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 drop the kitchen items off when I arrive. I get my coffee; grab anything queued up on the kitchen take-off point that can be dropped off on the way, and drop them off on my way back.

As it works out, everything is almost always where it ought to be; and when it’s not, I know where it will be instead.

The key is that I always check the take-off point every time I leave a room.

I could have 20 holding pens in the house and they'd still lose their stuff, since the idea that you have to exert even a minor amount of effort by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort , is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.

I do not even get annoyed about it anymore - just like I do not get annoyed that it turns dark at night. My stuff is always in its place, and before we leave the house they will spend 10 minutes finding theirs.

I really want to make the system work reliably but I can’t. I’ve spent 30+ years trying to make things work. They just don’t.

It works when I have planned to do things ahead of time, but I can’t get my brain to remember to do it when interrupted, the attention shift doesn’t trigger “callbacks” or “publish events”. This is a fundamental prerequisite to make this work.

People’s who can do this will have difficulty not understanding people who can’t.

This same problem applies to “thinking before I speak”. I can’t do that. People think I can because I don’t make the same mistakes by rote learning what not to say in specific situations. I can’t anticipate new mistakes or generalize previous ones.

I think it's the multiple processes going on in the brain, where there's a process that will scan for danger, and this same track is able to break out of the deep thought process. I have to assume this same process just doesn't see those points as something that should interrupt the deep thought process.

The same process with any novel activity will be much more sensitive, but as I do more of the same activity it will consider it a safe activity. The more I do something, the more I would be on autopilot allowing the deep thought process to go on.

For example when I am in a new place, after moving or whatever reason, it is easier in the beginning for me to stay organized because the process is still sensitive and is more careful, but the more I get complacent the less I will be thinking about where to put the things and the deep thought track will be fully prioritised.

Should I schedule time to put myself consciously in this situation where I do it every day for 30 minutes?

Because otherwise it's a paradox. For me to be able to train it, I would have to be able to come out of autopilot at that specific time in the first place.

Say you add a function, and then the first time you call that function, you call it by a different name. Don't fix the function call to match the original name, but instead go back and change the name to match how you tried to call it. The state of mind you are in when you called the function is a better guide to naming than the state of mind you were in when you implemented it.

That doesn't give enough credit to the original idea. I know it's an exaggeration, but 20 holding pens will totally defeat the purpose. The idea is to have one place in every room where you can put anything. This saves the mental effort of trying to recall what is the place for thing-at-point. There is a place, for all of them, don't think about it. Just dwim it into the holding pen.

If you are the type of person to intensively multitask, to occupy your short-term memory with different trains of thought in a holding pattern, you will tend to sacrifice command skills - if your memory is already busy reading and writing on all available channels, it isn't going to pop up "You have something in the oven" or "You were holding a pen a minute ago and you set it down on the second tier of the brown bookshelf" or "You need to get the kid from school". The internet & smartphone era has unlocked a degree of hyperstimulus that can veer into the pathological for those of us with our brains wired a certain way.

This is also a thing if you're doing things at a 'normal' degree of focus but your memory is impaired (number of operational channels reduced) in some other fashion, through age-related cognitive decline or some types of medication or chronic sleep deprivation or a TBI.

This is the ADD trait. We are chronically late to important events, we lose things all the time, we frequently accumulate a thousand browser tabs, we jump from thing to thing as they come up. Forming subconscious routines is difficult, and when we do it, we often allocate them only the barest muscle memory - I lock my car regardless of whether it's already locked or should be locked (bringing in groceries) because my macro for leaving the car is to lock it. There are pros and there are cons to this cognitive style. But it's certainly not a matter of DESIRE to do things or CARELESSNESS.

What helps? I find:

* Writing things down, especially notes.txt

* Snapping pictures of things as easier form of notes

* Scheduled phone reminders

* Getting sufficient sleep

* Getting more than sufficient sleep - leaving an extra hour in bed to think about things, plan your day

* "Bookmark all tabs"

How do you get a hold of the picture later?

I've tried doing this, but I have a hard time finding the pictures if I haven't quickly moved the information to textual form.

I still remember the last time I lost my keys, which is like 26 years ago, when I was 10. But I still identify as that kid that always lost their keys xD

I am consciously trying to whittle down my keychain to reduce the chance of temporary losing access to things. I have a keypad door lock so I’be been able to get rid of my front door key.

