Is Color-Coding Recommended?

The short answer is NO! Color-coding makes for beautiful social media posts but isn't always practical for day-to-day organization. Take a pantry for instance...red ketchup beside a red box of pasta beside a red bag of chips doesn't make sense. Images portraying this in a pantry look cool at first glance. But what if you buy chips next week that are in a green bag? They get moved to a new section and you can't find them easily because you don't associate chip bags with a specific color (unless you buy Lays and know that yellow are original, green are sour cream and onion, and orange are cheddar and sour cream...but I digress).

In a clothes closet, organizing by color makes perfect sense. We often look for clothing to wear daily based on color so color-coding makes it easy to spot what we are searching for. It can also help us realize that we have 25 pairs of black pants and maybe we can let go of those we haven't worn in awhile.

I won't be color-coding any books, pantries or office supplies anytime soon but will continue to recommend doing so with clothes. Practical over visually pleasing wins everytime!