How to avoid losing items? Holding pens | Hacker News Reader

How to avoid losing items? Holding pens

blog.alexwendland.com

417 pointssurprisetalk270 comments

My 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 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 might just steal this idea from you. Having a partner who ”organize through chaos” (which I maintain is not an actual system) there are constantly treasure troves of knick-knacks everywhere, usually hiding important items. No matter how often I try to organize it’s always messy, I think this might be the answer. Thank you!

A place for everything and everything in its place...

Ah yes, same here, my wife stacks stuff in any available free space, anywhere in the house.

It’s fine for stuff that has a fixed spot in the kitchen or bathroom, but documents, mail, jewelry or any kind of tech just disappears everywhere.

Quite so. It’s always an adventure when sorting through these stacks. Never know what one might find.

We have "piles" everywhere. Woe to you if you move or rearrange a pile...

Long time lurker, first time posting because I love this concept and this is is how I (ADHD type) get stuff done without getting distracted.

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.

Two phases:

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!

It’s interesting because it contradicts the advice to only move an item once (avoiding clutter)

> contradicts the advice to only move an item once

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.

This is a good idea, as is the idea in the article. The basic requisite however is a desire to not lose stuff. My wife always loses track of her EarPods. My oldest kid always loses his pocket knife.

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 <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, 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 lose my shit all the time (everything that doesn’t have a fixed location anyway), which is why everything that regularly comes with me is now in it’s own specialized bags. There’s a work bag, a ‘going out with kids’ bag, etc.

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

A few thoughts on keys:

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.

This reason is precisely why I got an implanted RFID chip. When I lived in apartments, I would _constantly_ lose my door fob. It's much more difficult to lose the chip if it is part of you ;)

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

Probably I'm just old but I'm very aware of an electronic device being a single point of failure. (I realize the car's keyfob is that--and have been meaning to investigate the practicality of keeping a spare key in the car in a faraday bag.) I do keep a physical door key on my keyring even with a keypad door lock and have one somewhere on my property as well.

Most cars have a physical key tucked in the fob, and will do some form of passive RFID “auth” when the fob is brought close to the start button or equivalent. It is not too different from engine immobilizer keys.

I'm aware of the key in the fob. I Wasn't aware that there were other capabilities if the fob itself wasn't working. Was just experimenting the other day about the capabilities and limitations of the keyfob under different conditions.

It seems as if you can't lock the key in the car but I'm not sure how much I trust that experiment.

Only one of my cars has a key fob, and I finally took that fob off my keychain once I realized that I can use the 5 digit keypad on the door to lock and unlock it. It's very freeing only having a few small keys in your pocket and not a bunch of giant fobs.

This is just good marriage (and general relationship) advice.

Just curious: The "33rd" in your username is the parallel, a given 33rd street somewhere, none of the above ...

The "ding" sound from "Find my iPhone" is pretty commonly heard in my house... but not from my phone.

The problem I find is that, other than my iPhone, the reason I often can't find an iDevice is that I haven't used it recently and have no idea where I left it. Unless it was attached to a charging cable it probably isn't in a position to ding or otherwise be found.

It is easy to say to do this, but in reality what happens is I am deep in my thoughts and all of it happens on autopilot. I consciously understand it would save me time to put them correctly away, but there is just nothing triggering me to do it. If I had a very intelligent watch that dinged me every time I'm supposed to do it, I would do it. The tech is not there yet though.

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.

It is a skill that you can develop to maintain a basic awareness of what you are doing that you can break yourself out of autopilot to do the small things that you need to do.

I came here to say the same thing. It's something I have been actively working on lately. It's quite an effort to pay attention to the small things, something as simple as making sure I put the mouse into my backpack along with my laptop. But the pay off is enormous ... I get a really strong sense of relief when I do find things more often where they are supposed to be.

How do you go about developing it?

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.

The skill is called mindfulness[0] and is usually cultivated through meditation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness

My wife and I are very similar to you and your wife. I will note that on the rare occasion when I misplace something, I've found that it's efficient to just enlist her help finding it immediately. She is much better practiced than I am at finding things where they don't belong.

A tip that's helped me: when you finally find the thing you misplaced, and are done with it, don't put it back where you found it, put it in the place where you first looked.

Clever!

This reminds me of a rule I have for naming things in code (functions, variables, etc).