However, I found that decreasing the use of something can increase the chance of losing it, because you’re not “touching” it all the time and not aware of its location.

I have an Airtag, but wish that it could be integrated into the car keyfob to whittle down the size even more.

(I wouldn't recommend embedding an Airtag though, ha)

I've always thought it was the same as the bubble sort algorithm we were taught in uni.

Take something one step towards where it belongs, and pick up anything going in the same direction you are.

Repeat that a few times and everything gets where it belongs. Not the most optimal algorithm (it's a bubble sort after all) but it helps.

Pick things up (until both hands, arms, elbows, armpits, etc are fully saturated).

Put things away. DO NOT PICK UP ANYTHING AT ALL UNTIL BOTH HANDS ARE EMPTIED.

1) take out the trash

2) put clean stuff away (from your "sorting station")

3) pick things up

4) put things away

5) circulate (start from a bathroom or kitchen and spiral "outwards"), and begin the "pick things up" phase again.

Take out the trash removes "constipation" (the ability to "evacuate" or "clear" unwanted or unneeded items)

Put clean things away reaps the rewards of your prior investment in cleaning, and clears out your "sorting station" ... the necessary, temporary workplace for sorting or prepping clean items.

Picking things up (until saturation) makes it a game of ordering, organizing the held items where you're effectively pre-planning your drop-off route in order to remove the items from your hands.

Putting things away UNTIL EMPTY stops the ADD distraction of "doing something else useful" because you "MUST" complete the "pick things up phase" by "putting them all away".

Spiraling outwards from a bathroom generally means that a bathroom has an unambiguous "cleaned" state (trash, toilet, sink, mirror, floor, drawers, etc).

Bathrooms/kitchens generally connect to bedrooms or living spaces, and repeating the steps above (trash, clean, pick, put) in the bedroom or living area is effectively "guaranteed to terminate".

Saturate your arms, put everything away, repeat.

Best of luck!

Also, there's design trick to make things look better. If you put 3 or 4 things onto a dish or textile or something, they magically convert from clutter to intentional. I don't know if a plastic sterlite works for this though.

This would have to be wrong.

This would ban laundry hampers, dirty clothes would go straight into the machine.

I think the rule would be if you pick up the item from the “take-off” point it goes away.

You have to be able queue things before the clean. OP isn't cleaning, they are constructing the queue. You would be allow to move from queue to queue I guess, but you'd have to make sure there can't be a topographical loop.

What changed this was a trick I learned from working IT in a large manufacturing company. We got to walk the line and learn from our customers, and one thing they had at critical stations were poka-yoke(0) trays. Think a molded plastic tray filled with exactly all of the things the operator needed to do their assembly, the bolts and nuts and fixtures and what not. So if you were attaching a pulley to a shaft you had a spot that held one pulley, one for a set screw, etc., and the spot was designed for only the right size screw so if it too long or too short you knew you had a problem. On each assembly the operator knew if their tray wasn't full when they started assembling or if it had extra parts in it there was a problem, and when they ended assembly if the tray wasn't empty something wasn't done properly.

One day I had the epiphany that this might just work for me, so I decided to make my own: I bought some craft foam and a plastic tray, and traced/cut spots in the foam for everything I needed for work – my keys, badge, watch, etc. Then every day when I came home my work things went into the poka-yoke, and I forced myself to not leave the entryway until it was completely full ... so no more "oh guess my wallet is in the car", I had to go get it and put it in. Every morning when I was leaving for work I'd empty it. My mornings went from ten+ minutes of me cursing and searching for my keys to... nothing.

(0): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

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.

He'd get annoyed with me because I moved his keys from the microwave and put in next to the rest of the keys. Apparently that was his spot for his keys.

The way I 'fixed' this is I got a little basket for his keys and now he gets after me because I leave my keys on my desk.

One other thing that would cause turmoil was mail. We would get mail in then dump it on the counter. I would sort it into piles but apparently the pile was an efficient storage method. Now we have inboxes right next to the door, even our dog has one for all of her stuff because before we'd place her leash wherever she wandered off to when she walked inside.

All spare cable go in a place. You never use them. But if you throw away that mini dvi cable or that display port one, you’ll need it tomorrow.

