16: The Container Trap – Why Containers are a Huge Problem for ADHD Brains trying to get Organized

The Great Container Trap

Containers are a genuinely useful organizing tool, but they’re also one of the biggest traps out there, especially for an ADHD brain. Here’s why so many of us end up with a stash of cute, unused containers that never quite solved anything, and what to actually do about it.

The impulse-buy problem

It’s easy to be out running errands, spot a display of adorable containers, and grab a handful in different sizes with the plan to figure out later which ones fit. Without measuring the space ahead of time or knowing exactly what’s being contained, that optimistic trial-and-error approach usually ends the same way: containers that don’t fit the shelf, or don’t fit the item, or fit fine but there aren’t enough of them, or there are too many and now there’s no room left for the containers themselves.

Containers almost always get bought at the wrong step

Professional organizer Julie Morgenstern, author of Organizing from the Inside Out, uses an acronym called SPACE to describe the proper order of an organizing project: sort, purge, assign, containerize, equalize. Containerizing is the fourth step out of five, yet it’s almost universally treated as step one. Buying containers before sorting through what you actually have, deciding what to keep, and assigning everything a home is simply premature. Once you know what’s staying and where it lives, the question becomes whether it even needs a container at all, sometimes it doesn’t.

Try something free before buying something cute

A great trick before investing in a properly measured container: use whatever’s already lying around, a cardboard box, an old Tupperware container, anything free, and live with it for a while. That trial period reveals exactly what’s actually needed, whether it needs a lid, straight sides instead of rounded ones, a certain depth, before spending money on the “right” one.

Shop your own stash first

When organizing a space, even a container that failed in its original location isn’t useless, it just hasn’t found its right home yet. Rather than buying more, pull together everything already purchased and sort through it as its own inventory. Only once you’ve genuinely exhausted what’s on hand, and know precisely what’s still missing, does it make sense to go buy something new.

Your practical, actionable step

Before buying a single new container for your next organizing project, sort and purge the space first, decide where everything will live, and only then look at what containers you already own to see what fits. Save the new purchase for whatever gap is left once you actually know what you need.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.