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Comment by xyzelement | Hacker News Reader

This reminded - I noticed a while ago that being a computer science guy makes me think differently about physical storage and retrieval.

For example - my wife likes "shorts" to be in one drawer and "t-shirts" in another. I like for one drawer to be "workout clothes" and have the mix of gym shorts and t-shirts. To me this feels "obviously" right because the use-case requires both items so why pay for two costly "open drawer" IOs?

Similarly, she is very organized with her paper files, I just throw mine into a box. In the rare event I need something (eg when doing taxes) I don't mind scanning through the whole mess. Seems like a better strategy than making each "write" costly (neatly organizing) since writes are frequent and reads are rare.

Anyone else like that?

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Your first example could have a different explanation, assuming she is the one that more often does the laundry. Ordering clothes by type is cognitively easy: a shirt is a shirt, shorts are shorts. When you have a stack of freshly washed clothes, sorting them according to type is so trivial it is a thoughtless process.

However, sorting according to use case is more involved. For each piece of clothing in the clothes pile, the clothes organizer must think of how this particular piece of cloth is used. Is this just an old t-shirt? Or is this particular old t-shirt out of favor with my husband and so he uses it for his workout? Or should it go in the pyjama t-shirts pile?

So writes seem to be much more costly (cognitively) when organizing clothes according to usage rather than type (if these clothes are not your own in which case determining their usage does seem trivial), and your wife may be optimizing for it (again, see initial assumption)

Reasonable analysis. In the case of my wife, it's a matter of what she believes is right (shirts go together because they are shirts) not of expediency of any of the operations :)

Personal optimization schemes fall apart when we have to interoperate with others, just like in system architectures.

Think about the cognitive load of your spouse when you decide how a system should work.

I think that if you want your own classification you have to put away your own laundry ...

Why are you bringing this toxicity into it? OP didn’t say anything about who does the laundry. They could be each doing their own or he could be doing it for both of them - it’s entirely besides the point of how they prefer the clothes sorted.

The original comment was assuming his partner more often did the laundry, which could explain the difference...

I thought of doing the "writes" as per the use case as having to denormalize the "record" first which is extra work from insert point of view (but optimized for "fetch" - the entire dataset of shirt+pant is right there) - that is not how they come out of the washing machine. They come out normalized as "shirt" "pant" which is optimum for inserts. So if she doing the laundry, her method is the least effort for her.

ok but the real question for everyone here is do y’all put your leggings in your sock drawer or with your bras/underwear

I do both and I order the clothes most times.

Clothes I can use in multiple situations (like a pair of jeans or normal t-shirts) are grouped together but I also use "use-case-drawers" (like sports or outside work clothes).

My girlfriend (no tech background) uses a more seperated system (work t-shirts are not sorted to work pants) but still seperated by use-case (normal pants /= work pants).

I guess it's up to everyones own preferences then..

When folding the washing, I don't make sure the t-shirts / pants / etc are the "right way out", reducing the already heavy burden on the folding server, and pushing that work onto the less heavily burdened clients.

I know someone who is similar with the paper files, but lazily sorts them when she needs to retrieve something, so the full scan only happens at most once.

This is pretty efficient. She lazily sorts them on first access. They are stored in a thunk and then lazily evaluates them. After that repeated access is efficient.

Even better is to scan and pitch what you can during the scan, then file what's left. Scanning for computer search is awesome.

What do you use? I have an awesome document scanner but Acrobat Pro takes like ten seconds a side to OCR with a ridiculously single-threaded process that ends up taking minutes to finish even short documents on a monster workstation.

Not the person your question was to, but: I use Paperless myself, but Mayan EDMS is another option. OCR kinda sucks as a rule, but it's better than the big ol' firesafe I used to have.

> Similarly, she is very organized with her paper files, I just throw mine into a box. In the rare event I need something (eg when doing taxes) I don't mind scanning through the whole mess. Seems like a better strategy than making each "write" costly (neatly organizing) since writes are frequent and reads are rare.

