Best Tips for How to Organize Your Backpack

For many students, a backpack carries everything needed for the school day — notebooks, binders, supplies, electronics, and personal items. Because it holds so many essentials, keeping your backpack organized can make a big difference in how smoothly your school day goes.

However, backpacks can quickly become cluttered with loose papers, snack wrappers, and random supplies if there is no system in place. Learning how to organize your backpack properly can save time, reduce stress, and help you stay focused during class.

If you’re wondering how to organize your backpack more efficiently, these simple tips from students and organization experts can help you create a system that keeps everything easy to find.

Knowing how to organize your backpack prevents you from digging through piles of crumpled papers and supplies when you are simply trying to find a pen or notebook. Below are several practical tips students use to keep their backpacks clean, efficient, and ready for the school day.

5 Easy Ways to Organize Your Backpack

1.       Start with the right backpack. The right backpack can mean different things for different people, but there are a few things that you should always consider: fit, size, weather-proofing, and pockets. “Please pick one that’s actually going to fit you well and one that’s going to be comfortable for your shoulders and your back. One that’s durable and possibly resistant to all kinds of weather,” suggests Tiktok content creator jozadak.

Pockets are also non-negotiable as they give you plenty of organization options. They help keep everything in place by ensuring you have space for small items that tend to be impossibly hard to dig out if you’re only placing everything in one big compartment.

2.       Separate all your stuff into categories. In the video How to Organize Your School Supplies, Seventeen.com web editor Noelle Devoe suggests grouping the contents of your backpack according to their use—whether they are notebooks and books, hygiene products, pens and other writing materials, snacks, and other miscellaneous items like your earphones and sunglasses—and assign each category to different compartments and pockets. Most backpacks will have a big front pocket, which is the perfect place for things you’ll need easy access to throughout the day, such as snacks, pens, or a school planner.

3.       Arrange the contents of your backpack from big to small. You can choose to organize your backpack according to the size of the items or your class schedule. Either way, you should always see to it that your biggest and flattest items go in the back of the main compartment first. This means your big notebooks, binders, or laptops. In doing so, you’re making more space for your other items. “I have three [binders], so I use that technique where I put one the opposite way, and then pretty much the opposite after that,” shares high school student and Youtube content creator JM Everything in his video How to Keep Your Backpack Organized.

4.       Consolidate your notebooks. Some students like having a dedicated notebook for each subject, and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that. However, this can add to the disorganization for those who are already struggling to keep their backpacks tidy. Instead, Devoe suggests using a four- or five-subject notebook with different colored tabs or sections for each subject. Another option would be to get a binder that can fit well inside your backpack. A school binder is great for having all your notes in one place and storing papers, handouts, and activities that would usually just get stuffed inside your backpack and end up crumpled, torn, and unreadable.

5.       Put your small miscellaneous items in a pouch before tucking them away in your backpack’s pockets. How many times did you have to spend minutes looking for your earphone only to find the wires all tangled (or worse, frayed and broken) once you’ve finally managed to wrangle it out of what seemed like the bottomless pit that is your backpack? Small items like earphones, pens, lip gloss, and keys can easily add to the clutter in your backpack. “Go through all of these things and put them into pouches to keep them safe and organized,” suggests Devoe. Pens, for example, need to be in a pencil case instead of just being thrown in one of the pockets. “Pens can poke holes in your backpack, and the pencil will mark up the inside of your backpack. It just gets really messy,” she adds.

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