Benjamin Davies

Part of creating a living space that accommodates this would be making sure I have good furniture and that it is arranged well. I believe my current furniture is not sufficient.

I'm going to do some research on this. It might pay to make a quick 3d model of the spaces I wish to improve, so that I have something semi-tangible to play with before I start spending money on furniture.

I am realising that having a good taste for where things should live is a skill. For some things it is obvious, but some things require more knowledge and consideration to place appropriately.

It might pay to make sure I have excess spots that could be “homes” for things, in case I need to make significant changes to where things live, or in case I get more things. Thankfully IKEA is opening in Auckland in a few weeks 😁.

Extreme examples of solutions to this in professional contexts are shadow boards and shadow foam cutouts. Here, the users create a very clear visual correspondence between what an object is and where it belongs when not in use. I don’t expect the solution to my problem will involved drawing lines on walls or furniture, or creating foam cutouts, but there might be a hint of a solution in this.

Part of Marie Kondo’s advice is to “get rid of anything that doesn’t spark joy” (paraphrasing).

If I were to follow this advice, it might be the case that I will get rid of a lot of things that would be a waste of time and attention keeping and giving a home. I would also potentially better remember the things that I choose to keep, because I am keeping them based on a standard relating to my psychological attachment to them.

Practicing remembering the homes of everything requires that I have something external to refer to correct mistakes when I make them, so this doesn’t defeat the potential need for a list or something of the sort.

Just automatise it. Putting things in the right place is a fairly straightforward thing to practice, and there is no reason you couldn’t automatise the homes of all your things.

This is useful for fungible or semi-fungible items, or items that are easily categorised, but not helpful for unique items.

Grouping items by category goes a long way in reducing what needs to be remembered. I don’t need to remember where every sock goes because the simple algorithm “if sock: put in sock drawer” takes care of all socks.

I have a poor memory relating to keeping track of items, and it won’t help if I also have to remember where everything lives.

Should I write down a list of all permanent items and their homes? Ideally I wouldn’t need to do that.

Never put them anywhere else.

I believe this will be a key thing for me to automatise. Many of my things live in sort of ‘interim homes’ on the way to some not-yet-defined permanent home—which they never seem to make it to, of course.

My personal spaces are fairly bland and oddly proportioned. They are not aesthetic at all, even when maximally tidy. Aligning my living spaces with my aesthetic preferences may increase my baseline motivation to keep them tidy.

I noticed today that things in my shared spaces have better defined homes than the things in my private spaces, in the sense of #2840. Relationship maintenance may be a factor, it might be a trivial factor compared to what I describe in #2840.

I’ll test giving everything in my private spaces a dedicated home. From there it should be easier to understand how important ‘relationship maintenance’ is as a factor in my unconscious and inexplicit motivations for tidying up.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be part of the solution.

This would work well for some open threads, but not others (like anything I have left unaddressed on Veritula).

Idea: Keep a document tracking open threads, updating it every night. Every morning, feed it to Gemini Flash and have it coach me on what I could work towards resolving today.

Closing threads is a common problem in my life. I should look for ways to increase my propensity to resolve/finish things I start.

The solution needs to allow for the fact that not everything needs to be resolved, that having some open threads is inevitable, and that some of those threads are acceptable to leave open indefinitely.

As I think about this, I notice that—once I solve a given problem with a new idea—I have no habit to consciously acknowledge that a problem has been solved, much less to write down that it has been solved. The ex-problem fades from my mind as I set my mind on a new problem.

I could try to make it a habit to explicitly acknowledge when I do find solutions to problems. If the solution is found on Veritula, it would be natural to acknowledge it here too.

I like the idea of explicitly acknowledging progress in this way, because it might help me become more prideful in the Objectivist sense.

Would you like to try formulating an explicit methodology for how you want to use Veritula?

This seems like a good idea.

Similarity is fine if it is less narrow, but ‘thread’ doesn’t seem any less narrow than ‘discussion’ to me. A ‘thread’ usually means a reply chain.