valiantfoxdinosaur:

aspire-to-the-light:

I used to tidy my room according to a fairly arbitrary set of rules – namely my parents’ rules. When I was a small child and my parents yelled at me to “tidy your room”, they usually meant something like “make it so we can’t see your stuff”. I could achieve that outcome by stuffing everything into cupboards and sweeping things under my bed, so my brain decided that was “tidying”.

At some point, I noticed that I did “tidying” because otherwise people would shout at me, but it was actually a pointless activity, and fairly destructive to my ability to find stuff and get things done. I’d tidy an item into a bottom of a drawer, and then not be able to find it, because it was at the bottom of a drawer full of other random things. Or I’d tidy an item into a bottom of a drawer, and then just kind of… forget about it. “Tidying” my toothbrush is a great way to guarantee that I’ll forget to clean my teeth.

…so I stopped doing “tidying”, and decided that I was Anti Tidying and that the correct response to the “tidy” meme was to put on some angry rock music and yell about complying with arbitrary systems being soul-sucking.

But it turns out that there is actually value to … if not tidying, at least a tidying-adjacent activity! Which I am about to explain how to do.

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1. Introspect.

The most important part of tidying is understanding your own mind, preferences, and capabilities.

I am a fairly forgetful person, and I lack a decent autopilot mode. I therefore get lots of value out of having objects directly in my line of sight, because looking at the object will remind me that it exists. If I keep my toothbrush somewhere I can see it, I’ll be more likely to brush my teeth. If I keep my toothbrush somewhere that makes it likely I’ll look directly at it and notice it during the part of my daily routine where I ought to be brushing my teeth, I’ll be much more likely to brush my teeth. 

Lots of other people notice this, and think that I just don’t like tidying or don’t care about tidying. Their idea of “tidying” involves getting rid of “clutter”, where clutter is having lots of visible objects. I kind of still don’t understand this, but I’ve been told it’s due to finding visible objects distracting and being able to think more clearly in a more empty-looking room. Any object that they can see might be a distraction, so they have to put it into a cupboard or a drawer so it can’t distract them.

My brain does the opposite of this; if there’s an empty room with blank walls, it’s easy for me to get lost in thought and end up wasting time by aimlessly staring into space day-dreaming. If my environment is visually interesting, it helps ground me in the real world, because my eyes will settle on something that reminds me where I am and what I ought to be doing. I don’t find clutter unpleasant or distracting; on the contrary, I often find clean/minimalist/empty rooms feel unwelcoming and inhuman and barren, and wish that there’d be some random stuff scattered on the table as evidence that actual humans actually live there.

I also keep a lot of stuff on the floor, because the floor is a large area, and putting nothing on the floor feels like a horrifically inefficient use of space. Some people absolutely hate this, because they need the floor clear so that they can walk on it. Through whatever combination of situational awareness and being-used-to-cluttered-floors and basic physical agility, I find it fairly effortless to walk across a cluttered floor and avoid stepping on things. I am honestly baffled by people who need uncluttered floors to avoid stepping on things, because I have observed them interact with their environment and they do not seem to be constantly walking into furniture and so they must have some ability to look where they are going, but I can be sympathetic and clear my floor when they are coming over.

It is okay to have your own tidying preferences! You are allowed to break away from the system where Virtuous Tidying means tidying according to your parents’ preferences and the general societal idea of empty-and-uncluttered-equals-tidy, and if you have different pro-clutter preferences, this is because you are Unvirtuous and Untidy. If your preferences and needs are highly idiosyncratic, your idea of “tidy” may be completely orthogonal to other people’s idea of “tidy”.

In shared spaces, you may have to compromise. In your own space, you are allowed to completely ignore what other people think “tidy” means, and figure out what you want.

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2. Categorise

There are two types of tidying ontology I use.

The first is by object clusters. Most of the time this is the kind of simple obvious category that you are already using. You put shirts on the top shelf, trousers on the second shelf, coats on the third shelf and underwear in your underwear drawer. Shorts intuitively belong with trousers because they are the same kind of object. Socks, pants, vests and bras belong together because they are all underwear.

I do not want to undersell object-cluster categories; they are very useful for being able to find things. If you have three drawers full of “stuff”, it is far better to sort them into three drawers full of categorised stuff, because then you know where to look for an item.

In order to group together a bunch of disparate objects into categories that will fit in the storage spaces you have, categories don’t have to be rigorous or make sense to anyone but you. I like having a “utility items” shelf for useful things (scissors, string, stationery, torch, paperclips, sewing kit), a “gadgets” shelf for electronics (phone chargers, bank card reader, keyboard, mice, headphones, adaptors), and a “self care” shelf for health stuff and comfort things (medicines, ear plugs, first aid kit, hot water bottle, lip balm, nail polish). There is no good or rigorous reason why headphones-for-gaming are not a self-care item, or why a bank card reader is not a utility item. What matters is that the categories make sense to my system-one, and so I know where to put things and find them later.

I only really use object-cluster ontology for reactive items. By which I mean, there are some objects that I never use except in response to a situation cropping up where I need them. I only want my sewing kit when I’ve ripped my clothes, so it’s OK to have it stowed away in a drawer where I might forget about it and it might take me a couple minutes to find it. The sewing kit doesn’t have to be in a location where it prompts me to use it, because the ripped clothes prompt me to go find the sewing kit.

For objects I want to proactively use, I use situational ontology. In the situation where I’ve just gotten out of the shower, I might want to dry my hair, wrap myself in a towel, apply deodorant, and not forget to clean my teeth. Therefore, rather than categorising those objects separately (hair dryer in gadgets, towel with clothes, deodorant and teeth with toiletries) I should put them all in a “just got out the shower” category and put them right in my path when I exit the shower.

