My solution is to just keep buying more until I reach environmental saturation.
This is why I have at least six measuring tapes.
How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
91–100 of 282 posts
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#92I just end up buying enough of the item to be within arms reach of nearly anywhere I'm likely to use it. I used to never be able to find a screwdriver when I needed it, so now I have seven screwdrivers: three regular ratcheting, three stubby ratcheting, and a ratcheting one that lives in my pocket. I keep a regular ratcheting on my desk, in my living room, and in my bedroom, which are the only places I would realisti…
I applied this rule to tape measures, because I found I never had one when I needed one, e.g., out in the car. So my new rule became: if you can't easily find a tape measure when you need one, buy another one at your earliest convenience. Now I have one in my work bag, at least one in the car, one in my main toolbox, a few hiding around other places in the garage, one in the kitchen, probably one upstairs, on in my d…
I applied this rule to microfibre cloth for my glasses. I bulk buy 100 of these online and place one each in every jacket I have, plus a few more around drawers at my home
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#93My approach is to have separate “take-off” points near the entrance/exit of each room. Example: If I’m in my home office and find that some things need to go to the living room and some to the kitchen, I simply queue them to take off instead of taking a trip every time I realize an item needs to go. Then when I take a coffee break, I’ll grab all the items; drop the living-room items off on the way to the kitchen, and…
I do the same. I use the stairs as take-off points. I regularly go up and down anyway, so I take whatever is on the stairs and put it away, or put it on the next floor stairs if it needs to go to the attic. Now if I could only get my wife to do this too. She will put items on the stairs but always forget to take them up or down and walk right past them :-D
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#94Any beautifully reasonable, clever, optimal strategy for this kind of home-human interaction would meet the sledgehammer of my utterly unreasonable order freak partner (way before having any opportunity to explain any reasoning about it).
Good to see at least someone is able to enjoy even reasoning about these little things.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#95Best cleaning / organizational tip I’ve learned : everything out of place goes into a tote. Every day shuttle the tote around the house to deposit the items in their rightful place. This reduces reorganizing to linear time
When I lived with a mate we each had a drawer in the kitchen. This place had weirdly deep drawers, two of, stacked. Perfect for this.
If I saw his junk lying around, it went in his drawer. Far more often if he saw my junk lying around, it went in my drawer.
‘Where’s thing?’ Probably in my drawer.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#96I love physical algorithms and data structures in every day life. My little computer science brain is simple but if I can remember small tricks, particularly with the arrangement of everyday things, I find joy somehow. A couple of my favorites are like if I need to remember to do something in the groggy morning, I put either my wallet or keys wrapped around something weird. When I awaken and go to find those items, I am awoken to the specific thing to remember to do or bring. I never forget my wallet (very fortunately for me), so if I find a large paper or pen or something very odd in the fold which would absolutely never belong there under normal circumstances, then it triggers the reminder. It also helps that I usually just forget the memory /trigger/, not the actual memory of what to donor bring. Another simple one is I rotate a couple supplements. How do I recall which to take? I stack them. I always put the one I /should/ take next on top. The way I remember this is I fall back to a base case: say I forget my little trick, well, I tell myself to grab the top one. So either I remember my trick, or I do the simple thing and just grab the top one. Either way I have at least made it through today with the correct one. Then I put it on the bottom and am primed for being forgetful tomorrow. I am still working on arranging shirts in a fifo queue in my closet on the rack. Or more clever, I put it back on the top and treat the rack as sort of a heap data structure, things worn recently are always to the left. If I want to wear it not so much, I put it deeper down the line. Then when searching I always start from the top (left for me) and know I probably wore a lot of these items recently. This also helps because I tend to wear only a fraction of my shirts, usually my favorites. Again, they are towards the left so they are easier to find.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#97My approach is to have separate “take-off” points near the entrance/exit of each room. Example: If I’m in my home office and find that some things need to go to the living room and some to the kitchen, I simply queue them to take off instead of taking a trip every time I realize an item needs to go. Then when I take a coffee break, I’ll grab all the items; drop the living-room items off on the way to the kitchen, and…
my take-off point for outside my house is on top of the car keys.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
More intrigued about the socks part, how did you solve it? I’ve lost enough to understand that there’s something clearly wrong about the way I deal with them.
Socks can end up stuck in a pair of shorts (if you mix laundry) only to fall out somewhere in the streets if you're not paying attention.
Yeppp.
That’s why I started checking. If you don’t catch it early, you’re not going to find it.
Sometimes it also just gets stuck in some clothes and it doesn’t fall out on its own too. If I’m missing a sock, I give my clothes the ol’ shake.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
More intrigued about the socks part, how did you solve it? I’ve lost enough to understand that there’s something clearly wrong about the way I deal with them.
Socks can end up stuck in a pair of shorts (if you mix laundry) only to fall out somewhere in the streets if you're not paying attention.
Sounds like an argument for one of those mesh laundry bags, so that the laundry load is mixed (multiple categories) without being mixed (individual items interspersed).
I have an "unpaired socks stay in the laundry-room" policy which covers most cases, but it won't help if one of them exfiltrates within another piece of clothing.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#100> 2.) instances where we don’t have time to take the item to it’s assigned place (e.g., because it’s in another room). One of the most important things I took away from the life changing magic of tidying up is that, unless you live in Scrooge mcducks mansion, the chances that you genuinely don’t have enough time to put something back where it belongs are very remote. EDIT: I actually wrote down my thoughts about this…
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!