I am a Pinterest fanatic. I have a board for everything— my aspirational style, what my future home will look like, magazine layout ideas (from my yearbook days in high school), summer camp arts & crafts projects, nail design ideas (channeling my inner Hanna Marin), and more.
I LIVE on Pinterest. So does my best friend.
Every weekend, we pick a night where we both lay on our beds in our respective dorms and just talk for hours on the phone (this is our way of ensuring our friendship doesn’t die in college). “Hours” as in a minimum of three. “Hours” as in almost getting everything off of her to-do list before I call and then “let her go” at 2 a.m., at which point she’s too tired to type up her chemistry lab.
Photo Credit: Pinterest
And while the conversation is riveting enough to hold both of our undivided attention, we’re in the Netflix-should-have-shows-that-are-easy-to-follow-when-you’re-on-your-phone-the-whole-time generation. If there are days that are technology cleanses, our phone call days are technology binges. We’re both constantly scrolling on different apps (it’s also a perfect time to catch up on social media after a week of working very hard, because, college).
Too often, our text messages become flooded with memes and screenshots. I send her seven, she sends me eight, and already, it’s a lot of scrolling. Which I don’t typically mind, but the two biggest flaws in this system are that (1) both the content that I want her to see and the content she wants me to see is in one place (a bit of sensory overload) and (2) when we text each other important information, like dates and ticket confirmations, it gets lost pretty quickly.
Photo Credit: Urban Dictionary
Enter Pinterest’s shared boards and section dividers.
My best friend and I have a shared board called “carina & erika” (lowercase for aesthetic purposes) and three sections within it: “roomies! (apartment)” for the apartment we say we’ll share when we’re in our 20’s, “for carina to see,” where Erika pins college stories and the U.S. vs. the rest of the world memes (my favorite kind of humor) for me, and “for erika to see,” where I pin Brooklyn Nine-Nine screenshots and John Mulaney jokes for her. Photo Credit: Screenshot
It’s a really efficient system for us, and the sections feature of Pinterest is SO amazing. I beta test for Pinterest, so when they first rolled it out I was ridiculously excited (and immediately divided my style board into clothes, shoes, jewelry, accessories, nails, and hair…I think I’m a compartmentalizer).
Considering we each have 300+ pins in our sections, it’s a godsend that the pins I want her to see and the ones she wants me to see aren’t thrown together in one huge mess. I make a point to check our shared board maybe once a week, and if I forget, my best friend will usually casually remind me to on our phone calls, especially when she saves things like Charles Darwin’s diary entry. Photo Credit: Newsroom
Sharing Pinterest boards saves so much space and time, and for us, we love having one solid location to put everything. It’s a place where we don’t have to worry about her Snapchat password getting lost in a sea of tweets, nail polish colors, Urban Outfitters wishlist items, and more. Try using Pinterest boards with your best friend too!
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