Create What You Need

I have this client who has lots of cards and loves to send them to people for all occasions: birth of a baby, birthday, wedding, baby shower, Hanukah, Passover, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Valentine's Day, St Patrick's Day, get well or just because; to name a few(yes, that's just a few). She truly loves to acknowledge whatever people are celebrating.

My client knew she needed a way to keep track of all her cards, to make the process of finding and sending them out much easier. When I arrived to one of our sessions she presented me with a card keeper from The Container Store she had purchased.

The keeper was a nice size but only came with 6 dividers. If you were paying attention to the above list of occasions then you know we needed many more sections.

So using a common resource in this home office I hacked a quick solution. I took some manila file folders and cut off the flaps at the fold line.  Then I took out one of the 6 plastic dividers to use as a template and cut down the now halves of a manila folders down to size.

Then I sorted her cards and labeled the dividers, plastic and manila, resulting in: ​

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Now it is quite a breeze for her to put her hands on whatever card she needs and to know where to put cards she purchases. Also she can add sections by simply cutting another manila folder.

The lesson here is that there are a lot of organizing products out there, but more than likely they won't be exactly what you need. Be flexible and customize to get the functionality you need or simply create what you need. You don't necessarily need to purchase a "card keeper" to organize cards you just really need a card sized box and some dividers you can label.