Comment by tonymet
2 years ago
Best cleaning / organizational tip I’ve learned : everything out of place goes into a tote. Every day shuttle the tote around the house to deposit the items in their rightful place. This reduces reorganizing to linear time
When I lived with a mate we each had a drawer in the kitchen. This place had weirdly deep drawers, two of, stacked. Perfect for this.
If I saw his junk lying around, it went in his drawer. Far more often if he saw my junk lying around, it went in my drawer.
‘Where’s thing?’ Probably in my drawer.
I drove my spouse crazy with this because I'd put his stuff in a pile in the same place every time.
He'd get annoyed with me because I moved his keys from the microwave and put in next to the rest of the keys. Apparently that was his spot for his keys.
The way I 'fixed' this is I got a little basket for his keys and now he gets after me because I leave my keys on my desk.
One other thing that would cause turmoil was mail. We would get mail in then dump it on the counter. I would sort it into piles but apparently the pile was an efficient storage method. Now we have inboxes right next to the door, even our dog has one for all of her stuff because before we'd place her leash wherever she wandered off to when she walked inside.
It is nice until you start having fragile stuff like sunglasses in the drawer.
Your fault for leaving them out!
Although we were respectful of each other’s stuff. We were best mates so it worked out.
This is how I ended up with three boxes ful of infrequently used items that were supposed to find their place for a year now... :/.
We throw everything out (to thrift stores if possible) after a year of no use. Has bitten us almost never and when it has it’s usually something useless to someone else too (cheap to replace).
We have a problem getting rid of stuff in this way because we have hoarding tendencies. For every item you consider removing, you think up new ways in which you might need it in the future, or you say you will have a yard sale and make a little bit of money back, neither of which are realistic.
I think the problem is further exacerbated for people growing up in scarcity, so they are used to frugal operations, and are unable to cope with modern day flood of goods. Our parents are a good example, they save plastic grocery bags, all boxes, all original containers even for e.g. a coffee maker. "Just in case we will sell it one day".
I don't know what to do :-) Maybe we should write a will/set aside a fund to pay a junk removal company to come before our kids get ahold of the mess, so they don't inherit the burden.
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This seems like the ‘cable storage’ problem many people I know suffer from.
All spare cable go in a place. You never use them. But if you throw away that mini dvi cable or that display port one, you’ll need it tomorrow.
This is similar to how---let's be honest---most of us manage our OS desktop files.
Ha! Similar idea to mine, but I use an open-wide-shallow basket/bin instead. My saying to my family is, “Everything has a place to go.” The ones that don’t go in their place quickly enough land in the basket/bin.
Now, during the weekend cleanup chores, the items are preferably placed in the right places.
Growing up lacking access to good stationery, I kinda get anxious and panicked and tend to over-buy stationery items for my kids and mine. So, I have a pretty large basket container just for the stationery.
Ask me. 100+ journals. 10 packets of 10 pen packets. Colorful index cards. A5 files. Cube notepads. Postit notes. Notepads, yellow, white, a5,letter,legal.
... and that's "before" you become a stationery geek / fountain pen collector
And how do you manage to force yourself to do that last daily part? Most people who struggle with storing stuff in a dedicated storage also struggle with routines.
start with weekly and work forward. It varies for me too. depending on how cluttered your house gets you may get by with a different routine.
Yeah, "just clear the tote out daily" is a a huge understatement. Though, I think this plan better than never cleaning at all.
I've done this. The problem I find is having to fold my clothes and re-orginize every tote 10-15 times a day, as the totes are rotating around the various pettestals.
I'ts definity a case of "house eats you". You know what I mean.
Yeah, but where does the tote live? It’s mobile and might not be where I need it when I need it. Then I go looking for it, and all of a sudden I have two problems and have difficulty getting back to what I was doing in the first place. :-)
I'm afraid the only remaining option is to wear a backpack 24/7 and reenact your favorite inventory management RPG.
You know how RPGs that don't let you stack same items in the inventory suck? They're too close to real life.
Ah but then soon enough you'll need a bag of holding or two to expand the storage space of your backpack.
stop, you are triggering my Dora the explorer PTSD.
did I feed the cows?
That’s simple enough. Just get a second tote for holding your first tote! Then you just have to keep track of the second one to be able to locate the first one.
there are times where i have nested totes. life imitates programming
Fuck. This is why making lists never works for me either. I always lose the damn list...
Just make a notes.txt file on your computer. Now which directory did I keep that in? Also gotta keep it up on your screen all the time or you forget you even have it.
Just get a paper pad with your lists on it. Then place it in a random drawer and forget you have it for 3 days. Place it in a dedicated home, forget where that is and lose it again.
Just put it on sticky notes, and put them where you will see them. Now you have 5000 sticky notes everywhere, and don't even understand what you wrote on them. Then learn to ignore all of them.
A notepad that I carry in my pocket? Now I have more shit to take with me that I will forget. What about that computer in your pocket? I already have it silenced to keep it from distracting me... No easy way to keep basic text files sync'd with my computer without using a cloud service. Where did you store that text file on Cloud Storage anyways?
What kind/size of tote do you use? I just finished cleaning and realized how much easier it’d be if I did something like this - ‘sorted go-backs’
Going to sound facetious for a second: whatever size works for you and the space.
It's more just what works for the space and flow. For instance, I have identical milkcrate size boxes at the bottom and top of the stairs. Why? So I can exchange them interchangably and they are easy to drop stuff into as I pass. I take the bottom of the stairs upstairs to sort and I take the top of the stairs downstairs then just toss the bin back to the closest spot so I don't have to climb stairs... lowest energy possible.
In another case, I have a small-ish tub for assorted wires. The workflow is I have a big box of wires that are sorted into baggies, I pull a wire out, I use it, I put it in the small bin, then I sort the small bin back into baggies in one go. It fits on my shelf and the intention was to prevent it from becoming unsorted wires... which it unfortunately has because I can't keep it up.
So really, it's just whatever works best for the situation, area, what it will contain, etc so you just have to find what works best for your situation.
I like Akro bins, or some "system" that I can always expand easily in the future like Sterilite stackers (I've gotten 1 or 2 every year for about a decade).
https://www.sterilite.com/product-page.html?product=14723V06...
I've seen smallish, stiff cloth baskets with handles at Daiso that would be suitable
Plastic bins of assorted sizes , from jewelry box to shoe box
It’s still linear time with one basket per room, you just have to maybe visit each room twice.
It may be linear in the number of items, but not in the number of rightful places (you’d have to sort the items by rightful place first). Deciding on each rightful place also tends to not be constant-time.
On the bright side, at least the rightful places are presumably still in Euclidean space so there are efficient solutions for the optimal traversal paths.
over time your items will develop a home.
can you go around the house filling the tote? :)
that too. pickup and deposit are in the same complexity