Peace of Mind Organizing

Corralling the cords

25 February 2013

Cords. They have been the bane of my organizational existence for quite some time. They’re a necessary evil, but they can be so unsightly.

A couple of years ago, I blogged about using the CableBox from BlueLounge to improve the cord mess in a certain part of my office.

It’s the cords that lead to my desk that have been making me nuts lately.

Here’s the lay of the land: I use a MacBook Pro, which sits to the side of my desk on a little desktop writing desk. I have an external monitor, which is connected via HDMI cable and an ugly mini-display-port-to-HDMI adapter. Also connected to the laptop are the power cord, an external hard drive and, on occasion, a scanner. At least several times a week I disconnect everything and use the MacBook Pro elsewhere. I have an external keyboard and mouse, but they are wireless.

On my desk, I also have a network router to which a printer and a device for our home security system are attached.

I recently took a photo to share with Jen Hofmann at the beginning of our work together in her Workspace and Studio Redesign program. It shows how ugly things were looking.

Then I got rid of extraneous stuff on my desk, which really simplified things. And this morning, I started realizing that many of the cords I had around were obsolete. The phone cords for my landline. A power cord for a stereo system I used to play my iPod on. A random component cable. Those were on the floor near the surge protector. It felt good to get rid of them.

So I’m feeling better about my cords. Here’s an after shot. It’s not amazing, but it’s an improvement.

I wanted to show you some of the individual solutions that are working for me:

• I affixed this cord organizer from Rolodex (which they don’t appear to sell any more, but here’s one on eBay) to the edge of the desk, so that when I unplug my computer, the cords don’t fall to the ground.

• I like to keep an iPhone USB cord handy, but I don’t need it plugged in all the time. So I used a little felted bowl I knit to hold it, along with a couple of those power block adapters Apple provides to you don’t have to take a super-long cord when you travel.

• The BlueLounge CableBox on my desk streamlines the cords that need to pass through from devices to my computer.

• My scanner’s cord is much longer than I need, so I used this CableClip to bundle it so it can rest out of sight behind the scanner.

Other strategies I use that don’t photograph so well:

• I have a channel attached to the underside of my desk that keeps the power cord for my computer, which is connected at the floor, from dangling. I got that at IKEA (where I also got my desk) many years ago.

• I used a binder clip to gather up my monitor’s HDMI cable (you can see it in the second picture above), but I realized this morning, that I should just buy a shorter HDMI cable. So I invested that $7 at Amazon this morning.

All in all, this combination of cord accessories plus minimizing the cords makes me feel like things are a little more under control. And I haven’t felt that way about my cords and cables in, well, ever!

Tagged with: cords, home office, jennifer hofmann, order

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