How I Organize My Books

Spoiler: I'm kind of a psycho about it

If I have a superpower, it’s organization. I love to organize and make things easy to find and clutter free. And that extends to digital things, too. So let’s talk today about how I organize my books - and I don’t mean my bookshelves.

I use Trello for all things book related. I’ve been using it regularly since 2021 to keep my books organized and I love it. Inside Trello I have two main book boards - my TBR board which keeps track of all of the books I own but haven’t yet read, and a Finished Books board, sorted by year which is where I house all of the books I read, per month, along with my review of them (which I then copy and paste here for my weekly snapshot reviews).

TO BE READ BOOKS

First, let’s talk TBR board. Here’s a glimpse at it:

A quick Trello overview so that the terms don’t feel confusing:

• Board - this is what it’s called for an entire space (like the TBR board above)

• List - inside each board are separate lists (in the TBR board, those are things like Next Up, TBR-NetGalley, TBR-Physical, etc.)

• Card - each list is populated with cards, in my instance, each book gets its own card

Now, TBR Board: This is where every single book that I own lives - whether it’s a physical book, eBook, or audiobook. Once I buy it, I add it to this list. Not only that, but I have some specific info inside of each card, along with the cover so that it just looks prettier. Here’s what it looks like inside of a card:

You’ll see that I include an image of the book, the page count, an Amazon link, publish date, author, and synopsis. And then below that I have my own review information (more on that later). Not only does this board help to remind me of what books I actually own, it makes writing reviews a lot simpler.

FINISHED BOOKS

Once I’ve read a book and I’m ready to review it, it heads to my Finished Book board. Let’s get a glimpse of that now:

As you can see in the image, this consists of every single book I’ve read in a year. It’s broken down by month, and includes crucial details. In addition, I also keep a running list of my favorite books from each month so that it makes it simple to pull together best of lists. Let’s take a closer look at a finished book card:

This is my finished card for JOE NUTHIN’S GUIDE TO LIFE. Up above is the information that I added in when it was on my TBR board, and what you can see is where I filled out my own information - most importantly my review. All of my reviews live on these yearly Finished Books boards and make it super simple to look through when I can’t remember how I felt about a certain book (which is often).

These cards are also great because as I’m reading, I’ll sometimes write down a quick comment right inside of the card (you can see one above) that I don’t want to forget to mention when I review, or it’s something that’ll help me remember a key part of the book.

I’ve tried other ways to keep track of my books, but Trello is the easiest I’ve found with this process. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s just pretty to look at which is very important to me.

ONE MORE STEP

And lastly, a couple other quick things I do to keep track of book related things happens inside of the Notes app on my phone. I have a separate folder for Bookish Things and keep two separate lists: New Books and Books to Find.

The New Books list is my quick list of every new book I’ve recently obtained. It lives on this list before I transfer it to Trello. In here is just the title and author of each book. And as I add them into my Trello list, I bold the book so that I know I’ve moved it over.

And then the Books to Find list is a simple list of books I’ve recently heard about that I want to do more research on to decide if I want to buy it or not. This could be books I’ve heard about on podcasts, something a friend has told me, a book I’ve seen on Substack, etc. It’s just a running list of books that sound interesting. And every once in awhile I’ll go through this list and look the books up and remove the ones that I decide aren’t for me. Sometimes before I go to Barnes and Noble, I’ll also look at their website to see which of these books are in stock in my store to make it easy to find what I’m looking for.

So that’s how I organize! Two simple programs that really work for me - and they’re both free! I’d love to know what you think:

• How do you organize your books? Or do you?

• Do you think I’m a complete psycho and this is too much work?