First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this system that come to mind immediately:
- The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots and, I think the stated reason for the dots.
- The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more.
- But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that.
So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.
Interesting, but this seems to solve the wrong problem. I already know that the ice cream maker sitting on the shelf hasn't been used in 5 years. The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold storage.
This just sounds like hoarding, not a real problem. It's an irrational psychological attachment to things. It is a prison and a distraction from the substance of life.
Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.
You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.
Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.
You should set a rule that if it isn't used yearly it goes. In the case of the ice cream maker that means you have to make ice cream once a year just so you can keep the machine.
I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me joy - she died long before they were born so they have no memories of her hobbies)
"If you get rid of clutter, there will be cases where you'll have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff between cleanliness and functionality."
I read an anecdote about someone using eBay as a storage service. Buy what you want, use it, then resell. The difference in the purchase and resell price is the storage fee.
> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.
I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.
This is neat but my OCD brain is hurting. I suspect a location based sorting, where most-recently-used boxes are near the top, or closer to your workstation, solves the same problem without the visual clutter.
My low-tech solution to organizing electronic parts is to use shoeboxes, with written labels at the end, and plastic bags inside to organize the various groups of items.
They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used much.
On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.
I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat mundane in-between details about your setup the most.
(I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)
I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.
Years ago I had a landlord that had been in the British military in some signal/ntelligence role. After, he made a living of stockpiling and selling obscure but simple chips from china to American military contractors.
I always considered I would do something similar if I owned a used book store. Each year would usher in a new colors. All books acquired that year get that colored dot on the inside page.
Some 5 years (or so) on I could easily go through each shelf of books and find the ones that were not moving. These get one last chance (a year?) in a bargain bin before then they go to Goodwill or wherever.
Otherwise a used bookstore can remain in a "picked over" and cluttered state.
> I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale.
> Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale.
> That's not a failure. That's the system working.
I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude
The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with stickers 3) remove rarely accessed boxes
We need a sponsorblock-style crowdsourced solution against such slop. Meanwhile I'm just blocking offenders' domains on all of my networks
Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides.
Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle.
This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.
I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it’s 2 seconds. To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts were used in them? It would likely be a close enough approximation without the overhead of the dot system, and might be good for documenting the project anyway. Plus the dot system doesn’t have a lot of granularity or flexibility, and it relies on the categories being static. Let’s say a box of resistors grows so big you want to split it into two subcategories; reallocating the existing dots correctly is now quite difficult.
Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.
This also works for kitchens.
What is most interesting is that it begins to impact what one buys. It turns out that, after a decade or so, one can predict which 'must have' gadget or appliance is actually just a very seductive dotless wonder.
I've found that a simple "done" list for tasks each day is surprisingly effective for keeping my own digital clutter manageable. This post's approach seems like a good visual way to track that.
>Time turns out to be a great universal organizer, just like how a photo collection is wonderfully organized by date more than by any other single dimension.
I have found this same thing to be true. I even tell my family that if for some reason they need to access all our critical info on my computer, the most recent files in each directory are almost always the most interesting ones.
This is brilliant. Upon reading this, I remembered that the original kanban system in the 1960s at Japanese car factories used physical tags attached to physical parts [1]. Low-tech with a right process around it works wonders.
68 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 73.3 ms ] thread- The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots and, I think the stated reason for the dots.
- The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more.
- But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that.
So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.
Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.
You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.
Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.
I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me joy - she died long before they were born so they have no memories of her hobbies)
"If you get rid of clutter, there will be cases where you'll have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff between cleanliness and functionality."
I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.
I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.
They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used much.
On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.
(I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)
I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me
I always considered I would do something similar if I owned a used book store. Each year would usher in a new colors. All books acquired that year get that colored dot on the inside page.
Some 5 years (or so) on I could easily go through each shelf of books and find the ones that were not moving. These get one last chance (a year?) in a bargain bin before then they go to Goodwill or wherever.
Otherwise a used bookstore can remain in a "picked over" and cluttered state.
> I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale.
> Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale.
> That's not a failure. That's the system working.
I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude
The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with stickers 3) remove rarely accessed boxes
We need a sponsorblock-style crowdsourced solution against such slop. Meanwhile I'm just blocking offenders' domains on all of my networks
Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle.
This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.
Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.
BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for sharing!
I have found this same thing to be true. I even tell my family that if for some reason they need to access all our critical info on my computer, the most recent files in each directory are almost always the most interesting ones.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards)