Organize Kitchen Drawers With Ease Using The 'Take 10 Away Method'

Organizing every drawer in your kitchen is a big project, especially if any of them is a classic junk drawer stacked to the brim with takeout menus and batteries. You have to take each one out of its frame to do it correctly, emptying them out to painstakingly sort their contents. Alas, it's the kind of housekeeping project that must be done occasionally. And while there's no skirting around the job of decluttering kitchen drawers, there is a way to make it less overwhelming and maybe just a little bit more fun. Introducing the "Take 10 away method," a decluttering technique that breaks down the intense project of organizing kitchen drawers.

The "Take 10 away method" weaves decluttering into the rest of your daily activities, making it seem like less of a chore. Start by choosing 10 items to remove from your kitchen drawers every day. Chip away at the project, dedicating your energy to removing at least this amount daily until your compartments are all organized. Some days you'll get to 10 and decide to do a little more, other days you might only remove five items before you move on to another project. Regardless, practicing the "Take 10 away method" creates a manageable schedule for organizing kitchen drawers (and the rest of the kitchen, too).

The best way to start a kitchen drawer organization project is to outline categories for everything in them. From cutlery to miscellaneous junk, knowing what you have in your compartments will help you figure out what to remove. Get rid of warped or bent kitchen utensils, extra measuring cups and bottle openers, and unused or redundant kitchen gadgets. Take the project drawer by drawer, organizing and updating everything as you go. Use the "Take 10 away method" when you actually start the decluttering project, and combine it with the circle rule — moving outward from your starting point in a circular pattern — to choose which drawer to declutter next. The "Take 10 away method" breaks up kitchen drawer organization into easy segments and gives you very achievable daily goals.

Kitchen drawers are a perfect first step in a kitchen organization project because they just naturally accumulate extra stuff. Inside those drawers you'll find some of the first things you should remove during kitchen decluttering. And though decluttering drawers might not be as visually striking as decluttering countertops, organized kitchen drawers create the feel of a less cluttered, more streamlined kitchen every time they are opened. After organizing your kitchen drawers, you'll know what kinds of drawer organizing tools you need to keep the clutter-free kitchen you worked so hard to create.