Keeping Tidy
A discussion exploring problems and solutions related to physical and digital tidiness.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.I notice that I tend to work harder at being tidy when I am well fed, or have consumed dopaminergic substances like nicotine.
It may be the case that food and dopaminergic substances decrease my threshold for what problems I feel are interesting enough to tackle at a given moment, including tidying up.
A former coworker told me he sometimes struggled with self-doubt when he was in college. Then he noticed that the self-doubt would appear when he hadn’t eaten in a while. It consistently disappeared after meals.
This leads me to believe that my untidiness may have to do with physiological lethargy, and that increasing availability of biological energy may contribute to a solution to it.
I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a dedicated final place where everything lives. I think creating and designating these spaces would go a long way, as I wouldn’t need to work out a place to put every item each time.
I have a poor memory relating to keeping track of what things I own, 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.
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.
This is useful for fungible or semi-fungible items, or items that are easily categorised, but not helpful for unique items.
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.
Practicing remembering the homes of everything requires that I have something external to refer to, to correct mistakes when I make them. So this doesn’t actually defeat the potential need for a list or something of the sort.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe another way to state the same thing is that every object in a space should have a purpose. And that, once a purpose is defined for an object, the proper place for it falls out naturally from its purpose.
You (presumably) buy something to put in your home in order to solve some problem you couldn’t solve without it.
Related to that, here’s a tip I like to follow. Anytime you go to a new place, like a hotel room or an AirBnB, designate a spot for your keys and valuables. Do this immediately upon arrival. After that, put those things there consistently. Never put them anywhere else. That should make it much harder to lose your valuables while traveling.
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.
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 😁.
I think part of the problem is that I don’t have a dedicated final place where everything lives.
Yeah, it would be difficult getting a place ready only to leave it again soon. Your subconscious might be asking, ‘What’s the point?’
I’ve noticed that I have no problem keeping shared spaces tidy, which I suspect is driven by inexplicit ideas related to maintaining relationships, rather than understanding the underlying value in maintaining a tidy space.
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 only 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.
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.
Good question. It is not something I have thought about much myself, but I wanted to allow for the possibility that people may want to discuss keeping their digital devices tidy, not just physical spaces.
I suppose digital tidiness would consist of organising your computer, phone, or tablet in such a way that it is straightforward to find things when you need them.