We tried this but holding pens became eventual long term storage for abandoned property. I like the tote idea.
How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
111–120 of 282 posts
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#112So did no one that this was a mindfulness exercise where you constantly hold a writing pen?
I don’t know if I imagined if it help train memory or just write down where you put things…
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#113> 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…
The conclusion seems to be: keeping things in order is easy (or easier) if you have lots and lots of free space.
Which might be true, as there's a lot of things in life that gets much easier when you have surplus of space (a major reason people leave their city apartments and build or buy houses on the outskirts) - in general, having a large surplus of resources, such as food, water, time or money, tends to improve efficiency. Over-provisioning for the win.
Anecdotally, this checks out for me too - the smaller the home (relative to number of people in it), the messier it seems to be.
Perhaps the reason is the same as why computers slow down when low on memory or storage space - when you're running low on space, any random spot you pick is likely already taken, and storing anything requires you to first rearrange stuff already there. Which, for humans, means you likely won't do it and just drop the thing in the first free spot you can find.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#114Any 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.
Is there even a need for a holding pen if there is an order freak in the house?
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#115Earlier 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.
I solved my socks issue once and for-all when I moved out of home - I bought 10 pairs of the exact same sock so that you can never mix a pair up by mistake. Over the years as they either get holes or stretch to much, I replace it with a new pair of the exactly item
Getting short on socks? By another 10-pack of the same brand/colour. If you only ever wear one type of socks, this is just sensible. My socks are always in order, and there will be at most one sock not paired with another.
Unfortunately, this only works where the feet have stopped growing, and where the choice of fashion makes this feasible. Mostly, that's adult men with standard black or otherwise dark socks. My young son loves brightly patterned and colourful socks with variation (as befits a five year old), but keeping those paired is challenging.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#116I would continuously lose ballpoint pens. At one point I thought the solution was to buy an expensive ball point pen as that would make me more aware of not losing it, but the effect was that it would just take a bit longer. I finally settled on buying many cheap pens. One humorous thought that I was curious about was that since I never found any pens (either my own or those lost by others), was it the case that ther…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/
Haha, awesome, thank you.
"We propose a somewhat more speculative theory (with apologies to Douglas Adams and Veet Voojagig). Somewhere in the cosmos, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, walking treeoids, and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, a planet is entirely given over to spoon life-forms. Unattended spoons make their way to this planet, slipping away through space to a world where they enjoy a uniquely spoonoid lifestyle, responding to highly spoon oriented stimuli, and generally leading the spoon equivalent of the good life"
I knew it! :-)
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#117> 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…
I found the guy without a toddler. I airtag everything now. Either the toddler moves it, or I chuck my keys somewhere during a defcon 1 situation. They have been a big help, personally.
I've got a 12 and a 14 year old, they were toddlers once! But admittedly I didn't read the life changing magic of tidying up until they were 3 and 5 so maybe out of toddler stage.
However when my wife gave birth to our second child is when I realised that if we didn't marshall our stuff properly we could never leave the house. It was around the same time as I dispensed with about 6 trailer loads of stuff we had accrued in the first couple of years of parent hood, so even before I read the book I had started to form some of the same ideas around throwing shit out and always "resetting" everything (things like restocking the nappy bag when you arrive home, doing the dishes before starting cooking etc.)
Also:
> They have been a big help, personally
I agree. Having kids has been a bigger driver of personal development than I ever could have imagined.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The conclusion seems to be: keeping things in order is easy (or easier) if you have lots and lots of free space. Which might be true, as there's a lot of things in life that gets much easier when you have surplus of space (a major reason people leave their city apartments and build or buy houses on the outskirts) - in general, having a large surplus of resources, such as food, water, time or money, tends to improve e…
> The conclusion seems to be: keeping things in order is easy (or easier) if you have lots and lots of free space.
Or less stuff, which is also one of the key points in the aforementioned book.
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#119Best 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
What kind/size of tote do you use? I just finished cleaning and realized how much easier it’d be if I did something like this - ‘sorted go-backs’
Plastic bins of assorted sizes , from jewelry box to shoe box
Re: How to avoid losing items? Holding pens
#120Earlier 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.
Wait, there are people who don't 'mix' laundry like shorts with socks?! For what purpose? Obviously racial segregation and anything needing a different temp or other setting, but ceteris paribus a shorts wash and a socks wash?