I think the problem is further exacerbated for people growing up in scarcity, so they are used to frugal operations, and are unable to cope with modern day flood of goods. Our parents are a good example, they save plastic grocery bags, all boxes, all original containers even for e.g. a coffee maker. "Just in case we will sell it one day".

I don't know what to do :-) Maybe we should write a will/set aside a fund to pay a junk removal company to come before our kids get ahold of the mess, so they don't inherit the burden.

Now, during the weekend cleanup chores, the items are preferably placed in the right places.

Growing up lacking access to good stationery, I kinda get anxious and panicked and tend to over-buy stationery items for my kids and mine. So, I have a pretty large basket container just for the stationery.

It's more just what works for the space and flow. For instance, I have identical milkcrate size boxes at the bottom and top of the stairs. Why? So I can exchange them interchangably and they are easy to drop stuff into as I pass. I take the bottom of the stairs upstairs to sort and I take the top of the stairs downstairs then just toss the bin back to the closest spot so I don't have to climb stairs... lowest energy possible.

In another case, I have a small-ish tub for assorted wires. The workflow is I have a big box of wires that are sorted into baggies, I pull a wire out, I use it, I put it in the small bin, then I sort the small bin back into baggies in one go. It fits on my shelf and the intention was to prevent it from becoming unsorted wires... which it unfortunately has because I can't keep it up.

So really, it's just whatever works best for the situation, area, what it will contain, etc so you just have to find what works best for your situation.

I'ts definity a case of "house eats you". You know what I mean.

On clothes, I suggest a FIFO order, then occasionally garbage collect from the out end to identify clothes you haven't worn in a long time and keep skipping over when it's time to dress. Get rid of them or move them into cold storage.

Oh man I love this technique. I use it all the time. One morning when I was running late and had to fly out the door or else miss the bus, I threw the toothbrush I just finished using in the middle of the floor in front of the door as I ran through through the room. Got home 10 hours later and "why TF is my toothbrush in the middle of the living room? ... Oh yeah I need to pay the eye doctor bill." Works great, I love 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 realistically ever use these things.

As a result there's really no reason for me to lose it; it's already contained into the area that it already lives.

I do this with a lot of stuff now. Separate chargers for my laptop for my desk and my bed, separate iPhone chargers, and a bunch of other stuff.

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 desk drawer, etc.

No regrets. Life is better now.

I also have a keychain one that lives on my house keys, which has come in handy a few times (even if it is limited to 6 feet).

The stuff you have there is all pretty small and not terribly expensive, so I don't think it's very hoard-ey.

I did have to get rid of a lot of my computer equipment that I was hoarding...rack mount servers are sort of addictive because they're inexpensive and powerful, so I had a bunch of them taking up way too much room in my basement. I've given all of them away to friends and coworkers and replaced them with a few tiny gaming PCs.

Mazda 323’s used to open each other too, and also Ford Lazers. These problems don’t seem to happen anymore, but at some cost.

You can't do it with everything but, for example, I tend to have a stocked travel kit that I don't need to raid (for the most part) for everyday charging gear. My laptops live where they live and I'll bring their chargers with them; they basically don't move unless I'm traveling. My office has some tools and my garage has some tools. I may need to raid one or the other but not for routine stuff.

I certainly don't need to bring a downstairs charger upstairs to charge my iPhone at night.

As you said, you can’t do this for everything; some things are too expensive or take too much room to have a million duplicates of, but I don’t feel like I lose those things as much.

The things I feel like I loose are generally relatively inexpensive, like pens or scissors or screwdrivers. I got lasik so I don’t need them anymore, but i used to have 10 of the $7.95 pairs of glasses spread out everywhere as well, in case I lost a contact lens at work or something.

Aliexpress is kind of a godsend for me. A lot of tools on there in particular are shockingly good.

This is at times my personal hell. I'm of the type who uses the "find my phone" feature about ten times a day and needs Tile trackers for my keys - and wallet. If only a tracker existed that was small enough to attach to my two pairs of prescription glasses.

I'll have a think about designated putting things down areas, but I'd likely just forget.

(I see that https://findorbit.com/products/orbit-glasses-x exists but that's for Apples only).

My umbrella I just AirTagged, for fun... its been surprisingly useful.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/C8pTP29pk-O/

I ended up having a place for everything as mentioned in the article.

In the last 10 years, I have not actually lost a single thing. I’m actually pretty proud of myself. I also haven’t lost a single sock, which is really where it matters.

