3 Tips for Cable Management in Home Offices and Gaming Rooms

Cable management is an admirable endeavour. In more down-to-earth terms, however, it’s a massive chore that feels endless until finally – 3 hours after you initially thought you finish – you realise, “that’s it…that’s the last one”. Coincidentally, it’s a great chore to take on if you want to put yourself off ever buying another device, gadget, or piece of tech ever again for fear of yet another USB-variant making its way into the midst.

But don’t let that put you off. Once you’re there, nothing will ever stop you from keeping things organised,d and you’ll finally put behind you the days of tangling your feet up in a forest of cables just to sit at the computer, pushing wires off your desktop when they keep drifting back over your mouse and keyboard, and staring resentfully at the hideous heap of wires dangling down the back of your desk and visible from just about every area of the house…somehow.

Here are some tips to get you where you want to be.

1. Don’t take this one when you’re looking to tick things off your To Do list
In case that introduction didn’t make it clear enough, this is a big job. It’s not going to take you days, but it will take you a couple hours of solid focus and effort to get it done. Starting it when you just want to get on top of the odd jobs around the house is a recipe for disaster, since you’re likely to give up soon after the going gets tough and not come back to it until, finally – someday – you sell the house and move onto the next one.

Make a coffee or juice, pull all distractions and obstacles out the way, and be prepared to spend a couple hours following wires back to their sources.

2. A wireless mouse will make things way simpler
If you don’t like cables, then no amount of effective management can overcome that one universal pain point: the mouse cable with a mind of its own, creating unwanted drift when you’re playing video games or getting caught under itself at those times when you need to click faster than usual. MMORPGs, strategy games, online slots SA, and battle royales all have one thing in common: a smooth, friction-free mouse experience is a make or break factor.

Other cables are easily managed: you can cable tie them, or use painter’s tape to attach them to the back of the desk. But a computer mouse needs plenty of flexibility and movement, and you can’t resolve that with a cable tie.

3. Command strips are sometimes better than cable staples
Command strips are generally easy to remove, and can be used to guide wires along the baseboards in the same way cable staples are. The benefit of cable staples is that they’re slightly less bulky, and tend to blend with the cable/baseboard better than command strips do. Then again, command strips are renter friendly (or friendlier, since, every so often, one proves difficult to remove without damaging the paintwork).

Command strips are also great if you need to guide the cables around furniture, since most people don’t want to put a series of pinholes in finishes that aren’t easily painted over in the future.