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.

I really do not like the assumption people don’t do something because they don’t want to it.

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.

This is not an effort or desire-mediated performance, it is a focus-mediated performance. Some people find that cognitively more difficult than others.

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"

> Snapping pictures of things as easier form of notes

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'm not the person you're asking, but do the same thing, and for me I can usually find it visually by scrolling through "all photos" if it's recent, and sometimes using search in the photos app.

Do you use those 10 minutes to learn a new language or something?

Usually I spend those 10 minutes helping them search for their stuff :-) My main interest is the lack of stress because I know where my stuff is.

> 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 <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.

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.

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

my take-off point for outside my house is on top of the car keys.

These "take off" points remind me of a great parody

Whoa, it's halfway there

Whoa,leave it on the stairs!

https://youtu.be/ZKW-USW5uTo

Ha! This is how I manage files between my desktop and home directory’s subfolders. Don’t have time to sort? Drop into the parent directory, and sort it later.

Thanks for sharing, I'm definitely going to be giving this a try!

I do this. The take-off points are generally where I will trip over the items. It infuriates my wife.

One take-off point I've used is putting things in/on top of my shoes.

That way I can't leave the house without dealing with them

A related pro-tip I learned from catering, which I now use often for leftovers, potlucks, gifts, etc. If you have things in the fridge you need to take with you when you leave your current location, put your keys in the fridge with them!

Also related: if you place anything on top of your car - coffee, wallet, briefcase - putting your keys with it makes it hard to forget & drive off.

Good idea. I know that problem myself, too, though unfortunately this solution only works with a set of vehicle keys, doesn't it?

So unfortunately not much use if you're commuting on public transport…

Or blocking the door!

I will almost always ignore the box/take-off. I pile stuff up by my office door that needs to go out to the garage. That spot always has tools piled up. A tote probably would help.

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.

My biggest problem has always been forgetting things when I leave the house. I was _constantly_ leaving for work, only to turn around because my wife called and said "you forgot your badge, you forgot your wallet", etc.

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

In manufacturing this is often referred to as "Kaizen" [1], more specifically as 5S / "Seiton" part. There's even quite a substantial (though not cheap) market for kaizen specific foam inserts / foam sheets. Mainly these are easier to cut and have contrasting color for top and middle layers, showing obviously if a tool is missing from its place. Look up "kaizen foam" if interrested.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

Best 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’

I like Akro bins, or some "system" that I can always expand easily in the future like Sterilite stackers (I've gotten 1 or 2 every year for about a decade).

https://www.sterilite.com/product-page.html?product=14723V06...

Going to sound facetious for a second: whatever size works for you and the space.

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've seen smallish, stiff cloth baskets with handles at Daiso that would be suitable

Plastic bins of assorted sizes , from jewelry box to shoe box

Ha! Similar idea to mine, but I use an open-wide-shallow basket/bin instead. My saying to my family is, “Everything has a place to go.” The ones that don’t go in their place quickly enough land in the basket/bin.

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.

Ask me. 100+ journals. 10 packets of 10 pen packets. Colorful index cards. A5 files. Cube notepads. Postit notes. Notepads, yellow, white, a5,letter,legal.

... and that's "before" you become a stationery geek / fountain pen collector

Yeah, but where does the tote live? It’s mobile and might not be where I need it when I need it. Then I go looking for it, and all of a sudden I have two problems and have difficulty getting back to what I was doing in the first place. :-)

I'm afraid the only remaining option is to wear a backpack 24/7 and reenact your favorite inventory management RPG.

You know how RPGs that don't let you stack same items in the inventory suck? They're too close to real life.

did I feed the cows?

stop, you are triggering my Dora the explorer PTSD.

Ah but then soon enough you'll need a bag of holding or two to expand the storage space of your backpack.

That’s simple enough. Just get a second tote for holding your first tote! Then you just have to keep track of the second one to be able to locate the first one.

there are times where i have nested totes. life imitates programming

Fuck. This is why making lists never works for me either. I always lose the damn list...

Just make a notes.txt file on your computer. Now which directory did I keep that in? Also gotta keep it up on your screen all the time or you forget you even have it.

Just get a paper pad with your lists on it. Then place it in a random drawer and forget you have it for 3 days. Place it in a dedicated home, forget where that is and lose it again.