(I do match up my socks every time right after I do laundry tho.)

There was one time I couldn’t find a tool and I was afraid I was gonna break my streak… but I did eventually find it.

My guess is that people using a dryer are probably more prone to be victims of this.

How I do things is: - put dirty clothes in the dirty clothes bag as soon as I undress - put clothes by type in a laundry bag before washing them - hanging clean clothes to dry

The last part is probably the most important, because if you hang an odd number of socks, you know there's an issue so you'll look for the missing one. And the laundry bags will avoid you having socks stuck in pants/trousers.

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.

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.

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.

I have one kind of gym sock and one kind of dress sock. I never need to pair socks; each type goes into a box in my dresser or closet.

Similarly, I never fold gym shorts, gym shirts, or underwear. (Who cares?) Each gets stuffed in a general area of a drawer. The time savings substantially outweighs the inefficient use of space.

My usual t-shirts (32° from Costco — super comfortable) are generally wrinkle-free and likewise just get stuffed in a bin.

95% of the time my outfits are grab-and-go and require minimal laundry effort.

My wife pointed out to me early this year that I have a uniform which I didn’t actually notice until then - the same jeans (multiple pairs of the same style in black and blue), and only one style of t-shirt but in 3 colours (it’s a lie - I have 2 styles of t-shirt).

It might sound boring to some, but there’s no better feeling to me than to not even have to think when getting dressed - it’s a FILO Queue!

Should you now have a hundred pens, consider breaking them out into a pens and markers drawer etc.

This is really not rocket science, but you need to care a bit about the fact that you now became the official bouncer for the desk stuff drawer and you should not let other stuff into it. And when you find a stapler in the kitchen, you take it and put it in the one place that makes sense: the desk stuff drawer.

And you can create many such drawers, and with a certain amount of things you will have to. And yeah, consider adding literal labels.

I've also really found it helpful to put things in plain sight.

The best example of this is shallow toolchest drawers where you can for example open one and see all your screwdrivers.

The worst is the back of the refrigerator, where things go to turn into science experiments. I can kind of see why those super-expensive 48" wide (but shallow) subzero fridges sell for so much.

I still don’t think my wife understands the struggle that the top shelf is completely invisible when I open the fridge door unless I get way down.

It is fairly deep and that takes some discipline for the refrigerator but I've been good with that so far. Not that many locations where things can disappear. We'll see how long the discipline lasts. It "feels" like a bigger fridge/freezer even though I think the volumes are about the same.

* you can put them on their ends and they don't fall over, which is ideal for storage on shelves

* translucent so you can see what's inside

Pull off the shelf, open up, rummage / sort / process (with extra space in the lid if needed) then pour everything back into the main storage from the lid and reshelve.

It's amazing how being able to shelve on their sides (rather than in a stack) changes things.

1. Everything has a place;

2. If something is out of place, I put it back to the place;

3. If I cannot put it back at the moment, I put it in my pocket, and goes to 2 after current task is done;

4. If I cannot put it in my pocket, I put it near me in some salient way, and goes to 2 after current task is done;

5. If something is constantly out-of-place, rethink the designated place for that item.

Step 4 is dependent on the fact that the space is well-organized in the first place, such that I could put item in a way that is salient and jarring to future me. If I'm surrounded by a mess, it probably wouldn't work. For example, I often perch something that I have to carry to my room in the middle of the kitchen island while I'm chopping and cooking. It works because the surface is almost always empty. If the kitchen island is already crowded, this wouldn't have worked.

But I think the real secret to how to get the system working, is to do step 2 as much as I could, and avoid step 3 & 4 if at all possible. It's the realization that moving an item to the right place takes less than 20 seconds, only 19 seconds longer than putting it in my pocket. (This of course predicated on the fact that I live in a small apartment rather than a big house.)

Small items need proper attention. Anything smaller than my hand get organized on the spot.

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 https://www.benkophone.com/2018/12/20/theres-nothing-magical...

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!

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.

Or less stuff, which is also one of the key points in the aforementioned book.

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.

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.

I have a closet full of clear plastic shoe boxes with labels on them. Labels like First Aid, Remotes, Ribbons, Pens/Pencils, etc.

When you need to put something away, put it in the shoe box.

