The Economics of Tidying Up

Obligatory link to Paul Graham's article on the same issue:

http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html

Quote: "I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting."

You need to de-clutter to think better. It is certainly true for me.

A good organizer is a hoarder. It's better to take a good at everything around, go category by category, and get rid of everything you don't need. Save nothing for those 'what if' scenarios that never come. Say goodbye to momentos that serve no purpose. If you feel joy when holding or looking at it, I would say that serves a purpose, but that's a fine line and easy to cross by putting everything in that category. Get together everything you're getting rid of and have a yard sale. Anything you don't sell, drop off what you can at a goodwill and throw the rest out.

You'll feel a huge weight lifted off your shoulders when done, a weight you didn't even know was there when you started.

My experience is that a large fraction of creative people are basically lazy slobs. What can be done?

A professor I know installed two dishwashers in his apartment: one for dirty and one for clean. This seems awesome, but it's certainly tricky to make it really work: You need to limit yourself to only one load of dishes. You can get into the situation where you have two washers with clean dishes. You either have to mark one of them as dirty and re-clean those dishes, or ugh, sweep the clean dishes into one washer. Also pots never fit.

Japanese manufacturing calls this "5S"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_(methodology)