How To Organize Your Life With Pinterest

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Have you tried using Pinterest to Organize Your Life?
I know that sounds marvelous unless your Pins are willy-nilly and you have 300 pins per board!

In other words, are your boards and pins set up to save you from the frustration of searching through 100 appetizers recipes before finding the one you were looking for?
No?  Sort of?

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Pinterest as an Organizing Tool

In reality, Pinterest is a thing of beauty and whoever came up with the idea of Pinterest 10 years ago had a truly genius idea, right?

By now you too have probably been at this Pinterest thing for several years and have been collecting pins on everything from recipes, home decor, fashion, education, or whatever rings your bell.

But, maybe you feel like the organization of your Pinterest boards and pins just isn’t working for you anymore, and you’d like to be organized but just don’t know where to start.

Believe me, I have been there, done that, and because I now consider myself sort of a semi-professional Pinterest organizer, I want to share the tips and tricks I have learned to use Pinterest to organize my life. I love it.

Organize Pinterest

But before you can use Pinterest to stay organized you have to Organize Pinterest.

• First, you need to organize your boards into Categories and put them in an order that works for you.
• Next, you’re going to Clean Out unwanted or duplicate pins.
• You’ll want to Rename or Add new boards if you need to.
• And for boards with many pins, you’ll learn to make Sections within your boards.
• We will also cover how to delete and Move Pins to other boards. This is awesome!

I’m not going to lie, this is going to eat up a good chunk of time, but I think it will be fun time, and so worth it.

Honestly, once you get the basics down, you’ll see Pinterest has added so many easy organizing features, you can “tweak” your plan to your heart’s content.

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Board Categories

First, let’s start with broad categories to organize your boards.
(I’m not talking about board names yet.)
Here are mine, but don’t feel you need to do the same. We likely have different interests, right?

Recipes/Food
Home
Technology
Personal Care
Family
Holidays
Special Events

You might add things like Travel, Gardening, crafts,  or whatever.

Naming Your Pinterest Boards

Next, within each category, you will have Pinterest Boards with a more detailed title.
Don’t worry about having too many boards. I’ve seen people with over 100, and I have 60 myself.

Examples under each category:
( yes, this is a long list, just highlight the ones that work for you).

Recipes/Food
Soups
Breakfast
Appetizers
Meat/Fish/Poultry ( I’ll explain in a minute how to set this up)
Entertainment/Parties

Home
Home Organization
Home Decor
Home Remodeling
Minimalism
Decluttering
Smart Home

Technology
Digital Life
iPhone
Gadgets

Healthy List
Diet
Fitness
Happiness
Self-Care

Family
Grandchildren
Vacations

Holidays
Christmas
Halloween
Easter

Special Events
Weddings
Birthdays

Grouping Boards

Now move your Pinterest boards and place boards for each category together.
This is super easy on a laptop or computer.

To sort automatically just Open Boards,
Click on the Sorting Button on the top right.

I personally use the drag and drop so I can put my categories together.
Of course, you can certainly keep your boards in alphabetical order if that works better for you. 

On an iPad or iPhone, it is also super easy to rearrange your boards.

• Click on Boards and you’ll see Manage Boards in the middle.
• Off to the right, you see a little icon that looks like two little circles with lines.
• Click on that icon to Auto Sort with the same choices available on a laptop.

You may be wondering if you can drag and drop on a mobile device?
The answer is yes, and it is so cool. Here’s what you do.

• Open boards and press down on the board ( don’t open it.)
• You will see a menu of icons for editing ( pencil) or sharing the pin.
• You will also see two little arrows. (see below)
• Drag your finger to the arrows and the circle becomes red.

• Next, you see a screen that says, “Reorder Boards”
• Now you can just drag and drop your boards into any order you want.
• Done!

Now that you have your boards organized in the order that works for you, it’s time to take a look at the pins within each board to see what you’ve got hidden in there.

Declutter Your Pins

Later I’m going to help you learn how to add, delete, and edit a board, but first let’s take some time to clean-up your pins.

Did you know that under each board you can see the Number of Pins in the board and the number of Sections if you have any?

I am going to suggest starting with the boards that have the fewest number of pins, and take the time to delete pins you know you don’t want or you find duplicates.
I liken this to decluttering your cupboards.
Just take out what you don’t want and get rid of it. 

How to Delete a Pin

Actually deleting a pin is really easy so you should be able to get a lot done in just a little amount of time.

You need to open a board to see all the pins inside.
You do not have to open the pin all the way to delete it (but you may need to if you forgot why you pinned it in the first place)

• On a laptop, you can just hover your cursor over the pin.
• Click on the little pencil in the upper left corner of the pin.
• When it opens, just choose Delete.
• You can do the same by opening the pin and finding the little pencil.

TIP: Actually any time you see that little pencil it means “edit”, which includes deleting.