Just put it on sticky notes, and put them where you will see them. Now you have 5000 sticky notes everywhere, and don't even understand what you wrote on them. Then learn to ignore all of them.

A notepad that I carry in my pocket? Now I have more shit to take with me that I will forget. What about that computer in your pocket? I already have it silenced to keep it from distracting me... No easy way to keep basic text files sync'd with my computer without using a cloud service. Where did you store that text file on Cloud Storage anyways?

It’s still linear time with one basket per room, you just have to maybe visit each room twice.

This is how I ended up with three boxes ful of infrequently used items that were supposed to find their place for a year now... :/.

We throw everything out (to thrift stores if possible) after a year of no use. Has bitten us almost never and when it has it’s usually something useless to someone else too (cheap to replace).

This seems like the ‘cable storage’ problem many people I know suffer from.

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.

We have a problem getting rid of stuff in this way because we have hoarding tendencies. For every item you consider removing, you think up new ways in which you might need it in the future, or you say you will have a yard sale and make a little bit of money back, neither of which are realistic.

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.

Yep, guilty. Got plastic grocery bag full of plastic grocery bags in my pantry. In my defense, I use them as either trash bags, or as food storage (instead of cling film). Still they tend to accumulate over time.

This is similar to how---let's be honest---most of us manage our OS desktop files.

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.

It is nice until you start having fragile stuff like sunglasses in the drawer.

Your fault for leaving them out!

Although we were respectful of each other’s stuff. We were best mates so it worked out.

I drove my spouse crazy with this because I'd put his stuff in a pile in the same place every time.

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.

can you go around the house filling the tote? :)

that too. pickup and deposit are in the same complexity

It may be linear in the number of items, but not in the number of rightful places (you’d have to sort the items by rightful place first). Deciding on each rightful place also tends to not be constant-time.

On the bright side, at least the rightful places are presumably still in Euclidean space so there are efficient solutions for the optimal traversal paths.

over time your items will develop a home.

And how do you manage to force yourself to do that last daily part? Most people who struggle with storing stuff in a dedicated storage also struggle with routines.

Yeah, "just clear the tote out daily" is a a huge understatement. Though, I think this plan better than never cleaning at all.

start with weekly and work forward. It varies for me too. depending on how cluttered your house gets you may get by with a different routine.

I've done this. The problem I find is having to fold my clothes and re-orginize every tote 10-15 times a day, as the totes are rotating around the various pettestals.

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

I 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.

I put things in my shoes. Then I remember when it’s time to leave!

When I sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, I always put my loose items, watch, ring, sunglasses, wallet, phone (called EDC these days?) in my shoes. That way I'm guaranteed to not misplace them and forget them the next morning.

I think I also do most of these. Clothes in FIFO queues, except I have three queues for T-shirts, for best, decent, and doing housework quality. Stick a post-it note on my glasses or shoes to remind me to do something. Or use a weird item to jog my memory if I don't have a post-it to hand. Leave medication out on the bathroom sink if I need to use it the next morning. Leave the bedroom wastepaperbasket on the bed if the bins need to go out later. And the takeoff points someone else suggested - things to go downstairs pile up at the top of the stairs, things to go to he kitchen pile up on the cupboard by the kitchen door, etc.

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.

> 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.

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 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 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.

Yeah.

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.

Yep, I keep a laptop USB-C charger in my backpack, so I don’t have to unplug things and move things.

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.

USB-C has been a game changer for charging. I'm now able to keep a charger that will work for almost everything I own everywhere I might need one. One at my desk, one in my bag, one by the TV, one by the bed. Next step is strapping a set of adapters to each of those cables.

USB-C is the best. When I had to trade my Intel MacBook pro back into IT for a new M1 with a MagSafe connector, I told them I wanted to keep the USB-C charger. I didn't want another damn charger to carry around with me. They thought it was super weird that I would prefer USB-C, but it charges everything I carry with me.

Also I replaced a few receptacles in my house with ones that have USB-C ports on them. Then I never have to worry about them walking off...

https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/90/ygg_ask.png

https://what-if.xkcd.com/90/

my car keys cost $350 each

Yeah I mentioned in a sibling comment that there are things that are too expensive to have a bunch of, so you can’t do it for everything, just relatively cheap “I can never seem to find X when I need it…” stuff.

Perfect example of anti-progress in the modern world.

