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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

Deep within your subconscious memories is a series of you unloading A4 from your printer, thinking about where to best store it, finding 20 reams already there, stacking this one on top, and then promptly forgetting the location.

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"I don't put things where I think they should go, I put them where I am likely to look for them" - Adam Savage

I really like this quote, but I can't find any reference to Adam Savage saying it.

Closest I can find is his concept of "First Order Retrievability"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyCrHLYiGNo

I recently watched the video where he said it, but I can't remember which one it was. It was one of the ones on the Tested channel, either an ask Adam or one of the questions from a live stream they made in to a video.

One of his "Ask Adam" videos, I believe the same one he discussed Pica pens.

> I really like this quote, but I can't find any reference to Adam Savage saying it.

Maybe, instead of attributing the quote to someone who said it, they attributed the quote to someone who they'd think would've said it.

No, Adam Savage has said something to this effect every time he talks about how his shop is organized and why it shifts around over time. The gist of it is that while most of his tools and common materials are first order retrievable, but theres a whole world of stuff in the shop that can't, so he thinks about where it should be stored and puts it there or there are times when a particular tool or set of tools is always used with some other thing in the shop, so it lives next to that other thing rather than on some rack of the same tools. What is most likely happening is that its all been in videos of which no readily searchable transcript exists, and he is not always very concise about explaining his core practices, so finding the exact quote is non-trivial.

Here's a Q&A where he says something like this: https://youtu.be/og0yYQAN1JE?t=233

I'd be better off putting them where I wouldn't look, that's probably where I'd look.

I've been following this since I heard him say it a few years ago, and I try to impress this upon my family as well

A4 is an antimemetic paper size

Periodically I buy things like Post-its because I can't find any--and then the next rare time when I really deep clean my office or attic, I find enough office supplies to open a stationary store.

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