Does this sound familiar? Your child needs glue for a project that’s due, obviously, the next morning. You open the drawer you've always called the school supply drawer, though calling it that probably gives it more credit than it deserves, and start digging. Three dried out glue sticks with the caps squeezing out the glue all over the edge. A calculator with no batteries. A pile of pencils, none of them sharpened, all of them somehow too short to use. No viable glue. You might finally some in the kitchen junk drawer, wedged between a set of Allen wrenches and a takeout menu for a restaurant that closed two years ago.

When school is in full swing and somehow no one can find any glue, the good pencils, or even a decent pair of scissors, despite an entire drawer supposedly devoted to school supplies, it’s time to re-evaluate your system or lack thereof.

A quick purge before the first day fixes most of this. Toss what's used up or dried out, restock what's actually missing, and sort everything into labeled bins by type. Ten or fifteen minutes now saves you from digging through that drawer at 7:40 in the morning on a Tuesday three weeks into school.

That drawer isn’t a mess because you don't care about being organized. It’s a mess because school supplies keep getting added to it every August without anything old ever leaving, so finding one working glue stick meant sorting through five dead ones first. The fix isn't a fancier drawer or color coded bins (though those help). It's deciding, once a year, what actually stays. Don’t keep the graveyard of misfit and broken school supplies. Purge that nonsense and start the school year fresh!