Many people look at the new year as a way to explore new ways to be more organized and productive. Even if it’s not an official resolution, it’s something that often ends up on our task list during this time of year. Here are some tips from our favorite organization experts.

Declutter Before You Organize

Marie Kondo, the mastermind behind the KonMari Method of home organization, recommends doing a thorough audit of your home before purchasing storage systems and other organizational paraphernalia. Often, people leap over this step, believing it’s easier to simply skip ahead to the organizing. However, you’ll quickly find that organizing a bunch of items you really don’t need or want is just creating unnecessary work. Save time – and money – by decluttering first.

Use Color

If you’ve been watching Netflix’s viral hit, The Home Edit, with designers Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, you know that they love to merge organization with beautiful home design – and that their favorite way to accomplish that is by organizing items by color. They prefer to arrange everything from food in the fridge to the books on their shelves in rainbow order, though you can use any color arrangement you like. The trick is to simply group similar colors together, which creates a pleasing visual and allows you to easily identify where something belongs.

Contain, Contain, Contain

Jamie and Fillip Hord, of Horderly (a home organizational service), stress the importance of containment. It’s easy to get disorganized when nothing has a specific home and items are just sitting on shelves or in cupboards. By placing similar items in boxes or baskets (with labels, of course), you’ll be able to keep everything together, reduce clutter, and make it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Go Digital

One of the biggest sources of clutter in a home is paper – bills, documents, keepsakes, awards, etc. Get rid of everything you don’t need. Archive older items in boxes and label them with a date after which they can be discarded. And scan as much as possible so you can keep items in a digital format without having to deal with more papers to organize.

Don’t Forget Your Hard Drive

Go through your hard drive and delete any files you no longer need. Refresh and archive.

Now all you have to do is stick to the system and you’ve got it made!

For more life hacks, visit the Olympus Town Center blog.