My parents had a Mark 2 Ford Escort. My mum came home in someone else’s car once, as it looked similar and the key worked in it.

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.

eh... my car before that, a 90s Japanese car, had plain old dumb keys. It was stolen twice (and found abandoned twice) by joy riders who easily stole it.

I hope to be buried with my old, dumb cars :p

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 desk drawer, etc.

No regrets. Life is better now.

I did the same thing when Dollar Tree started stocking tape measures for $1.25. I figured that they’ll be accurate enough and I do need to measure stuff a lot, so I have ended up buying four.

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).

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

A decade ago, I bought a bucket of 25 nail clippers. My wife was initially skeptical, but over the next few years, grew to appreciate the low demands of the system: Need a nail clipper? Go to the bucket. See a nail clipper in a weird place? Put it in the bucket, if you feel like it and have the time. Otherwise, don't worry about it. There'll be one in the bucket when you need it.

My ex-wife was constantly losing nail clippers. My solution was to buy a box of 50 of them and put them everywhere.

I do this for pens. I bought 25 4-color Bics, stuck them in a glass at the center of the house. Very useful

I'm happy to read that I'm not the only one. I love those 4-color Bics. I somehow need to buy a new box every other year or so.

The whole household uses them

I always lost my guitar picks while in school and going through my guitar phase. Eventually I bought a whole box of them and scattered them throughout my room. Less than a week later I couldn't find any. Some items, like guitar picks and bobby pins are just cursed out the factory it seems.

I have a copy of little kit several places:

It contains:

- sharpie

- pen: https://amazon.com/dp/B005Y0T8C2

- postit full-stick notes pad

- cutter of all: https://amazon.com/dp/B000VYOISU

- opener of all the things: https://amazon.com/dp/B0017DGTSG

- diagonal cutter - any decent, but I like klein: https://amazon.com/dp/B0000302W8

at first I questioned myself duplicating stuff. Was I being a hoarder? But honestly, it has paid off 1000x

I have to fight against my hoarding tendencies, but I figure that for small stuff, the likelihood of getting so much that it's a problem is unlikely. Even if I had 100 screwdrivers and 100 tape measures, that would be a bit odd, but it's not enough for a reality show to make an episode about me.

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.

that diagonal cutter seems a strange choice to me. Care to say more on why that particular item? You already have a pair of scisors and a cutter in there...

In my EDC case / kit(s) I tend to add a pair of grippy pliers instead of cutting pliers - think Knipex Cobra or the Knipex parallel pliers for grabbing / tightening stuff.

I just gradually added that one in - the scissors don't really cut wires or zip ties.

the other "cutter" is just a very good letter opener

You may be right, I use it much less frequently (but when I do use it, it is the right tool).

From the title I thought, how is holding a pen all day going to stop me from forgetting where I put things down? Lol.

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).

I like the tip from Adam Savage on where to put new things: Quickly think about where you would search first for this item. The first thought that comes to mind is where you store it. Next time you look for the item it is right where you would search first.

This is good advice. But I'd like to extend it to: and if the place you first would look for sucks consider making a better one. E.g. if your stapler goes missing a lot and clutters your desk, relabel an easy to access drawer to "desk stuff" and put it in there. Put all other small things that fit the description in there. Return desk stuff into the desk stuff drawer.

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.

This breaks down when there are two of you with different places you would search first.

Exactly, I can always remember where something is or should go if I made the initial decision of where to store it. But if my spouse decides on a new organizational system, even if explained to me, I can't seem to recall it when I need it!

That is the best way to end up with a giant mess on that tiny piece of furniture you have next to the front door.

That is what happened to me.

I think that's a clever idea.

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 think the freezer on the bottom setup makes sense too. I spend more time looking in the fridge, move it to eye level.

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.

Just went from a side-by-side to a French Door. (I admittedly have an upright freezer in my basement.) This seems so much better than what I had. The freezer drawers are shallow and much easier to see stuff I might want in the near-term than with the side by side.

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.

Counter-depth fridges are the way to go. All we lost when we switched was the space where stuff was slowly going bad.

I went back and forth. I do have a lot of condiments for ethnic cooking and so forth that have pretty good refrigerator lives for a home kitchen. I think the real trick is to keep leftovers and genuinely perishable stuff towards the front.

I used to lose stuff and I also grew up in a hoarder house.

