On dealing with things..

[theducks]

I'm a bit of a packrat. For example, I tend to save every receipt from every place I go on holidays. I have receipts from Tim Hortons in London Ontario in 1998. And bus tickets. This is fine, it's all filed away in a neat display file. I'm not as bad as my grandmother, who would periodically buy "mystery bags" from the dead-letter-office auctions. Sure, you'd get some interesting stuff, but really.. do you need it? At least my incoming junk has been consciously and deliberately obtained.

So in the lounge room, I bring stuff home (not very much anymore, since Secret Project Number 5 at any rate), where it invariably ends up in a pile on the coffee table. Periodically, I miss being able to see what colour our coffee table is, and clean everything up. I do this in a fashion that makes both my darling wife and my dear records manager mother weep. See, mum always taught me to deal with something once, and once only. Records sentencing. The idea being that it saves time, has no double handling, etc. My method is to get two boxes. Let's call them box 1 and box 2. I put all my unfiled and miscellaneous crap into box 1. Sometimes items jump out as being crap and get thrown in the bin on the way there, sometimes others get sorted into destination piles, by but and large, everything goes into box 1, so everything I need to deal with is in one place.

Then I move everything from box 1 to box 2, deciding along the way if my life will really be disadvantaged by throwing it out, and doing so unless it would be. Anything that has a destination goes into its respective pile, and anything I've identified in the initial process as deserving of a destination pile gets one too. By the time everything is in box 2 or a destination pile, I've usually thrown a lot of it out. Then I deal with the destination piles, put a lid on box 2, and store it away, until the next cleanup I do, where it becomes box 1. This means I either see it every time I clean up to either find a place for it, throw it out, or put it back in the box. I figure as long as I only have at most one box of un-placed items, I'm ok. Every time I've done it, I try to end up with under 1/3rd of the box full.

(destination piles include: filing, electronics tools, computer parts/cables, travel accessories to go to the bedroom {I keep all our travel stuff in my bedside table, quick getaway or something}, books, freecycle)

Some of the destination piles end up in boxes of their own, like computer parts/cables. I have a downstairs box for anything I use on a regular basis (usb cables, firewire cables, ethernet cables, external hard drives) or any computer/electronics related items that have come in, and when that box gets too full, I take it upstairs and file the contents into other boxes. I have 7 boxes upstairs in an expedit shelving unit - network stuff, audio visual stff, usb/firewire/apple stuff, computer case parts + general electronics, hard drives/optical drives/ram/flash memory, power cables and adapters, and electronics manuals and driver disks. When these boxes get full, I go through them in a similar fashion, but due to their smaller size, I basically dump the contents on the couch and put back what I really need, and get rid of the rest in an appropriate manner. I also have a 40L tub with keyboards in it (if the keyboard doesn't fit, it has to go out or replace one that is in there), and another 40L tub with iBook parts, which at some point I will sell to paperishcup's father for a pittance.

tldr; I have boxes of crap, but I go through them regularly and weed out anything that I don't need. This is how when people ask things like "have you got a near-IR camera/random apple cable from 1995/spare widget?", the answer is yes. I know if I have it or not because it gets sorted on a regular basis, and I have it because I have sufficient space to store it. You know, it would be better not to bring crap home in the first place, but at least this stops it from getting out of control. I only have one box of random crap, and any of the other boxes are at least sorted by contents.

Comments

[silverai.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite so organised, but I do have a similar method to cleaning up. I have piles instead of boxes though. I go through my mess and put it into one of three piles. There's a "keep" pile, a "throw out" pile and a "maybe" pile. Then I throw out the junk pile, have a small break (like getting a drink or something) and start on the "maybe" pile. I find that I have a lot more clarity about something the second time I look at it, and I can confidently keep it or throw it out with no regrets. Then I either sort the keep pile, or push it back somewhere, where it's still a mess but is a smaller one.