• On your mobile device, remember when you pressed down on the board before and saw the little arrows?
• Do that again, but this time drag your finger to the little pencil to edit. Delete!

What if you want your pins in a different order inside your board? Easy.

• On a laptop drag and drop pins and put them in any order you want.

• You have probably already figured out that on a mobile device you press down on a pin and choose the arrows again to move them around

Delete or Move Multiple Pins

At this point, you must be thinking, deleting all those pins will take more time than you have!

Fear not, you can get it accomplished in minutes, really.

• Open the board
• Look on the right to find those two little circles with lines.
• Click the little circle with lines icon
• Choose “Select Pins to Move or Delete”.
• Now just click all the pins you want to move or delete.
• Click Done. Ta-da! All your chosen pins deleted or moved together.

Moving multiple pins on a mobile device is pretty smooth too.

• Open your board where you want to move ( or delete) multiple pins.
• On the right, click on the word Organize.
• Now you can select as many pins as you want.
• At the bottom, you’ll see an arrow, a folder, and a trash can.
• The trash can is of course how you can delete multiple pins.
• The arrow icon is what you want to choose to MOVE pins to another board or section.

Note: You are going to use this same format when you want to move multiple pins to other boards or sections. That’s all coming up.

Moving Pins to a New Board or Section

Before we talk about making sections or editing boards, it’s a good idea you learn how to move pins from one board to the other first.

Moving a pin couldn’t be easier.
• Choose your pin and hit the little pencil again which means to edit.
Here’s is what you’ll see.

Notice this delicious recipe for Kung Pao Chicken is living in my Main Dishes Board.

To move it to another board and remove it from this board,
• Click the little arrow on the right and a whole menu of all my boards will appear.

• Simply choose the new board and poof, it’s moved.

What if I wanted to create a brand new board called Chinese Food?
You would follow the same steps because you’ll be given the option to create a new board and move your pin at the same time. – Magic

On the above image, you will also see that my pin is in a Section called Asian Food. This time if I want to move my pin to another section, I click the arrow, and I’d see the other sections on this board to choose from.

Next let’s see how easy it is to create sections in your boards.

Sections to Organize Pins

I was shocked to see I had some boards with over 300 pins!
No wonder I can’t find what I’m looking for!
You have a couple of options for organizing if you have a board with a lot of pins or plan on having a lot of pins.

My best example is my Soups and Stews board.
I love making soup, so I collect a lot of recipes.
But I will admit it is very frustrating when I am searching for a specific recipe and I have to scroll through all 313 recipes, and then sometimes miss it and have to start over!

So, one choice I have is to create a new board for just Chili or Stews making fewer pins on each board.
My other option is to leave all the pins on the same board and sort the recipes into Sections.

What you see below are the Sections I created inside my Soups and Stews board.

Sections are essentially grouping your pins inside of a board to make it organized!

Again, Pinterest has made this so user friendly.

• Open the board you want to create sections in.
• On the right, you’ll see a + sign.
Click it and choose Add Section.

• Now you can move pins to the new section from this board or others!

Bonus: you can rearrange your sections by dragging and dropping just like you did with boards and pins.

Editing Boards

Editing a board has several easy to use features.

This time when you open a board, look to the top left and click the three little circles in a circle as shown here. Look what pops up.

Here is where you can change the name of your board, Delete, Archive, and scroll down to make your board secret. Quick and easy, right?
If you’re new to secret boards or archived boards, I’ve included some helpful details below.

Secret Boards

I think the term “secret boards” speaks for itself.
By the way, if you have many secret boards as I do, it is a good idea to declutter and organize them as well. 

On a Secret Board, no one else can see your pins!! The possibilities are endless!

I’ll explain why below, but I plan on Archiving many of my Secret Boards, because they aren’t something I need right now, but may later.

Archived Boards

At first glance most of us wouldn’t realize why Archiving Boards is such a great idea.

As you know, Pinterest adds pins to your Home Feed based on your searching and pinning history.

Well, let’s say I was searching and pinning for a special event like a trip I am planning to Disney.
When the trip is over, I don’t really want to delete the whole board, but I don’t need any more tips about Disney right now in my Home Feed.

If I Archive my Disney Trip board, it will go to the Archived Boards section at the bottom of my profile.
My pins will be there if I need them, but Pinterest will no longer add new Disney pins to my Home Feed!!!

To Archive a board, just tap the Edit Button (little pencil) on your board, then tap Archive.

Again, you can always find your archived boards in a new section at the bottom of your profile.

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How Do Your Boards Look?

Well, I am hoping you found these tips for organizing your life with Pinterest Pins and Boards helpful.

If you’d like to follow me on Pinterest, you can find me here.

Do you have more tips and tricks about organizing Pinterest to share with us?

Please let me know what worked for you in the comments below, or don’t hesitate to ask for help or advice.

Have Fun!!

P.S. You may also enjoy More Help Organizing
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