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.

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.

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.

How do you get from drying to storing to picking and wearing a pair of shorts without noticing there's a sock stuck inside? I could maybe buy it in case of some loose long pants, but with shorts, you can literally see the entire inside surface when you're lifting them to wear.

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?

I am intrigued about people losing socks because it never happened to me.

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.

After yesterday's laundry I counted the mismatched socks: 22. I have no frickin idea where could one misplace twenty-two socks but well here I am.

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.

This is the Way.

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.

Grab-and-go? I like the sound of that.

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!

I solved the problem by buying one single sort of black socks and one single sort of white socks. No need to pair them: just pink any random of the same color.

It always boggles my mind that losing socks in the laundry is such a common phenomenon. A socket is either collected, or left in the machine. There's nowhere else it could go. It's not like a tape measure or a pen that carried around house and could be put somewhere without you consciously registering it. Maybe some washing machines have really strange geometry that is prone to conceal socks?

Dogs are a big factor here. Cats less so.

I have, however, just settled on a uniform for work: same underwear, white or black socks, grey t-shirt under my scrubs (oh, the joys of wearing pajamas at work). Darn Tough socks aren’t cheap, but they are guaranteed for life, and they’re great for preventing smelly feet if you’re prone to them.

Now that you mentioned pets, it makes perfect sense to me.

My cat has indeed never been interested in socks. However, he'll move almost everything else. I still remember the day I had to wear sun glasses to classes, because he hid my normal glasses, later discovered to be behind the bookcase.

I like this idea, but I wonder if the people (like me) most likely to benefit from this idea are precisely the people that would turn the holding pen into an undifferentiated trash bin in the same way that any empty surface gets filled over time.

I like to say - my wife is like Marie Kondo except when she’s done with something, she thanks it and puts it in a bowl by the front door.

I think the solution to this is to follow rule #5 in TFA: Is cleaned out regularly—ideally daily, at most weekly—, so that it doesn’t become a storage area.

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

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

https://www.westonboxes.com/ I recently discovered these. Lifechanging in two ways:

* 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.

My algorithm is like this:

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.)

I have pretty much the same algorithm, except that I do have misc boxes for the stuff I don't need right now, but I may need later. Those boxes appears after a cleaning spree (1 per room). After a week or so, the items inside will get their proper place based on usage patterns (whatever is left inside goes back to long-term storage).

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

I've had trouble getting this to work but I do have one addition that might help people who can make this work or partially work.

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.

In my otherwise minimal-cruft apartment, I have a shelf of 18 of those clear plastic shoeboxes, labelmakered with what goes in each.

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.

1) Items which are too transient/unimportant to have memorable assigned place.

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!

> IMO, having a place for everything and ensuring that everything is where it belongs (mise en place) is the ultimate efficiency boost

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

This doesn't help people who have a "one item stack", which occasionally describes me. If I'm holding something, and I find something else I need, I'll just put the one thing down to pick the other thing up. If I'm interrupted, there's a chance that I'll leave the original article right wherever this happened.

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

Funny, when I read the title I thought it was some mental trick that involved holding a pen.

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.

Same here. I came away wondering if I had fallen for click bait.

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.

My solution is to just keep buying more until I reach environmental saturation. This is why I have at least six measuring tapes.

But if you don't lose things, how do future archeologists find them?

I have such a hard time relating to this in the same way I get deeply annoyed by sloppy code from coworkers. Any advice?

Try to keep in mind that your attention to detail is almost certainly perceived by them to be fastidious, and that quietly your seniormost colleagues and leaders may well muse: "Man, if only sublinear would loosen their standards, just imagine how much faster we'd proceed". Put another way: the fact that you can't relate to OPs problem is because you're hardwired to solve it (putting things in their place) continuously, likely without exception, which means you're paying a different cost. Try to think of _that_ cost when you bristle at their solutions.

I enjoy thinking about this perspective, but at the end of the day it's not slower in the long run to be meticulous. Quite the opposite.

I think it's less that being meticulous is time consuming than that, in the same way that things have different values to different people, things can have different costs. I feel like if I didn't put things in convenient places that may be difficult to find later, I'd end up doing a lot of backtracking in the present.

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.

"Meticulous" is basically defined as "the upper end of the right level of care about detail." What you call meticulous others might call unnecessarily pedantic, or obsessive. What they call meticulous, you might find sloppy.