Often, someone will say, "Where's the lighter?" and I'll respond, "in the closet". Happens nearly daily now.

The problem I have is that sometimes I'm too tired to put my thing in the holding pen. For keys, we have a key holder. But sometimes I don't realize I have keys in my pocket until bed time and I just empty them onto my night stand. Even walking across the room feels like too much. "I'll put them away tomorrow", I think to myself.

In any case, it's a helpful set of routines, I just find I don't ALWAYS stick to it.

The majority is computer parts and cables (e.g., "USB Cables", "USB and Other Chargers", "Video Cables").

Every few years, I go through and cull (e.g., give away enough misc. apartment repair screws/etc. that what I keep fits into one shoebox rather than two, and give away those old-technology cables that I'm 99% sure I'll never need, while keeping 2 VGA cables that I still use for servers).

The Sterilite clear plastic shoeboxes are sold at some stores for about a dollar each.

A single spot seems easily preferable to half-a-dozen 'holding pens' spread throughout the house. Have a junk drawer for long-term miscellaneous storage, an inbox for action items (mail to read, that broken toy you need to fix, etc).

2) Instances where we don’t have time to take the item to it’s assigned place

It takes, what, 20 seconds to walk into another room and back? How often is this truly a matter of "can't" as opposed to "don't want to"? Note that you're not actually saving the 20 seconds, because you're going to have to walk all over your house later, cleaning out your storage pens and returning them all over the house.

IMO, having a place for everything and ensuring that everything is where it belongs (mise en place) is the ultimate efficiency boost. If you still struggle with this, the ideal solution (beyond "just put it back when you're done, bro") is Ben Franklin's method, which was assigning 5-10 minutes at the end of each day, just before bed, to "putting things in their places". Visiting your work space, your bathroom, your car, etc, returning things to their rightful places, and generally putting things in order in preparation for the next day. Nothing will make future-you love current-you more!

I will add that not having something in the first place is another excellent efficiency boost.

The actual idea of 'holding pens' is a good one. However, only if the contents get sorted, otherwise they will just fill up with clutter. I know people for whom this idea would lead to excuse to not put things away, they'd just put them in the holding pen and do it later. Later never comes.

I try to stare hard at the thing I wish to put down for at least a count of two. That usually brings me "into the moment" and I put it where it belongs. I don't always remember to do it, but it works when I do.

The worst for me are my clip on sunglasses. I take them off when going inside and don't wish them in my pants pocket where they will get broken. Consequently, I tend to set them down "wherever" and lose track of them. Particularly when conditions change, e.g. dusk, when I go back out and they are no longer needed. Shirt pockets would resolve that issue, but I'm not going to change my my entire wardrobe to resolve this issue.

One of those two things are the faucet o-rings that I've placed somewhere near the faucet itself thinking that "it should be easy to find them here", rather than putting them in my usual tool bag. They are still "missing" to this day. I will probably find them when we move.

I've greatly improved the "retrieval interval" of my phone since I've put it in a mint-green case instead of the standard black one. Same goes for my bluetooth headphone case, on which I applied reflective stickers.

Another trick is to group related objects. My office key card is in the cover of my work smart phone, so I have to look out for one item less each morning.

I got the idea from reading a survival book, which recommended taping things like the knife with brightly colored tape, so you can find it when you drop it in the leaves. I accidentally threw my keys in the woods when I meant to just throw a stick. It took 3-4 hours of searching to find them, even in a 10x10 area (because it was years of layers of leaves).

Once I started always putting my wallet and keys down together, no matter what, I basically never lost either of them again.

This is how the TV remote control ends up in the freezer, for example.

But it's an article about choosing one place where you put miscellaneous things that usually belong somewhere else.

Eg, I misplace my wireless headphones a lot. Something comes up that demands my full attention, so I take off my headphones. My headphones live at my desk.

If I walk to my desk, I'm likely to forget what I needed to do - there's lots of stuff demanding my attention on my desk, after all. Someone could also engage me in conversation on my way. Much of the time I'll return to my original task without issue, sometimes I'll get distracted for 15 minutes, sometimes I'll get distracted for an hour.

It's a lot cheaper to just put down my headphones. Or maybe it's more accurate to think of it as less risky.

Some people are completely comfortable with being late, or having smudged glasses, or driving erratically - it does not bother them in the slightest.