This is why I have given up trying to organise my downloaded papers and books by subject. It's faster to search through them when I have a term in mind.

This reminds me of the days before "Downloads" folders were provided by OSes for use by browsers, and one would need to select a destination for every file at download time. I think macOS got it right with the "stack" widget (truncated listing of the Downloads folder sorted by date).

My wife keeps on reorganising my toolboxes and it’s driving me nuts. She ends up organising the contents by colour, or by size, so now I find my woodworking chisels in a box with filter spanners and solder (the soldering irons are in the box with glue and mallets). It’s driving me crazy, but she won’t stop, and gets mad at me when I can’t find stuff because “it’s organised”.

Different people have different minds. I group by function and efficiency of use - she by colour or shape, as she doesn’t know what half the tools are. My organisation looks chaotic but I know exactly where everything is, and I know that the tools I’ll need for a given task will all be in the same box.

Now, I have to haul everything out, rummage, have an argument, get called an idiot. So much better.

A crap bowl would be illegal here. Everything must go back in its place, no matter how inconvenient that place is.

The key at least for me is to recognize that my wife's desire to clean and organize is a huge net positive for my life, with things like you just described being relatively small side effects.

Here's how I manage it. One important thing is to label anything that's messy and needs to remain that way "a work in progress.". It indicates to the wife that (a) you care about neatness and (b) there's an end in sight.

The other thing is to claim areas. Sounds like tools are your domain - have you discussed that maybe you should just be in charge of that one small part of your life? :)

Sounds like the 5S auditors have invaded your workspace!

"it’s driving me nuts"

At least you can find the nut drivers. ;)

Oh my, do I get this. My wife has worked for years as a professional organizer, so she definitely has an idea for How Things Should Be Done.

That way is not mine however. I've been known to have something much like Shitbowl as a system, except I called it my "sedimentary filing system." It has layers, like a parfait, and very much an LRU cache.

She likes things to be away, which to me, is not always having them usable. Sometimes, things that are stashed out of sight are less than accessible when I decide I want them.

Different strokes I guess. After nigh on thirty years, I'm somewhat tidier, while she has become more tolerant of a bit of disorder.

Kinda?

Workout clothes make sense, these are things that get sweaty and I don't want to sort through all my t-shirts and underwear to find a wicking ones. And fancy clothes (wedding/funeral) go together so I can just open the closet bag and have my suit, shirt, tie, and dress socks all there - one "go bag" for each suit color (black, blue, grey) with shoes below.

However, everything else is interchangeable throughout the year.

For paper, there is some basic sorting I'll do. Pets, cars, home, and tax related items. I just put the new piece at the end of the folder which is hardly any 'write cost' and makes for a much easier read later if the need arises. Besides taxes where I just need all of the papers, most of the time the thing I need to reference is near the end

I have a sports drawer: t-shirts, shorts, ankle braces.

Other t-shirts hung in wardrobe and a separate drawer for other shorts.

Paper files: chucked into a tray haphazardly after being attended to. Sorted into filling cabinet once tray is full (which it is now and arguably has been for a month or two).

I'm reminded of cars, which are designed for assembly. They are easy to put together and they're put together in layers.

Same with your clothes, designed for laundry. (defined by laundry?) easier to have bins for socks, and underwear and pants and shirts. they wash in one batch. Easier to load the socks drawer all at once.

But not as easy to find everything when you're getting dressed.

That said, I have two kinds of toolsets.

generic - all the tools in one chest - drawer for pliers, anothers for screwdrivers, ratchets, sockets, etc

project-specific - near my computer I have phillips 2,1,0,00,000 and a keypuller and a paperclip.

row order vs column order I guess. array of structures, structure of arrays.

I spend my whole work day figuring out those problems but not once got the idea to apply them to organising my personal life. Questioning a lot of decisions now...

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