Exactly that, it's the No True Scotsman fallacy.

I'm in the process of coming to terms with how neurologically diverse people are.

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.

Some sympathetic reading about ADHD might help. And think about who in your life might have it in some degree. That person who leaves the cabinet doors open, or who has 500 tabs on their browser. Don’t pathologize it.

I imagined this would be an article about getting into the habit of keeping items in your hand so that you don't place them down somewhere and forget.

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

One of the small wins in my life was actually using up a Bic Crystal pen, without losing or breaking it. Took maybe a decade, as I don't really write that much anymore, but it lasted through 3 or 4 moves and some commuting.

Reminds me of stuff from Van Neistat [1] where he just has repeated tools on different places. I end up doing this for cheap stuff like eye drops ie "1 for office and 1 for home". If its 1 for home and 1 on the backpack, soon I will have 2 on the wrong place (because the pattern goes like "is this the backpack one? let me take it with me just in case")

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

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

My trick is to make the objects "stand out". Black headphones, smartphones, keys etc are easily overlooked in work bag pockets or when placed on other dark surfaces.

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 attached brightly colored ribbons to my keys. Finding the keys now takes far, far less time. I feel stupid not thinking of this decades ago.

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).

> Another trick is to group related objects.

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

I 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 there are people who find pens in the same way I lose them or do they just vanish into another dimension...

I take this strategy of buying many of a thing to scatter all over with a few things. I've found it very effective.

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.

Interesting. For contrast, switching to the one-good-pen approach was what finally did the trick for me. These days, I find I'm more likely to run out of ink than lose my pen. To each their own!

"Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid lifestyle, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the good life." -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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! :-)

I lose things extremely rarely so much so that I distinctly remember the only two things I've lost in the last 5 years or more. My rule is simple: put the item back to its designated place the moment you are done with it.

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.

Great idea, i have a 'etagere's and bowls on each surface basically. Most of the time i know where stuff is, if not i know fairly certain in which 'pen' it is. It also really helps to be conscious of where you put something. What i mean is, if you put the thing in the box, look at it and how it 'looks' in the box. +300 to memory of that item ;)

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

With ADHD, time blindness, and object permanence, I have been thinking about a sort of design that would put specific things in eyesight in certain walking paths and only when going in certain directions. So things to go up the stairs would be visible in a box only when going up, with some kind of hood, for example. The same idea for going into and out of rooms. I don't think I've seen this strategy discussed anywhere before

Keep a basket with handle for this purpose, the kind used in supermarkets. Makes it easy to transport the items back to their proper home.

I use the Reisenthel baskets, available in a wide variety of colors: https://www.reisenthel.com/en/shopping/categories/shopping-b...

250 comments as a Hacker News discovers interior design.

I never lost a single sock during or after washing. Why? Because I care (they are expensive cycling socks) and I go after each sock immediately when putting them on the drying rack. So where are they? 1) Entangled with one of the other wet clothing items. (60% of cases) 2) Lost on the way between laundry machine and drying rack (20% of cases) 3) Still in the laundry drum (20% of cases).

I see your point, I’m a neat freak who cares about most things I possess. Trouble is, we don’t always have time to be this neat. For example, I’m standing in my laundry room rolling up socks when suddenly someone calls from upstairs. I go into my hallway, still working on a pair of socks, and discover it’s my partner calling me because our son just defecated on the floor of the tiny bathroom upstairs. I throw the socks on the first available surface and run to help, focusing on the new problem at hand, and now the socks are lost. This exact situation is on the extreme side of course. It’s more common for me personally to put down a glass/cup to assist someone with a minor yet to them seemingly important task and then proceed to search for my lost bevrage.

A german kids show investigated this and made a video about it[1]. Here you can see the 4th option of what can happen.

[1] https://youtu.be/-sYZEOftpw4?si=T4btvhTJpfSzA9q2&t=35

Isn't there a fourth failure case - that they have failed to make it into the drum in the first place? Maybe not a huge issue for yourself, but can occur in my workflow.

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.

I'm extremely forgetful so for me, things either exist in their rightful place or I will have to buy a new one. Given that trade-off, I don't mind traveling to a separate room to put things in its right place.

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...

