A good portion of my personal office supply collection spread out on my bed. Notice that my weakness is things in fun colours. Even the staples are colourful!

You know the scenario – you’re printing a script and run out of paper or you go to use your favourite extra fine felt-tipped pen and find its out of ink or, heaven forbid!, your industrial strength hole punch breaks mid project. You need to finish the project which means a trip to the office supply store is in your immediate future. If you’re anything like me this is both exciting and awful.

I LOVE office supply stores. I also have a problem with buying far more than I need. In fact, my tiny apartment currently has four drawers plus a large tub of office supplies (and that’s not counting specialty items for scrapbooking and card-making).

So when faced with a need to go office supply shopping, how do you go in to the store without buying a new 24 pack of sharpies (you will NEVER use the seafoam sharpie. Just don’t buy it!) or another box of 200 paperclips (even if they are blue/green/purple/pink sparkley ones)? Here are a few rules:

1. Make a list.
2. Stick to your list.
3. Walk around the store twice. Once to pick up all the items that look appealing and once to put back all the things you really can’t justify. I promise you DO NOT need that pack of Spiderman pencils, even if they are on sale for $0.97. You have more pencils at home.
4. Make a budget for when you go over your list.
5. Stick to your budget.
6. If you’ve picked up an item that costs more than $20 and it wasn’t on the list, put it back. NOW. Items over $20 at an office supply store are too big of purchases to be impulse buys!
7. You do not NEED the jumbo pack. Yes, it is usually cheaper per item to buy your favourite pens in the 24 pack instead of the four pack, but by the time you need pen number 24 you probably will have lost it anyway. Buy the four pack. Use them until they’re dead. Then buy four more. I don’t care how good your system for saving pens is. You never need the 24 pack.
8. The exception to rule 7 is when your favourite pen is going out of production. Just like all products, pen suppliers sometimes stop producing a specific style. If your favourite pen is going out of production please by all means buy the 24 pack. Finding a new favourite pen is hard.
9. The Sharpie permanent pencil is not worth your money. I’ve bought it, tried it, and now you don’t have to.
10. Never ever assume you know the state of your collection without checking it. That’s how I ended up with over 200 writing implements. 

A breakdown of some of my office supplies.