years, and they look good as new despite all the stuff I dump into them. My hot take is that bamboo drawer organizers look cuter, but the joinery is so crappy they fall apart within a few years. Not so with these.

I bought a couple of these archival boxes to organize old journals, and they are an absolute delight to handle. The paper is thick and precisely cut, and the corners are reinforced with a lacy little metal filigree.

My lifetime stat for pegboard hung is probably about 200 square feet by now. I love it. Dollar for dollar, it is the cheapest and most flexible way to maximize your storage space. (It was my first big DIY project and isvery forgiving for beginners.) I’ve bought panels from both Lowe’s and Home Depot, and Lowe’s is superior; it has a smoother finish and is easier to paint. I started using it in kitchens (our current apartment has one drawer in the kitchen, so we needed to find extra storage somewhere), but it has spread everywhere — to my office and the backs of closet doors where we use it to hang tools.

Like Martha,I would be lost without my label-maker. It seems fussy, but labeling your storage bins — especially the ones that contain items you don’t use that often, like hardware — transforms a stress-inducing mystery closet into an easily navigable stuff library.

I use these in my kitchen cabinets to double up on storage space: plates stacked underneath the shelf and smaller bowls on top. If your kitchen cabinets are large but you don’t have very many of them, these are very useful.

This is basically a simple laptop riser with a drawer built in. I always accumulate random little doodads on my desk, so the drawer is helpful as a landing place for sticky notes, lip balm, small products I’m testing out, and so on.

My apartment has a teensy little area of counter space over a cabinet that isn’t level with the main countertop and is tiled. I decided to use it as a home for my electric kettle and coffee maker (my husband and I jokingly call it the “beverage station”). To keep my coffee, tea, and other beverage items organized, I bought this coffee-bar organizer from Target.

Over the years of living in small spaces, I’ve owned a few different types of over-the-door shoe organizers. This one is better than any other I’ve had. It has 26 cubbies with clear mesh so you can easily see the shoes inside. The cubbies are also much wider than the traditionalover-the-door shoe organizers with pockets, so most pairs take up only a single cubby. (Some chunkier pairs have to be split up.) The only con is that I’ve put so many shoes in the organizer that the closet door is heavy, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

When I moved last year, I bought the Article Lenia bed frame and decided to get a set of these underbed drawers, too. In the past, I’ve used my under-the-bed space to store out-of-season clothes or other odd objects in long plastic storage bins, but they were tricky to get out and I rarely used the items stored inside. My husband and I each have one of these drawers on our respective sides of the bed, and we use them to store PJs and loungewear.

The apartment my boyfriend and I live in has a bunch of built-in shelves that got rather unruly during the first year we lived there. We bought these bins as a solution for the worst offenders — shelves filled with slinky activewear and squishy sweaters — and have since repurchased them three times to fill other shelves. I’ve even used one to organize stray cables and remotes. They’re easy to set up: You just have to unfold them and stick in a stabilizing board, which is included.

Between hair tools and backup shampoo, conditioner, and bodywash, my undersink storage had started behaving like an avalanche. These sliding organizers were exactly what I needed, and they are even designed to make room for that awkward pipe in the middle of the cabinet. (A word of warning: If your bathroom or cabinet is tilted, the drawers will slide.)

It turns out you don’t need to spend a ton to organize your shower. This one hasn’t buckled under the slew of shampoos, conditioners, bodywashes, and other shower products I’m testing. I also think it looks pretty sleek.

I’ve gone through lots of jewelry-storage systems over the years, and this is the one that stuck. It fits every piece of jewelry I own and there’s still room for more. I love that it easily comes apart and I can see all my pieces laid out next to one another for mixing and matching.

For my shoes, I went with Yamakazi’s five-tier rack. It lets me tuck away all my flats, sneakers, sandals, heels, and even some boots in my closet. I bought this as a replacement for my hanging shoe rack, and it’s a major upgrade. It’s overall nicer to look at, and I can fit way more shoes in it.