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ihaveajobyesterday at 10:58 PM2 repliesview on HN

This is neat but my OCD brain is hurting. I suspect a location based sorting, where most-recently-used boxes are near the top, or closer to your workstation, solves the same problem without the visual clutter.


Replies

dave_universetfyesterday at 11:13 PM

This is probably just a difference in how your brain and the author's work. A variety of home organizers have told me that people mean different things when they say they want an organized space. Some people want everything precisely labeled and sorted into narrow categories, and hidden away in drawers or closets. Others want everything visible and coarser categories. Each system looks and feels very distressing to brains of the other types.

It's especially a problem for people with ADHD, because the "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily socialized as the _only_ way to be organized, but it's also the exact opposite of how (some) ADHD brains want to operate. OTOH the very exposed and "emergent" organization that works for an ADHD brain probably is mild torture to an OCD brain :)

For myself, the sorting system in this post looks pretty ideal. All the stuff is right there where I can see it and scan for what I'm after, it explicitly allows for emergent organization where classification happens incrementally over time, and the dots thing has near zero activation energy but still gives me long-term information I can use. It's much better than an electronic or "clean" inventory system precisely because I'll never be able to consistently keep using those, whereas slapping a dot on a box, even on bad brain days I can manage that!

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switchbakyesterday at 11:15 PM

That's close to what I do - except I use dust. Every ten years I get rid of the ones that have enough dust to make me sneeze.

And I put them in the crawl space :)