How to Tame Cord Clutter
Cord spaghetti. We all have it. And it drives us crazy! So how to we manage cords so that we can charge all our devices without getting overwhelmed by the mess?
My first tip for my clients who struggle with cord clutter is to create a charging station. This is a single unit with one cord that will charge all your devices wirelessly. There are three amazing benefits of using a charging station rather than one-off cords for each device:
1) You minimize the total number of cords in your life, and fewer cords are easier to manage.
2) It’s much easier to find your devices because hey - if they’re not in your hand or on your body, they’re on the charging station! When we have a charging cord in every outlet of the home, we may always have a full battery, but there are also that many more places where the headphones, watch, or phone could be at any given moment.
3) A charging station can support your screen time goals. Set up your charging station away from your home’s main hangout if you’re trying to minimize screen time, or away from your bedroom if you’re trying to kick the screens-before-bed habit. Just by adding friction to the process of getting up to get your phone, you shape your behavior bit by bit!
There are a lot of products out there, but I really recommend that you use one that charges all the devices you use the most. For me, that’s my phone, AirPods, and Apple Watch, so I use this Mophie charging stand. If you, like me, have AirPods Max, the options are limited but there is this amazing charging stand called The Max Stand that is much more elegant than a loose cord and that ugly headphone bra lying around!
Once you have a charging station and have minimized cords, you need to contain and organize the useful ones you have left. There are a lot of different products you can use, but the basic idea is to group them together as much as possible and then attach the resulting bundle to the back of the furniture. So if you have a bunch of cords behind a desk, you would tie them together and run them along the back of the desk top and down the back of the table leg. You will be absolutely stunned by the visual difference this makes!
Finally, a nice touch I love doing for clients is to place any visible power strips inside a cable box. This is just a plastic box in white or black, and it doesn’t seem like that would matter very much, but when you put a white box against a white wall it vanishes visually and makes the space look must less cluttered.
Cords are a fact of modern life, but they don’t have to drive you crazy! Try out a charging station with some cord control and a power strip box in your home, and tell me what you think!
LMW
