Comment by smeej
1 day ago
The one logistical change I made that solved this for me was that whenever I have to look for something, as soon as I find it, it gets moved to wherever the first place I looked for it was. I take that as an indication that my brain's default sorting system thinks it belongs there.
I also have a tendency to go through everything I own once every couple of years and get rid of anything a past version of me thought a future version of me might want to do, but future me does not want to do, though, so the total amount of "stuff" I have is pretty manageable to start out with.
Brilliant idea (moving the found item to the location you first looked at)! If you ever write a blog post about your org system/such tricks I'd happily read it :)
Check out Dana K. White. She uses this principle along with 5 other "rules" to declutter. Has really helped me get my space in order.
I just spent fully 15 minutes trying to find anywhere there's a simple list of what the 5 rules are. Couldn't get AI search bots to pull it up for me either.
I don't know whether I'm more worried for her, that her work is somehow disorganized enough for this not to be screaming obvious, repeatedly, throughout her blog, or worried for the state of my ability to search the internet anymore, when I used to find it to easy to find specific things like lists of rules online.
Still haven't actually found the list, but I'm done trying.
I don't know if there's more to it than these two sides of the same coin, but every time I move house, when I pull something out of the box and go to put it "away," wherever it's going to stay from then on, I close my eyes for a second and think, "If all I knew was that I had already unpacked this, but I couldn't remember where I'd put it, where would I go look for it first?" and then I go put it there and that becomes its home.