Organization: Keeping Your Bag Organized

I love big bags.

Ever since grade school, I have been lugging around larger bags than the rest of the school population. I just needed to have everything I need on hand and the thought of going without my extensive list of "essentials" makes me feel a little vulnerable. Of course, I also have to have a complete array of pens, pencils, erasers, scissors, etc. with me all the time because I color code almost everything.

When mommahood came, the "essentials" only grew in number. My three-year-old daughter eventually realized that my bag was a treasure trove of doodling materials on those long trips.

All that stuff jumbled up in my bag is enough to make my neat-freakiness go crazy, which is why I am oh-so grateful to the wonderful person who created the bag organizer. You must have had our best interests in mind when you designed this little darling.

Below is a picture of my bag organizer from the front part. Most bag organizers available back then were black. I came across this one with a pink strip to satisfy my feminine little heart. A little.

This picture below shows how my some of the "basics" are neatly arranged inside the organizer. That's my planner in the larger pocket with one of my favorite pens, a black Pilot Hi-Tec in 0.3 (they call them G-Tec here in the Philippines), tucked into the pen holder. Beside it (shown with the pink zipper) is a pouch, which houses my pens, highlighters, etc., because I'm not a big fan of pens sloshing around in my bag either. The smaller pockets hold my pink Tinkerbell journal (which is mostly filled with doodles by a three-year-old who just loves to draw caricatures of our family) and a couple of Post-Its and in the adjacent pocket, my pink purse, which holds any loose change in place.

And this is how it looks like from the bag. That green pouch to the left holds my toiletries. I absolutely cannot go on without some wet wipes, facial tissues, my Hair Doctor, and my favorite VMV Armada lip balm (I am a huge fan of VMV Hypoallergenics!). The red stuff peeking out from one of the pockets of the bag organizer is a huge shopping bag I got free from one of my splurging sprees in Gift Gate. I think I am bound for a lifelong addiction to the utter cuteness that is Sanrio.

This is how I manage to keep my sanity on the move. Another big plus for the bag organizer is that I really don't have to take its contents apart when I change bags and believe me, I change bags a lot to match either my clothes, my mood, or what really works best for the activities of the day. I can just take the whole thing out and transfer the organizer to another bag. Easy-peasy.

I recently surprised my mom with a pink-and-gray bag organizer with zippers. She absolutely adores the thing. It's a perfect fit inside her pink Lacoste bag. I think my love for all things pink and organized is a genetic trait I inherited from her.

How do you keep your bags organized?♥