The drawer of cables nobody can identify
You cannot throw any of them away, because one of them might be the only one for something. So the drawer keeps growing.
Open the drawer. There are about forty cables in it.
Six of them charge phones, or did, for phones nobody in the house still owns. Four are the flat white ones that came with something. There is a black brick with a cable coming out of it and no marking on it at all. There is a coiled thing that is definitely for a camera. There is a cable that is clearly important because it is thicker than the others.
You have opened this drawer because something needs charging and the cable that lives by the bed has stopped working. You will now spend four minutes here, find one that fits, and put the broken one back in the drawer, because throwing it away feels wrong.
Why you cannot throw any of them away
It is not sentiment and it is not disorganization. It is a rational-looking bet that happens to be wrong.
The bet goes: if I bin this and it turns out to be the only cable for the printer, I will have created a problem for myself out of nothing. The cost of being wrong feels high, the cost of keeping it feels like zero, so you keep it. Forty times. Over nine years.
And the drawer is the cheapest possible place to defer that decision, which is exactly why it fills up. Nothing in there is a mistake. The drawer is the sum of forty reasonable decisions, each made in about a second.
The cost of being wrong is one cable
Here is the thing that unlocks the whole drawer.
If you bin something and it turns out you needed it, you order a replacement and it arrives in a day or two, for the price of a coffee and a sandwich. That is the actual downside. Not a disaster, not a lost device, a small errand and a small amount of money.
Set against that, the drawer costs you four minutes every time you open it, for years. It has already cost you more than the replacements would.
The exception is worth naming, because it is real: a proprietary cable for a specific expensive thing, where a replacement is genuinely hard to find or costs a lot. Those exist. There are usually one or two in a house, not forty, and you know which they are because you can name what they plug into.
Sort by what the end looks like
Tip the drawer out onto the table. All of it, so the drawer is empty. This is the only unpleasant part and it takes about ten minutes.
Then sort into piles by connector, not by what you think each one might be for. What the end looks like is a fact you can see. What it might be for is a story you will tell yourself about every single one, and telling forty stories is what makes this feel impossible.
You will end up with a handful of piles, and most of them will be embarrassingly tall. That tall pile is the answer to the whole problem: you do not have forty cables, you have four kinds of cable and a lot of duplicates.
The keep rule
Per connector type, keep what you actually use at once, plus one.
Count the places a given cable genuinely lives: one by the bed, one in the kitchen, one in the car, one in the bag. That is four, so keep five. The fifth is the spare that stops you ever needing the drawer again.
Everything beyond that goes, with two exceptions. Keep anything you can name the device for, where that device still exists and the cable is not a standard one. And keep nothing at all that you have already discovered is broken, which is a category people genuinely put back.
Test the survivors before you commit. Plug each one in and confirm it does what it claims. A drawer of cables where half are dead is worse than a small box of cables that all work, because a cable that might be broken makes every fault in the house ambiguous.
What to actually buy
A shoebox and a pen does most of this. Buy something when the survivors keep re-tangling, because a tangled small box becomes a drawer again within a month.
The one that makes the pile legible. Write-on cable labels in several colors go on every cable you keep, at the plug end, with the device name on them. This is the single thing that stops the drawer reforming, because an unlabeled cable is a mystery again within six months and a mystery cannot be thrown away.
The one that stops the tangle. Reusable hook-and-loop ties in a large pack, one per cable, coiled and fastened. Tangle is the reason a box of eight cables takes as long to search as a drawer of forty, and it is the reason people pull out three at once and put two back loose.
The one that gives the survivors a home. A set of adjustable drawer dividers turns the drawer into compartments, one per connector type. A divided drawer stays sorted because putting something back in the wrong compartment takes deliberate effort, whereas putting something back into an undivided drawer takes none.
The one for the cables that are actually in use. A cable management box that hides a power strip deals with the other half of this problem, which is the nest behind the television or under the desk. The drawer is the cables you are not using. The nest is the ones you are, and it is the reason people are afraid to unplug anything.
Label the ones that are plugged in, too
This is the step people skip and it is the one that pays off years later.
Every cable currently plugged into something, behind the TV, under the desk, behind the router, gets a label at the end nearest the plug saying what it goes to. It takes twenty minutes with the labels you already bought.
The payoff arrives the day something has to be moved, or replaced, or a socket needs freeing up, and the question “what happens if I unplug this one” has a written answer instead of a shrug. It is also the difference between a house somebody else could look after for a week and one they could not.
When it fills up again
It will start to. Things arrive with cables in the box, and those cables go somewhere, and the somewhere is the drawer.
The maintenance is one rule rather than a schedule: a new cable only enters the drawer if it gets a label on the way in. No label, no entry, and if that feels like too much effort in the moment, that is a fairly reliable sign the cable is a duplicate you do not need.
If a year goes by and you find the drawer is forty again, nothing is lost. The second sort takes twenty minutes rather than an hour, because you already know what the piles are and you already know the keep rule. This is not a system you can fall behind on. It is a decision you make once and then remake occasionally, cheaply.
Who this is not for
- If you repair or build things, your drawer is stock, not clutter, and the keep rule will cost you real money. Sort it by connector anyway and label it, then ignore the rest of this.
- If everything in your house charges from the same connector, you do not have a sorting problem, you have a quantity problem. Keep five and bin the rest this evening.
- If the drawer belongs to somebody else in the house, do not do this for them while they are out. Cables are the exact kind of object people are certain they will need, and being proved right once will cost you more than the drawer is worth.
Start on any Monday
Tonight, take out only the cables you know are broken. Not a sort, not a system, only the dead ones.
There will be more than you expect and none of them require a decision, because a broken cable is not a bet about the future.
The drawer will be measurably better and you will have spent four minutes, which is what it usually costs you to find one thing in there.