(It's true. I love organizing so much that I'm writing about organizing my Pinterest boards.)

Have I told you that I envisioned the existence of Pinterest years before it was created? I'm not talking about an Al Gore situation here where I'm claiming to have invented it; just that for a long long time I was hoping for a way to save and organize ideas online (I'm sure this is a surprise to exactly no one). In high school and college I had notebooks full of magazine images for recipes, home styling and my future wedding that I had cut out and pasted on the pages. Old school Pinterest!

Since I started using Pinterest I've created many boards and they were starting to feel disorganized; some were duplicating topics, some pins were no longer relevant or useful. I'd been dying to spend some time getting everything organized and I finally found some time this past weekend. The result is as satisfying as I hoped.

Pinterest has changed a lot recently and I don't find it to be as useful to scroll my feed. It used to be full of things friends and bloggers were pinning. Now it's full of "suggested for you" items or ads that range from pretty relevant to strange. 

But I still use Pinterest for saving ideas I find online or to browse my boards for inspiration. I especially love saving gift ideas for other people when I have them/find them. Then when birthdays or Christmas roll around I already have lots of good ideas (high five!). 

Here are a few recommendations I came up with after organizing my Pinterest boards: 

+ Board topic should be narrow enough to be useful but broad enough to include several pins. I had been keep keeping all my food/recipe pins in one board but I realized that I'm often looking for either a dinner idea or a dessert or a breakfast/baked good. So I created two additional boards and moved pins related to breads, baked goods and breakfast to one board and all dessert recipes to another. There were also a few boards in my profile that I had only pinned a few items to. I ended up moving the entire contents to other boards or in some cases deleting the entire board.

+ Keep board names simple. Some of my board names were confusing and made it hard for me to find them quickly. So I changed them to be more concise. For example, "I heart organization" became "Organizing & clean home," and "let's eat dessert" became "Dessert." I did this for myself but also so that if someone else looks at my boards they can easily see what they are about.

+ Use a consistent naming format. My boards were a mix of naming formats including all capital letters, all lowercase letters and mixed. I changed them all to have the first letter capitalized and everything else lower case. When I use "and" I used the "&." This kind of detail makes me so happy.

+ Change up the board cover photo. I was getting bored (ha!) of looking at many of my board cover photos. Choosing new ones was a simple way to refresh.

If you're itching to reorganize your pins you'll be happy to know that you can move, edit and delete pins in batches. Just open up a board and you'll see these options at the top right. 

If you'd like, check out my newly organized Pinterest boards. And do tell me if you've implemented any helpful Pinterest organization tactics.