Having OCD, it’s always great when posts like these appear, because you get to see everyone else who has OCD share their highly-optimised systems of organisation so you can update your personal methods.

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 :)

Designing intentionally how you organize everyday stuff is difficult but way worth the effort – it's one of those things you regret not doing earlier. Eg. key holder, grocery list 1) with its dedicated pen attached by a string, 2) next to the fridge (strings are nice to keep scissors in their place, too), ...

Any 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?

We tried this but holding pens became eventual long term storage for abandoned property. I like the tote idea.

I believe this is called a “junk drawer”

I airtagged my keys and my wallet. I have an Apple Watch and an iPhone. These are the things I need. The watch to find the phone. The phone to find the other things. Everything else I just give to memory or my wife’s memory since it’s never urgent.

The TikTok ADHD community commonly refers to these as "doom boxes" (or "piles") which reflects both the sense of dread that they instill, while also being an acronym for "didn’t organize, only moved".

TikTok and ADHD...

The best way to avoid losing items is not having them at all. If I need to do something that requires tools, I'll pay for the service or rent/borrow the tools.

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

Buying the tools for the job is usually much cheaper than hiring a contractor to do the job.

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.

So basically a junk drawer.

>>> 5. Is cleaned out regularly—ideally daily, at most weekly—, so that it doesn’t become a storage area.

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

> so the activation energy to use a holding pen is approximately the same as placing the item down randomly.

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

Thought this solution was going to be holding a pen in your hand...

Glad to know I’m not the only one who read the title this way!

Quite. I’ve lost several Fisher Bullet Pens. They’re tiny, and smooth. They fall out of pockets very well.

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

I went through a phase where I sort of did this. I kept forgetting or misplacing one thing when I left the house. So I started assigning myself one extra small thing to bring with me. It may just have been the attention I was paying, but it helped!

solutions can't hold anything, they dont have hands.

i thought it was going to be about how to hold a pen.

Reminds me of this classic bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oHBG3ABUJU

So 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…

My solution, from years of living out of a suitcase traveling for work, was “everything has a place”.

Need a pen? It’s in the first pocket of the backpack. When done, it goes back there. Need a charging cable, in the zipper pouch on the outside. When I unplug it, it only goes back there - no where else.

The other that helps when it comes to leaving stuff behind in a hotel room is a designated space - say on the desk. Anything removed from baggage - clothes, pens, computer, passport - doesn’t go anywhere but the desk. Then when you need to leave the room, you don’t need to search the room, only clear the desk.

At one point I put the RFID card I use to access the building i work at into the left pocket of my jacket instead of right pocket. I don't remember why but that day I was thoroughly convinced I forgot it at home. During lunchtime break I went back to my home only to find out it's not there...

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

My holding pen would just end up overflowing with stuff.

Of course, point 5 is the weakest link in this approach.

Please try this -- add a recurring weekly calendar item, “Chore: Clean up Holding Pen.” It can be a SAT/SUN around 8AM in the morning. ;-)

When I come home, I take off my hat and then I put all my 'leaving home stuff', keys, wallet, glasses, and put them in my hat. Done.

Why would holding a pen stop me from losing things? Seems like I'd just end up losing the pen too. Ooooooh, a holding pen.

I have had several accounts in the past, just for fun. I'm a complete newbie, but enjoyed many articles and commented on them. I was constantly downvoted (or whatever term is used) and I was many times just innocently asking honest questions. I feel that most of the people here ARE childish and can't relate, and therefore impose their 'powers' of banning and downvoting. After a year of all that childish behavior on here, I just closed my accounts and left. I am just a very curious (and I think I am intelligent) retired senior aerospace engineer. I was just so rudely treated here that I couldn't fathom the reasons for it. I am just too ignorant of this 'new' culture, I guess...

> retired senior aerospace engineer

Kudos, sir, and all due respect.

An admirable industry, and one that could nowadays use much of the values, approaches, and skills of your generation of engineers

Funny, from reading the title I thought this would be about holding a pen while walking between rooms.

Brilliant, a dedicated staging area in the physical world for temporary short term storage. Love it.

Oh, ok. I thought it's going to be about how to hold your pens properly, to avoid losing them.

Also AirTags. My keys, wallet, backpack, briefcase all have AirTags.

As long as I can find my phone, I am good.

Am I overlooking something, or is this just "have a junk drawer in every room".

