My mom, who has kept the same plastic containers since the nineties, watched me dig through the lid drawer for five straight minutes one Thanksgiving and said, quiet and flat, “You are doing this wrong.”

She was not wrong. The lids were stacked in a heap, the containers were nested, and every lid I needed was at the bottom.

Flip the Containers

Store the containers with their lids clipped on and stack them upright, or nest the containers and keep the lids in a separate shallow bin. The key is that lids get a flat, visible home instead of a pile.

I use a slim plastic file organizer in the drawer, the kind meant for folders. Lids slide in vertically like records. I can see every size at a glance.

Sort by Size, Not by Container

Group lids together by size: small, medium, large. The small ones rarely fit the big containers anyway, so the grouping actually saves time. I used to hunt for a matching pair one lid at a time.

Match and Cull

Once a year, pull everything out and match every lid to a container. Whatever has no partner goes in the recycling. I got rid of eleven orphan lids and six containers that way, and suddenly the drawer had room.

Other things that helped me:

• Keeping the lids bin near the containers, not on the other side of the kitchen
• Buying one brand of containers so lids are interchangeable
• Storing the daily-use containers at eye level instead of the bottom cabinet

The flip side of the hack is that you stop buying new containers because you can actually see what you own. My drawer has been calm for a year.