Organising cords & cables

What it is

Reaching behind a desk to unplug one thing and pulling up a tangled nest of six identical black cables, none of them labelled, is a small, universal modern misery. Organising cables is the cheap, satisfying fix, and most of it costs almost nothing.

Organising cords and cables means taming the tangle of wires behind desks, TVs, and entertainment units, and the loose chargers in drawers and bags, using clips, ties, sleeves, labels, and boxes so that cables are tidy, identifiable, and easy to manage. It spans the permanent setup behind a desk or media unit and the portable chaos of charging cables in a bag, and the aim is both tidiness and the practical ability to know which cable is which without tracing it by hand.

The techniques are simple and the materials cheap, often free. Bundling cables with reusable hook-and-loop ties rather than plastic zip ties means you can re-open them when you add or remove a device, which you inevitably will. Labelling both ends of each cable, even with a strip of masking tape and a pen, removes the guessing game of which plug belongs to what. A cable management box hides a power strip and the excess slack, and adhesive clips along the underside of a desk keep cables off the floor and route them where you want. For drawers and bags, the trick is keeping each cable coiled and secured individually rather than letting them all merge into one inevitable knot, and an over-under coiling technique, the method used for stage and audio cables, stops cables developing the twists and kinks that eventually break the wires inside.