Junk drawers accumulate homeless items. This is for temporarily holding items which you will move to a different, correct location either daily or weekly.

I think junk drawers also start out with good intentions.

Getting Things Done’s “In-Tray” but for real life items.

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!

The sequel Making It All Work mentions a tidying strategy of first putting everything that's out of place into a big "bucket" (e.g. laundry hamper), then dealing with them one by one.

You underestimate my brain's super human ability to justify leaving that stuff right where it is until "later" which actually means never but for some reason I accept it lol. Oddly enough, this only applies to things that I personally leave in stupid places.

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.

> So under your system I'd end up with all my stuff in my house's doorways

I see you've already been to my place

Anyone else misread this to mean holding a pen .. like a ballpoint pen

It's just a bandaid. When I was growing up, the 'holding pen' was the top of the dishwasher, and it lived in a constant state of entropy. The mail and bits were piled into a mountain that would fall when bumped into.

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

That's what the point number five is about: "Is cleaned out regularly—ideally daily, at most weekly—, so that it doesn’t become a storage area."

> 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.

I get that, but we had the same 'plan' but often failed to do so for the a lot of the same reasons we don't often deal with things the first time. I guess if you can make sure to stay on top of it better, it wouldn't be so bad

If you can't deal with the mail until 6pm, don't bring it in from the letterbox until 6pm. The key is to reduce the number of times you have to touch the thing. Ideally to one time. Any strategy of "putting stuff in a pile to deal with later" just results in piles of stuff unless you are very disciplined. And if you're disiplined, you deal with stuff as it comes not later.

And when the holding pen overflows, pandemonium ensues.

Good idea. An image would have helped tremendously.

My home is too small for me to have such a problem.

I understand it, I like it, I’ll use it! Thanks!

How to fix the mental problem of placement amnesia, though?

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.

What if those holding pens are the rooms?

This is a recipe for disaster.

Big fan of these frosted file boxes for this purpose.

Throw transiet shit in, have a sense of what's inside without looking too messy.

https://muji.ca/products/pp-file-box-standard-wide-1-2

Great idea.

Ah yes, that fifth step is the trick…

I'd argue mostly.

I do have a few bins mostly related to financial information like statements and bills--which I'll probably never need to look at given online access to many things--but that are probably good to keep around for a while before chucking them.

For that, you can use "spike filing". Place everything incoming you might need on top of a spike (or on top of a pile or in the front of a folder). The automatically sorts by traverse chronological order, making it easy to both retrieve old documents and to know the age so you can discard older ones.

https://www.enotesnepal.com/class-11/notes/business-studies/...

Not sure I want to take advice from someone who keeps their keys on their back pocket.

I used to be bad with keys. Now, in addition to having an AirTag on them, I have a hook for them right by the front door which I pretty much use religiously. I do have to go searching for my iPhone sometimes but not my keys.

I used to not have keys because I was too small. Then when I was about 8 or so my parents gave me keys and told me to put them in my pocket every time I leave the house. So I do. It's not difficult stuff.

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.

I certainly don't take my keys if I don't need them like I'm not driving my car. Someone else may be driving. I'm just walking from my house. (I have a keyless entry system.) I basically only need my keys if I'm getting in my car when, yes, they generally go in a pants pocket or fanny pack or backpack.

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.

Exactly so your problem is your system is way too complex. So many ifs, so many decisions, so many considerations. There's no way you can reliably trust yourself to not make mistakes once in a while. Do you have a workflow to help make this decisions? Is the software you write also this overcomplicated?

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.

My coat is the only place for my keys so I can’t leave without them.

I tried this trick too, but What if it’s sunny/too hot for a coat?

Maybe you use an alternative like something to clip on a belt?

Hello from Houston! I personally use a small backpack that I leave my keys, wallet, extra charging cords and a dedicated set of diabetes things and anything that comes out of that bag goes straight back when I'm fine with it. Works pretty well

How would holding a pen prevent you from losing things?

In this article, the meaning of _pen_ as in an enclosure, a cage, a tray, a box, a container [0]. A holding pen in this case means a holding tray, a holding box, i.e., a container for holding things. A pen (cage, tray) for holding things.

[0] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/pen

My solution is own less stuff. I own maybe 30ish items total.

I also have a fantastic memory, so I remember where other people leave things but if people had less things it’s easier to remember.

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