Organizing my charging cables

22 February 2024

I just got a new iPhone 15 Pro (I love it!). It uses a USB-C cord to charge rather than a Lightning cable. My MacBook Pro also charges with a USB-C cord. Each of those devices also has an optional MagSafe charging cable (iPhone; MacBook). I also have AirPods that use a Lightning cable. And a Kindle that uses a mini-USB. And an external hard drive that uses a micro-USB. And any of them might connect to a power source with either a USB-A or USB-C cable depending on what it’s plugging into. That’s a whole lot of cables to wrangle.

Earlier this year I did a cable clean out, letting go of cables that I no longer need. It was a huge improvement, but it didn’t feel easy enough for me to access what I needed. Then I came home to one day to find that my husband had bought an HDMI cable despite the fact we had several. He looked where he expected to see them and found none. They were big, so I’d moved to another location known only to me. A very bad idea. I wanted to rectify the situation

Here’s a photo of my first attempt, organized into an Elfa drawer:

When I decided I could do better, I took the suggestion of my brilliant employee, Beth, and bought a Short Medium All-In Modular Divided Box with 15 compartments from The Container Store. She had sent me a picture of how she used that bin to organize her charging cords in her house and I wanted to give it a try.

I went through my bins of charging cables again and separated out the ones I use most often for my devices, which are the USB-C and Lightning. I put them in a bin like Beth’s and then used the Elfa drawer I’d been using all along to store just the mini-USB and HDMI and printer cables.

Here’s how the divided bin looks. I’m particularly pleased with the labels!

And here’s how the other cords look, stored in the Elfa drawer. (The HDMI cables are back where Barry would look for them.)

I also keep a packing cube with my travel cables so they’re at the ready when I travel. That still feels a bit like a moving target as devices change so I went through it to make sure it contained up-to-date cables. And I updated my travel cord checklist. I’m writing this from North Carolina and it looks like I brought the right cables, so that’s good.

Here’s a photo of the travel cables.

So I have cords in three places, plus a few connected to the wall in a couple of places in the house. That’s a lot. But at least I can pretty easily find out what I have and put my hands on what I need. The labels in the divided bin will help me keep those cords organized. At this moment in time I’m feeling good about my charging cables!

Tagged with: container store, cords, travel