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Do you use plastic storage boxes for medicines and first aid supplies in your medicine cabinet? If so, you probably already have a pretty well-organized assortment of necessary medical supplies. But recently I came across a cool concept for organizing your medicine cabinet in a different way.

This idea still relies on the use of small plastic storage boxes. But instead of simply dumping all of your medical supplies inside of one or a couple, you are going to get a larger collection of small plastic bins, and you are going to denote a more specific purpose for each of them.

So for example, you could label your bins like this:

• First aid. Obviously, this is where you keep all of your crucial first aid supplies.

• Cold and flue. In this bin, you keep supplies which are especially handy for colds and flus (i.e. cough drops, throat sprays, decongestants, and so forth).

• Pain medicines. If anyone in your home suffers from chronic pain, a box specifically with pain meds and related supplies (like Lidocaine patches or menthol balms) would be very helpful. It can be hard to think when in pain, and having the supplies handy makes it easier and faster to get a chance at relief.

• Daily medications/supplements. This bin could hold capsules and pills which you take on a routine basis.

You could also have bins with labels for each specific person in your family, i.e. “Matt’s medicines,” “Melanie’s medicines.” This would only make sense in situations where there were persons in your household who have a lot of medications. But if you are in that situation, this is a great way to keep them from getting mixed up with other family members’.

One more idea is to have bins labeled for specific health conditions, i.e. diabetes, a heart condition, arthritis, etc.

While there are many ways to organize medicines, the main advantage to using this system is that you are doing so in a way which is based on purpose.

This is much more practical and simple for the brain to digest under pressure than a system which is based on some arbitrary characteristic (i.e. alphabetizing or so forth—or worse, simply dumping all medications into a bin).

This reduces the chances that you will make a mistake at a critical moment, or fail to find what you need in the moment you need it.

If your child has a cold, you can get him or her fast relief. If you come down with a crippling migraine, you can intervene swiftly—and prevent yourself from taking a wrong medication by mistake. If your spouse cuts his hand while slicing avocados, you can go right to the first aid kit.

Hopefully this idea helps you out. You can customize it any way you want to fit your needs. If you are still looking for more ideas to organize medicines or other supplies in your medicine cabinet or bathroom, keep reading the articles in our blog post archive.