Their world is completely different to mine, and it's not that they don't care about the sloppy code or that they are too lazy to polish it - they don't even see it.

Humans are surprisingly diverse in how their brains work.

I only started really loosing things since my girlfriend moved in as now she moves stuff around a lot. And we have a lot more stuff lying around

"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! :-)

In particular, I live in a sunny area at high elevation where sun protection is a big deal; finding out that one's only tube of sunscreen is lost or empty could have serious consequences on an outdoor activity day.

Tubes of sunscreen and sunglasses distributed to all vehicles, all backpacks, and all house entrances have ensured no sunburns in the family the last two years.

No one will give you back the time you spend organizing things.

For example, hiring a contractor to blow the leaves off your driveway a single time costs more than a leaf blower, and it takes 5 min to blow off your driveway, less time than it takes to pay the bill.

The issue is when other family members borrow the thing and then just set it down where they happened to be when they were finished with it...

This is the one which annoys me most, and so I have to have a 'staging area' for unpaired socks which are awaiting their unwashed partners.

The problem is once I clean out the "holding pens" the items are lost again.

Good to see at least someone is able to enjoy even reasoning about these little things.

I think this is where the algorithm falls down. The cost differential is actually huge.

I don’t know if I imagined if it help train memory or just write down where you put things…

Saying "I'm bad with keys" has to be such a low expectation of one self I can't even comprehend. Like those people who say "I'm bad with maths", but even worse.

What I did used to do was be careless in tossing them somewhere random when I came back into the house when I did take them. I now have a keyhook by the door I consistently use. But, sure, be condescending. I'm sure it will serve you well.

My system is, if I'm outside the house my keys and wallet are ALWAYS with me, doesn't matter whether I think I'll need them. I'm 40, I don't think I've ever misplaced my keys. Can't swear, but I really don't remember a single instance.

It's easy to fall into being condescending when all I see around me is people struggling with basic stuff. I get the impression "huh I must be a genius or something, I'm the only one that can do keys". I mean just look at the sibling comments "put keys in jacket", "what if it's too hot for a jacket urr durr". It's really astonishing.

For instance, when I'm working on something with many parts, involving multiple tools, even though I haven't moved from the work spot, I misplace tools right there and then, spending time looking for them. Where are those pliers? Oh, somehow they ended up under this thing, oops.

I blame years of computer use. In computer applications, we also have tools. But all we ever do is pick up the tools (in a GUI, or otherwise activate the tools in other paradigms, like invoking them by name in a command line or programming language). We never have to worry about returning these virtual tools into their original place. Computers train the habit of picking up tools, working with them and then forgetting about them when done.

The solution is simple: deal with things when they come. Stop putting everything off until 'later.'

> deal with things when they come

Sometimes it's not practical. You can't deal with everything in the morning because you will be late for work or school. You have to push certain things later and it's ok - as long as "later" is something specific like 6 PM every weekday.

You’d think I’d learn and stop buying black ones as well. Talk about stealth pens.

It’s almost like these type of posts are Emacs posts and the entire comment section is full of people sharing their unit.el snippets :)

Since then I keep the card in my left pocket.

The advice of having a specific place for every thing is good, but sometimes you mess up. I think I have ADHD so most of the time I don't pay any attention to where I leave things, I guess developing good habits is good whatever that is. Putting things in specific places is I guess one of such habits

As for take-off points, I use the doorway of every room I’m currently in… seems counterintuitive, but by dumping things in a doorway, you’re deliberately making it annoying to leave the room, so when you do need to leave the room, pick it up and either pack it away right now or dump it in /that/ room’s In-Tray.

So each room effectively has an In-Tray and an Out-Tray, but instead of yet another physical item you need to buy or at least take up space, the doorway will always be there!

If I work on my PC or server hardware at the dining room table I will end up with random components/tools/hardware left there after I finish and my brain will tell me "This is fine, we have something else to do right this second!"

If one of my kids leaves something like a bag of chips on the table right next to that pile of stuff I left behind, my brain will blow a gasket and make having the remediation of the chip bags misplacement by the offender as the super most toppest priority to address right this very second.

So under your system I'd end up with all my stuff in my house's doorways and 2 annoyed teenagers who will probably extract revenge by "cleaning up" my doorways and since they are teenagers and share DNA with me, not a single one of those items will find it's way to it's proper place! ADHD is an adventure for sure lol.