Tidying One’s Room

Last month returned to my parents' house while I search for a new job. They offered me a desk in the computer room, and cleared it for me. But every day I came down to use it, my mum or dad had put something (papers, clothes, wires) into the empty space.

To establish that this is "my" space, they told me to put "my" things there. Then it won't be a vacuum.

On the contrary, my colleagues in Taiwan were surprised that I always filled my desk with all kinds of things, mostly electronic. They thought it looked "messy", but I thought it's just my way of showing that I still exist.

For a long time, I considered my girlfriend's opinion of my room to be very hypocritical. She has so many plastic bottles of random creams that she can't see her TV. Instead of tidying, she stands up for 20 minutes while watching her shows! It finally dawned on me that she thinks wires are messy, and I think plastic is messy.

"If an object is in the first place you look, and you need to find it soon, put it back exactly where you found it! If an object isn’t in the first place you look, put it in the first place you looked! You’ll look there again.

Otherwise, what you are doing is systematically taking things you can find, and moving them to locations where you might not find them. Whereas if you fail to find them, you won’t move them, and they’ll stay not found. This is why you can’t find the remote – it keeps moving randomly until it finds a place where you can’t find it, then stays there until you figure that one out. Repeat.

It took way too many times when the only thing I needed was reliably in the wrong pocket for me to figure out how this works."

This post is great. It collates a bunch of half-formed thoughts I've had about organization and putting things away. I've noticed that when I move, I try to put things in places that are somehow analogous to where they were before, even if there wasn't a good reason to put them there in the first place. I'm unconsciously capitalizing on the fact that because I recognize the analogy between the places, I already have a place to expect the items to be.

> If they’re not in a permanent location, they’re probably in an arbitrary location.

The arbitrary location to often becomes the permanent location.

For me I found it helps to think which container I put stuff in. I have a box for my daily use tools. It's a drawer with tools, I know where to find it and it fits all the tools I need often. If I where to leave a tool on my desk its new 'container' would be the desk, or worse the room the desk is in. Sure the room is big enough as container to fit all my stuff and really easy to find. But no help in organising my tools.

Every place explicitly becomes a container in my mind with a set purpose and rules. For example the corner on my desk with important paperwork: container. No other stuff shall be placed there (my wife knows this as well). The empty shelve in the kitchen where we randomly put stuff: container of (only) temporary stuff that I remind myself of to empty every week/month or so by relocating the items to a different container (often the bin).

I still do have a lot of big random containers everywhere with all kinds of stuff, but at least I now don't put the stuff I want to find easily in there, since the belong in a different container. And because I think of everything as container I have to define the size for it so when they overflow I get triggered to clean or renegotiate the container with myself.

I've found a solution to keep most "cabley things" in order. I keep them straight, high up the wall, in a 2m wide hanger made from 1x1 wood.

Hanger is high enough for mouse & cord, wall wart & cord and so on. There are conical holes, every inch, deep ones on the left and successively shallower on the right. Far left holds RG-8 with connector nicely, or most power cords, and far right fits 3.5 audio plugs, mini-usb, etc. Holes are 1 inch apart and opened with a slit from the front. The slit gradually gets narrower from 12mm on the left to 3mm on the right.

It's hard to misplace things, as each cable only fits into certain area, and shirts or headphones or ... are not easy to insert into the hanger at all.

I think it's tidy. Some might not.

If anyone wants to read further and deeper in this topic I strongly recommend "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo. It covers almost all practical and philosophical aspects of organizing one's living place (and the way of living)

I can sympathize. But I don't have a wife so things tend do spiral out of control easily.

It would be interesting to extend this to refactoring in programming :)