When I was a kid, every drawer at home was messy. If we did spring cleaning and somehow tidied up a drawer, it gets messed up within a day or two. I learned early on that messy drawers are a fact of life, tidy drawers are not a thing.

Table tops can be kept neat, but drawers? Drawers are where messes go so the surfaces can stay tidy. They are like black holes where stray batteries, orphaned cables, extra scissors, and duplicate keys go and disappear, never to see the light of day again.

These days though, it’s different. I have tidy drawers all the time. Each time I pull one open, even when I don’t think about it, there’s a subtle feeling of satisfaction. They don’t stress me out, and I know where everything is.

But I wasn’t always like this.

I didn’t always have tidy drawers

When I started to care about tidy spaces, I wasn’t a minimalist. I tried to keep drawers tidy using organization tools like boxes and trays to categorize my things. It made everything organized, sure, but it didn’t look tidy. It was just organized clutter.

Still, it was better than disorganized clutter so it was an improvement. But the drawers invariably got messed up again. If it’s a drawer that’s accessed by everyone at home, it gets messed up even quicker.

After all, no one else cared that the box was for electronics and the tray was for stationery. Whatever space an item lands in became its home. Who has time to figure out where everything goes? And that’s why it’s so hard to keep drawers tidy.

But that didn’t matter. I was used to messy drawers, so tidying messy drawers every now and then was also a fact of life.

With minimalism comes naturally tidy drawers

That is, until a few years into my minimalism journey. Somewhere along the way, I had gotten used to opening my drawers to see a tidy space. But what’s even better is that my tidy drawers stayed tidy!

I mean, I still like to pull everything out to declutter every now and then, but it’s no longer because things got messy but because I just enjoy the process.

The question is, how did I get here?

How to have tidy drawers?

Step 1: Declutter the entire area

Every seasoned minimalist would tell you this – remove the clutter before you attempt any organization.

If you don’t declutter first, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time organizing things you don’t even need. And when you have a lot of things you don’t need, things are going to get messed up. Especially when you have to sift through the junk to get to the treasure.

Of course, you can spend a lot of time constantly tidying up and making sure everything goes back to where it came from, but we all have better things to do than micromanaging clutter.

The key point in this step is to declutter the entire area, not just the drawer. If you declutter the drawers only, clutter from the space around the drawers will find its way into the drawer.

Some tips for decluttering:

• Go through every item – this means emptying the drawers of all its content and really processing each item
• Ask yourself if you’ve used the item in the past year. If you haven’t you don’t need it. The exception is if it’s a tool that really does and will come in handy – sewing needles, pliers, screwdrivers, etc.
• Ask yourself if you don’t have this item, will you buy it again?
• Remove duplicates
• For things that don’t have a purpose, ask yourself if you love it. If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no
• Donate what you can, discard what you can’t donate, but don’t have them sitting around. They will make their way back to the junk drawer…

For more tips, check this post out:

• How to Declutter and Become a Minimalist

Step 2: Remove the nests

By nests, we mean organizational tools like trays, dividers, boxes, etc. The organization tools you think would make your space neater actually encourages you to hold on to things.

What do you do when you have trays and boxes? You look for space to fit them in, then you look for things to fill them up with, either consciously or subconsciously. That’s counterproductive to creating tidy spaces.

Let’s use pens for example. Say you have 2 dozen pens and 8 pencils of different lengths in a tray in your drawer.

Since you’re so used to the tray being there, you don’t even think about the things in there. When you tidy your drawers, you don’t even look at what’s in the tray. But the tray becomes fuller as you picked up more pens. Soon, you start to put other miscellaneous stuff like cables and twist ties in it too.

One day, you decided to declutter and you remove the tray. Now you’re forced to go through everything in the tray.

You discard the dried-up pens and the ones that make handwriting feel unpleasant. You realized you haven’t used pencils since you started using a mechanical pencil so those go in the bin too. You get rid of cables with connections you no longer recognize and discard the twist ties.

At the end of it, you’re only left with a handful of pens and a couple of still-useful cables.

Removing the nests not only frees up space, but it forces you to declutter more thoroughly because you no longer have “homes” for those things.

That’s not to say that all organizational tools are useless. Utensils divider, for instance, will always be useful unless you live alone and only have two sets of utensils.

The more you declutter, the fewer nests you need.

Step 3: Organize

So after you declutter and remove the nests, this is when you start organizing and deciding if you still need a nest for something. If you still have 20 pens after going through them, keeping them in a tray would be neater.

Organize things according to how often they get used, where they get used, and group them according to their category.

Continuing the pen example. Now that you only have 5 pens and 2 cables, you realize that the pens can finally all fit in the pen holder at your desk so you stuck them in there. Then you place the cables with electronics.

There, you’ve cleared your drawer of a nest of things. No more tray of miscellaneous stuff that keeps on growing.

Step 4: Repeat

For all budding minimalists out there, understand that minimalism is a journey.

Decluttering is like working out. It’s a muscle/habit that you need to exercise/practice and build on. The more you work on it, the better you get at it. So you may not experience the “ever tidy drawers syndrome” at the beginning, but I assure you it will happen.

Your drawers will be neater after round 1 of decluttering, but they may still get messy because you’re bound to still have excess.

Repeat this process several times, and you’ll realize that you own fewer and fewer useless things. That is the secret to ever-tidy drawers. You won’t even realize it at first, you’ll just open a drawer and marvel at how neat it is.

Then, many months later, you’ll realize that you haven’t had to tidy your drawers in a long time, but they stayed tidy!

Spaces with fewer items simply don’t get messy, so keeping them organized becomes much easier.

Tired of tidying? Try minimalism

As a younger individual, I never would’ve thought tidy drawers can “spark joy”. But they do for me and for some reason, I still feel a tiny sense of joy years after enjoying perpetually tidy drawers.

Maybe it’s just me being weird… But, even if you don’t care for that silly sense of joy, having tidy drawers is still great for practical reasons!

Can you imagine all the time and effort you’ll save if you never have to tidy your drawers ever again? Can you imagine never having to sift through a cluttered junk drawer for your can opener ever again?

That’s not all, because the sense of satisfaction from having ever-tidy drawers is so strong, you’ll find yourself clearing out more and more messy drawers in your life.

When even your drawers are tidy, you know that the visible space is definitely tidy.

Eventually, inevitably, the physical space around you will be transformed.

In truth, the title of this post might as well be “The Secret To An Ever Tidy Home is Not Organization. It’s Minimalism”.

Let minimalism spread through the nooks and crannies of your life because it will. Both inside and out. It will make life so much prettier and easier!

Want to read more about the benefits of minimalism? Check this post out:

Minimalism Benefits: Better For Us, Our Pockets, and Our Environment