Always Be Knolling (2018)

So there's a word for this! Maybe I'm a bit OCD. I tend to knoll everything on my desk but I deliberately put something at a diagonal if I want to remind myself to take it with me when I leave. It might be my pen or my reading glasses or the box with my ear buds. When I glance at the desk after standing up from it, anything that's not knolled stands out.

The extreme version: [1] This is an actual employee guide.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49p1JVLHUos

This is why we format and lint and use syntax highlighters.

Organization improves us. We eat with our eyes first. Avoid clutter and avoid unnecessary distractions. Feed our mind visually with ordered patterns. Embrace the uniformity.

I just made up a couple of pegboard-mounted tool kits, which turns out to be unreasonable satisfying. I think that satisfaction is in the knolling. A pegboard is naturally knolled by virtue of the orientation of gravity and space constraints. The same pegboard with the tools oriented and placed randomly just wouldn't be as satisfying.

Not sure if this only applies to those high on the OCD spectrum or not. Now I keep looking for places to add pegboards. I could 3D print a great pegboard toothbrush holder ...

Many of the pictures are of items that are parallel, not at a right angle. I guess we can't be bothered with details to make a point?

90 degree angles are the beginner's, training-wheel, paint-by-numbers, bowl-with-the-rails-up way to do it.

Once you master the 90s, then you can vary the angles and spacing according to a more personal aesthetic.

Attention is the key. Mise en place.