There’s something about spring that seems like a fresh start. It’s still a second chance at a new year, a time to get everything in order and set some goals.

Video: Cupcakes are a universal good, and using silicone liners makes for a cleaner, cheaper and more colourful baking experience. But these little reusable wrappers have a wider range of uses beyond simply baking.

I’ve always been a fan of pre-travel planning, to the point that I build a packing grid before every trip. The packing grid includes outfit components for every day of travel (based on predicted weather and activity), as well as a list of essentials that I don’t want to leave behind: Advil, Band-Aids, my Fitbit charger and so on.

It is a decision I face daily. When my five-year-old daughter shows me her latest work of art, do I: A) talk to her about it and then stealthily slip it into the recycling bin, or B) talk to her about it, hang it on the wall or fridge, leave it there for a couple of years forgotten, and then stealthily slip it into the recycling bin? The mental load is real.

While organising and arranging cables behind your media centre or brand new computer might give you a rush of adrenaline, untangling said cables after you add, remove and rearrange the stuff in your life is always a hassle.

Looking for a job is difficult under the best of circumstances, and it gets considerably more so when you aren't prepared. Optimistically, we stick with a gig for a while even if we don't love it, neglecting to keep our resumes and other materials prepped if an opportunity comes up that we want to jump at.

I appreciate the many storage bins, baskets and chests that have contained my kid's avalanche of toys. They're pretty - we have a few woven ombré ones. They're huge. And best of all, I've been able to toss things in there at a rapid-fire pace before guests arrive, and have my house instantly look like it's straight from the pages of an IKEA catalogue - or at least like Fisher Price did not just throw up in it. My continual solution for getting rid of clutter has been to buy more beautiful bins. And now I realise that these containers have got to go.

"So many books, so little time" might be an eye-rolling slogan slightly worse than "Keep calm and carry on," but it's also literally true. As is "so many books, so little space." When you have too many books, how do you decide which ones to get rid of? We asked authors, publishers, and booksellers (all notorious book hoarders) how they keep control of their home libraries.

There comes a time when enough is, quite simply, enough. I had been putting off the task of organising my sprawling Gmail inbox for months, if not years. But when Lifehacker told me that we were going to have a Spring Cleaning week, I knew it was time. And I wasn't going to waste precious hours trying to find apps or tools to do the task for me. I needed to Ron Swanson my inbox -- roll up my sleeves, jump in, and manage the mess manually.

Android/iOS: My boyfriend and I live in a two-bedroom apartment with exactly two, exceptionally small closets. The closest are big enough to hold our clothes, but when it comes to other things that one might put in a closet, that stuff is stashed all over our house.

When you're a geek with preferences on USB cable construction materials and a penchant for buying more than a few directional adaptors, organising the yards upon yards of wiring you've accumulated can be a bit daunting. Instead of learning enough knots to compete with the boys at the local yacht club, I turned to the old hook and loop fastener you might know as Velcro. With a single roll of cable-friendly straps, a pair of scissors, and somewhere to put it all, you can organise the tangled web of black cables you've woven around your keyboard or TV.

For everyone subscribed to the philosophy of GTD, myself included, task managers are essential to managing the process digitally. Of course, they're only useful if you actually use them, as evidenced by the trail of task managers I've left in my wake as I search for one with the right combination of cross-platform access, easy task management, and a little bit of sharing functionality. It would also help if it were in a place I wouldn't forget about (or avoid) such as my web browser.

In my first post-university employed position, I worked for a boss who loved Excel spreadsheets. She thought nearly everything could be put into "boxes and rows", and after my first year working there, I was officially a convert. I'm big on organisation anyway, and those spreadsheet cells called to me, luring me in with their promises of order and clarity. Event planning logistics? I had a spreadsheet for that. Airline and hotel reservations for the office directors? Spreadsheet. Goals for the new fiscal year? Spreadsheet.

Last year Instagram introduced Collections, a way to organise your pictures within the app into different curated groups. It's a feature that's been around for roughly a year now, but it's one that most people don't realise is even there.

The sponge is possibly the grossest thing in your house. I say this as someone who regularly comes home from holding a train pole and immediately eats finger food (it's builds character!), but still the sponge disgusts me. It is, by nature, a festering cesspool of germs, a wet thing used to clean dirty things that you let fester in the open while also sucking up all the bacteria in the air. The smell of a dirty sponge is one of the worst household odours, one that lingers on your fingers and leads to me obsessively washing my hands after every single sponge contact. It's like cat urine or black mildew - it's the smell of bad housekeeping.

At the beginning of the school year, every writing assignment, certificate and work of art that your child brings home is a sweet thrill, a memento to hold onto for years to come. But then, soon enough, your house is flooding with papers, and it's only November, dangit.

I'm gonna tell you a secret about picking your stuff up: It isn't any harder when you do it right away.

A while back I decided my apartment looked like a teenager lived there. Video games were front and centre, comic books were lying all over the place, and there were toys strewn about for no reason. So I made my place look a little more sleek, organised, and "grown up" - without sacrificing the things I loved.

Exciting news: There's a new organisational how-to in town. Look out, Marie Kondo, and make way for The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family From a Lifetime of Clutter. The author, Margareta Magnusson, who is "somewhere between 80 and 100," started the process of cleaning out her home and organising her affairs for her heirs, and found it so rewarding that she wrote a book about it.