Comment by wiether
2 years ago
Personal anecdote : I grew up in a regular flat where I couldn't find stuff because my family members were not careful about things. During my holidays as a kid, I used to spend a few weeks at my uncle's place, which was a _Scrooge mcducks mansion_ (I could sleep in a different room every day for the whole duration of my stay without sleeping twice in the same one) and it was a wonder of organization.
Everything had a specific spot allocated, everything was labelled and there were several inventory books.
As a kid it was absolutely fantastic : it was better than a store because they had stuff that I never seen before and it was free to use.
Thanks to that I then adopted a similar strategy myself (short of the inventory books) even though I live in a small flat. The amount of time I save with this and the peace of mind...
Whereas when I'm at peoples' place and they have to go through their whole home to find two batteries. A complete waste of time, energy and lots of useless stress. In the end they'll prefer going to the store to buy new batteries, even though they _know_ they have them somewhere. Absolutely insane to me!
The conclusion seems to be: keeping things in order is easy (or easier) if you have lots and lots of free space.
Which might be true, as there's a lot of things in life that gets much easier when you have surplus of space (a major reason people leave their city apartments and build or buy houses on the outskirts) - in general, having a large surplus of resources, such as food, water, time or money, tends to improve efficiency. Over-provisioning for the win.
Anecdotally, this checks out for me too - the smaller the home (relative to number of people in it), the messier it seems to be.
Perhaps the reason is the same as why computers slow down when low on memory or storage space - when you're running low on space, any random spot you pick is likely already taken, and storing anything requires you to first rearrange stuff already there. Which, for humans, means you likely won't do it and just drop the thing in the first free spot you can find.
> The conclusion seems to be: keeping things in order is easy (or easier) if you have lots and lots of free space.
Or less stuff, which is also one of the key points in the aforementioned book.