Taming Magazine Madness

I love magazines. The bold and bright colors, the anticipation of what's going to be on the next page, the feel of the shinny paper on my fingertips. In this digital age, many magazines are offering digital subscriptions in lieu or in conjunction with a paper magazine subscription. While I do own an iPad and enjoy reading certain types of articles on it, I just prefer a paper copy magazine so much more. 

That being said, magazines have a way of accumulating very quickly in our house. I make it a point to only subscribe to a select few to help reduce the clutter, but a lack of time to read, a lack of an organizational system to store, and an ongoing nagging feeling that one day I'm going to want to refer back to that one article on that one topic cause the piles to grow oddly fast. 

Since starting this blog, my magazine hoarding has increased substantially as I find blog ideas and inspiration for personal organization products and don't want to toss them into the recycle bin hoping I can find the information online later. So I decided to get a handle on this magazine madness by creating a magazine binder.

When I read through a magazine, I dog-ear the pages that offer some sort of information I'd like to hang on to. It may be a color scheme, a remodel project, a recipe, etc. I went back through some of the magazines I had already read and stashed on a shelf and ripped out all of the dog-eared pages. Then, I went through each ripped out page and gave it some sort of category like style, home colors, tips and tricks, etc.

I had some empty binders laying around in our home office and I found some three-hole-punched divider labels and some sticky tabs that I must have purchased for some other forgotten project. I made a tab for each category and stuck them onto the divider labels.

Then I three hole punched my ripped out pages and put them in the binder by category. As I read through more magazines and discover new categories, I can easily create another divider label and insert it into the binder accordingly. 

I will admit, it was very difficult for me to toss the read-through, ripped-out magazine into the recycle bin, but having just one binder to stash away is so much more open-concept than having a giant stack of dog-eared magazines that are timely to sort through when searching for the elusive one article about that one thing.

How do you organize your magazine madness?