Organizing your kitchen can be tricky. That said, good organization habits in the kitchen can save you plenty of trouble as you prepare meals for you and your family.

Using cabinets is a great first step, but the trouble often arises with organizing the space within the cabinets themselves. Instead of simply tossing all of your kitchen tools into the cabinetry, take a moment to consider how you’ll organize each cabinet. Here are three tips to organizing your kitchen cabinets:

1. Group like things together
You may be using a dinner recipe that calls for dozens of ingredients. Instead of wasting valuable time racing all over the kitchen to find what you are looking for, try keeping similar items together. Keep all of your spices in one place, all of your canned goods in another. Not only will you know which cabinet to look in first, but keeping similar items together can save on space, too. Think about it: Most cans of soup come in containers that are the same shape. It’s fairly easy to stack cylindrical cans on top of one another as well as convenient to place rectangular boxes side by side. Think of your kitchen cabinets as a game of Tetris. Organizing by shape will help you make the most use of your cabinet space.

2. Try clear containers
It can be near impossible to find things you can’t see. If you’re storing sugars and spices in opaque containers, it  might take you more time to open each one to find what you’re looking for than it should. Instead, try using clear containers to more easily see what’s inside. Label everything if you want to be even more organized. It will take you a little time to write out labels for everything you keep in your kitchen cabinets, but the time you’ll save when looking for items is well worth it.

3. Use additional storage devices for smaller items
It’s common for small items to get lost in the clutter created when you toss them all in the same location. Don’t let that happen to you. If you have a lot of small kitchen tools in one cabinet, use additional dividers to keep items separated from one another. Look for organizational tools designed for certain kitchen tools (like a flatware organizer for all your silverware, for example).