我们小时候就开始整理东西：热轮子，铅笔，班上最可爱的男孩。我们把房间整理得井井有条，当父母把房间搞得一团糟时，我们会生气的。随着我们的成长，我们养成了新的分类习惯，一些有用的（按时间顺序排列的税务文件）和一些尴尬的（按字母顺序排列的辣酱瓶）。

小时候，我对生活中的每一件事都有一个精确的分类法，但成年后我打破了这个习惯，现在我只整理我的书和咖啡杯。我问tl80的员工他们是怎么分类的，得到了广泛的答案，以及背后令人惊讶的原因。

Files

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a fan of organizing and rearranging my software, files, and apps. I usually spend an hour or two every weekend renaming, tagging, and sorting through photos I take or find online. My **artphone’s homescreen is pretty sparsely populated. I’ve got folders full of GIFs, impeccably tagged family photos encompassing the past decade or so, and a few zip files serving as archives of all my time spent tediously batch editing metadata.

Patrick Austin, Staff Writer

Books

I sort the books in my bookshelf by color, which I admit is something I learned on Pinterest, but I’ve been doing it for years and it works for me. I believe it reduces the visual “noise” and makes the living room feel less cluttered. Also it is pretty, and I enjoy pretty things.

Alice Bradley, Deputy Editor

Books, Too

I’m rather messy TBH, but I do organize my books into multiple **all stacks all around my house, in order of importance to read next. They only go on a bookshelf when they’re finished or already reread.

Adam Powers, Video Producer

Laundry

I obsessively organize my laundry. Not my clothes in my closet— specifically my clean laundry as I fold it. There’s a pile for pillowcases, one for dress socks, one for exercise socks, one for undershirts, one for T-shirts I can wear out, etc ... It makes putting everything away much faster, and then it all gets disorganized again as I pull stuff out throughout the week.

joel kahn, senior video producer

Music

I mostly store all of my stuff in loosely themed piles and clusters, but I do enjoy curating very specific playlists. I also sort my records by genre, and then alphabetically within each genre, rather than alphabetizing the whole collection.

claire lower, food & beverage editor

Music, Too

I don’t really sort anything obsessively either (I don’t feel like I have enough stuff to sort). I guess I try to keep my Spotify playlists in order of “most often listened” to “least often listened” for convenience: daily listening at the top down to seasonal stuff at the bottom.

Patrick Allan, Staff Writer

Notebooks

The closest thing I do to organizing happens in my notebooks. I may own several dozen, but I dedicate just one at a time to being my main planner/journal/scratch pad. (This already takes a lot of discipline and restraint.) I number the pages. Most of what I write is ephemeral and/or garbage, but on the rare occasion I’ll want to refer to something later, I add a line to my table of contents in the front.

beth skwarecki, health editor

To-Do Lists

I keep at least half a dozen different to-do lists at any time: my work to-dos; apartment to-dos; ‘life’ to-dos (anything from “renew passport” to “set up a password manager”); etc. Working in tandem to these are various running lists of things I need to buy, from clothes to groceries to home goods. There’s probably a tidier way to do it, but I like having lists for different categories, and a place to dump ideas or necessities that occur to me on the fly so I don’t lose them, but also don’t have to keep thinking about them.

virginia k. **ith, managing editor

Everything

Living in a tiny apartment means I don’t have a ton of stuff, but I am particular about what I have. I sort my books in the order I read them, and my unread books in the order I would like to read them. My closet is color-coordinated (following the rainbow), and then ordered by sleeve-length within each color, with skirts and dresses at the “end.” I also get frustrated when people don’t load the dishwasher how I like it; luckily, my current apartment is dishwasher-free so I can spare my roommates that headache. Tech-wise, I hate grouping apps in a folder on my phone, I prefer to be able to see all of them laid out in rows, and they are organized by category: finance, social, health, news, games, etc., and my music is organized by the month and year I “discover” it.

alicia adamczyk, staff writer

Nothing

I’ve got nothing. I under-organize in every department.

michelle woo, parenting editor

Food

I personally DON’T think this is over-organizing, but my boyfriend begs to differ. In our pantry and fridge, different food categories have their own areas: cheese has a spot, bread has a spot, etc. This isn’t just about organizing for the sake of organizing, it helps a lot with meal planning and grocery shopping. If we have a general sense of where things are located, it’s way easier to do a quick check on how much rice we have or whether we used all the cilantro (we didn’t, we never ever do). It also helps with food waste, because when things are semi-tidied, we’re less likely to forget about the mushrooms shoved in the back behind a case of La Croix and three different jars of pickles.

Caitlin Schneider, Social Editor

Mugs

I have this vague mental hierarchy of every coffee mug in my home, which I impose on the cupboard, putting the “good” mugs (bigger, prettier) up front, the “bad” mugs (**aller, uglier, one painful reminder of Election Day) in the back. If someone else empties the dishwasher, I come in after and patiently and pointlessly re-order the mugs.

nick douglas, staff writer

Everything, Subtly

Bottles of moisturizer, tubes of Retin-A, jars of pomade—all must be facing label-side forward on the bathroom shelves. They need to be set with purpose in a controlled disarray—not all pressed up against the wall, not organized by height, but loosely organized by type (face stuff, hair stuff, etc.) I do this with jars and cans in the pantry and products in the fridge as well. It’s as much about being able to see and identify the products easily as it is about trying to have an effortlessly Mayfair-filtered life. A di**al product of the social media era is that we’re all simultaneously living our lives while also seeing our lives through the eyes of an envious friend. Curating my shelves makes me feel in control and superior at the same time. If someone were to go looking for Q-tips in my medicine cabinet, I would like them to appreciate how easily they were able to find them—lined up of course on the shelf next to the face wash I’ve decanted into a more attractive glass bottle and labeled with the P-touch—and also nod approvingly at the Nounos yogurt jar in which they are arranged.

Melissa Kirsch, Editor-in-chief