The Overflowing Bookshelf Challenge: Getting Organized!
While working on my massive New Bookshelves Project (Instagram), I also took the time to get organized for my Overflowing Bookshelf Challenge. During the reshelving process, I decided to forego my typical alphabetical order arrangement for my unread titles in favor of a descending “priority” lineup. I’m going to share how this new reorganization has set me up for success with my challenge.
I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted staring at my collection, researching titles, and creating shelves on Goodreads while trying to get straight which books I should be reading first. I couldn’t find a great way to keep track of everything, so I’d have to re-look up the same titles constantly, wasting precious brain power and reading time. Clearly I needed a better way to organize these titles, and I took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the best solution would be to physically move them around in my collection instead of creating endless digital lists. #brilliant
Since I had to pull all the titles off the shelves anyway for the bookshelf swap, I took the time to painstakingly research each book to check for audio availability (either through audible, library overdrive, or physical CDs at my local branch – 3 sources for each title!! It took forever). Eventually I had everything separated into 3 categories:
1. Books available on Audio for Free!
2. Books available on Audio for a Cost.
3. Books without an Audio option.
I then arranged them from highest to lowest priority on the shelves in their own respective sections. The image at the beginning of this post is how it turned out. :) Here are the top shelves (or, the highest priorities) within each category:
I love it. This new shelving layout allows me to immediately see what’s on the docket, and it made it immeasurably easier to identify which bottom priority titles were up for eviction from my house (researching these bottom titles required another several hours of effort, but I was able to remove 99 from my shelves, which I’m super proud of).
What im left with are titles I’m genuinely interested in reading and a clear, fool-proof plan for reading them all: start with the highest priority and work my way back.
As I’ve explained before, I’m not the fastest at getting through physical reads for a plethora of reasons (eye strain, arcs, phone distractions, etc), so most of my book enjoyment these days come from audiobooks (it’s a bonus that I can listen to them all day at work). So this is the main reason why I chose to separate my collection accordingly. It also frees up more time for physical reads and will enable me to work though my collection that much faster. Here’s the first physical read series I’m Tackling:
Overall, even though it took a ton of time and effort, I’m 100% pleased with how it turned out and think I’ve taken out most of the obstacles I was facing for getting a handle on my collection. Here are some current stats (not including YA titles…I haven’t touched those yet):
Audio Free: 183
Audio $: 139
Non-Audio: 270
Total Non-Read: 691
Titles for Donation: 99 -> 14%!! (I was shooting for 10%)
New Total: 592
Once I let go of my donation pile, I’ll have 592 books to read. Figure I can do about 5 a month (leaving 5 for non-owned titles), then I should be able to get through all of these in 9.87 years. That may seem like a lot, but before I started thinning out my collection some years ago, I was looking at a 40 year TBR pile. The goal has ever been to get the TBR down to a “manageable” level, and 10 years was my goal. My new goal is 9 years (540 titles) – let’s take it in baby steps. :)
Thanks for following along my challenge journey. My next post will be about the much-needed reorganization of my unread YA titles. And then, dare I say, I’ll be finished with this project and can focus on challenge updates from there on out. :)
The Obsessive Bookseller 