Sorting Household Items By Color May Be Aesthetically Pleasing, But Is It Efficient?

Clutter tends to accumulate in spaces where most of the family's activities take place. Living rooms, entry hallways, mudrooms, closets, home offices, and kitchens need an organizational system that caters to a family's needs and routines. Once you've tackled and chosen the best strategies for decluttering your home, how you organize the items that are left over is a personal choice.

The trend of color-sorting items has been met with a mixture of enthusiasm and hesitation. On one hand, a color-coded closet organization system delivers an aesthetically pleasing look while streamlining dressing routines, earning the approval of individuals and professional organizers alike. Meanwhile, the rainbow bookshelf trend — where books are arranged by color and plastered across social media — is an organizational method that has garnered skepticism for favoring style over function.

While it may not be for everyone, sorting by color can be an efficient and aesthetically pleasing system — but it helps if the said items are organized by category first. Grouping items into categories can give you an overview of what you have to work with. Ultimately, the method you use depends entirely on what works for you and your household, and choosing functionality over aesthetics is almost always best.

Categorizing your wardrobe is a helpful step in efficiently color-sorting your clothes. Put jackets, pants, dresses, or shirts together first before arranging them by color, which will help streamline your morning dressing routine. Using colored bins or baskets dedicated to kitchen and cooking items can be an effective system to color-code your pantry. For example, breakfast items such as cereals, coffee pods, and tea bags can go into a blue basket; aprons and kitchen towels can be placed in a white one. When organizing the pantry, prioritize function before color. Dedicate one entire shelf to pasta containers organized by color, and another to color-coded canned and bottled goods. 

A child's room is another area that can benefit from a colored bin system. Place stuffed toys, toy cars, puzzles, and other toy categories into designated colored bins. To get your kids excited about organization, involve them in the process by asking their help in sorting LEGOs by color or assigning them individual-colored storage systems like boxes, bins, or baskets and giving them the freedom to arrange their own possessions.

Though rainbow bookshelves are undeniably a beautiful sight to behold, experts are concerned that this book organization system is more Instagram-worthy than it is efficient for book lovers. While the rainbow bookshelf takes a more decorative approach to book organization, try to balance this system with functionality by sorting your books out by genre first, then organizing each category by color.