I recently needed an HDMI cord for a monitor and realized that my cord drawer was accruing technical debt. Whenever I am done with a cord I just throw it in there... it gets all tangled up with all the others. When I inevitably need one of those cords I impatiently pull it out and it makes all the other cords more tangled. Here I am needing an HDMI cable that won't just come out easily, I have to pay off my past lazi…
Wow. I never thought of clutter in the home as technical debt, but it's as similar as you describe. That really makes me see home organization in a whole new light.
Marie Kondo's approach of having a designated place for each item is marvelous: I save so much time because I never have to search for any item unless my wife didn't put something back :P