It’s worth thinking about what object-cluster systems you’re using could be converted into situational systems. For instance, you can replace “shirt drawer” and “trousers drawer” with “comfy clothes for lounging around” drawer and a “formal clothes for impressing people” drawer. If you normally go barefoot around the house and only put socks on for going outside, you can scrap the idea of an “underwear drawer” and instead keep your regular socks tucked into your shoes on the shoe rack, your fluffy thermal for-cold-nights socks in the drawer with your pyjamas and comfy things, your sports bras in your sports kit and your plain under-work-clothes bras in your work-clothes drawer.

Moving my kettle away from my food preparation table, and onto my bedside table, was a fantastic decision that let me make myself a get-out-of-bed coffee without having to first get out of bed. It took me way too long to do it because I was stuck in the mode of “my kettle is a food-preparation item so it should be Tidied Away with the other food-preparation items”. 

You do not have to categorise things in the way you are “supposed” to! Maybe you have a coat rack. The coat rack is set in a little cupboard next to the door and is clearly designed for people to put coats on it. But you always forget your coat, because your coat is not with your other clothes, and you breeze out the door without noticing that you should open the coat cupboard and retrieve your coat. So abolish the coat cupboard! Keep board games in it! 

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3. Build Flows

Think about the processes you normally do day to day. For instance, maybe you get out of bed, take a shower, get dressed, throw some things in your backpack, eat breakfast and leave the house. Or maybe you get home from a lecture, take your shoes and coat off, flop into a chair and start typing up your notes.

Some of the processes will be … suboptimal. I fairly often go through a process of getting home from an event, taking my shoes and coat off, flopping into bed because going outside is tiring, dragging my laptop into bed with me, and a few hours later noticing that I really ought to be working by this point.

The physical placement of items and furniture can be used to guide you through a process. For the most literal obvious example, you can have a table with objects arranged left to right; alarm clock, coffee mug, deodorant, clothing, backpack, breakfast cereal and a bowl. That table functions as a sort of physical checklist for your morning routine.

The table is an obvious example, but it’s also an example of bad flow design. So you take the alarm clock off the table and shut off the alarm; what’s to stop you getting right back into bed and ignoring the other objects on the table? There’s no natural progression from item to item, in the way that there would be if you put the alarm clock next to your kettle, the mug to pour the hot water into in the bathroom by the shower, the deodorant on your way back out of the bathroom, your clothing just next to the place you sit to dry yourself off from the shower, etc.

Flows work best when they’re designed around the paths you already take. You walk in through the door, take your coat off and hang it on the hook directly next to the door, proceed a little into the room and put your shoes on the shoe rack right in front of you, then as you head towards bed to flop into it you encounter a table between you and the bed and so you put your keys and phone down on the table. I use that exact flow, having a brightly coloured noticeable box to drop my keys into, so I don’t lose my keys. You could use the same principle to avoid flopping into bed and scrolling social media on your phone, provided the table is far enough away from your bed that it would be trivially inconvenient to fetch your phone.

You want to use the arrangement of furniture and objects, as well as reminders like post-it notes or stickers and time-bound pushes like alarms, to direct yourself around your space in a way that you endorse. I almost… visualise one of those complicated Rube Goldberg machines. The reminder alarm going off pushes me to the desk, where my post-it note pushes me to my cupboard, where I’m forced to interact with work tools because they’re literally sitting on top of things I want…

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4. Use Aesthetics To Inspire Virtues

I haven’t been able to practice this thing for a while, because as a student I have to move in and out of student accommodation and there’s only really room to pack essentials. But I think it’s important, and I cannot wait to be able to do it again.

I have a picture of a character from a story I wrote, drawn by a very close childhood friend. That picture inspires emotions in me. It reminds me of my friend, it reminds me that I love writing, and it calls to mind the particular virtues of the character portrayed. When I stick it on my wall and look at it fairly regularly, I get frequent little reminders in the corner of my eye, throughout my day. It’s like a less-obtrusive version of constantly having someone whispering in my ear, “Remember to be kind, and take care of people. Remember to do the things you love. Remember to go chase the things you want.”

You can build a whole aesthetic that, for you, calls to mind important virtues. If you can figure out how to display that aesthetic in the space you spend most time in, you can immerse yourself in that aesthetic, and for me that’s always been fairly powerful as a nudge to act in ways I endorse.

It’s sort of like how stepping into an office makes me feel more focused and productive, because it feels like such a work-y environment. Or like how I can be more determined and patient when I’m working out in a dojo, literally surrounded by reminders of the way I value those virtues.

Interior design is difficult and expensive. You probably cannot rework your bedroom to have tapestries on the walls and a four-poster red velvet bed because it reminds you of Gryffindor virtues. However, you can rework things to minimise/cover/hide the things that clash with your aesthetic, and emphasise the things that remind you of who you are.

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“Accalia, this is incredibly obvious and I do not know why you wrote a really long post explaining it. I did not need you to tell me that maybe I should put my toothbrush in the location where I brush my teeth or put my shoes by the door.”

Because you’re not doing the thing!

OK, that’s unfair, maybe you are. If you’re currently looking around your room and noting the highly optimised flows and all of the objects placed in the exact correct location for maximum convenience, then good for you.

But I think most of the time this works like the smaller plates thing. If you eat off smaller plates, you will instinctively eat less and eat slower, which many (not all) people endorse doing. Many people are told this and say, “Yes, that seems fairly obvious and I should do that.” And then they do not do it. Or they do it like once and then forget about it entirely.

I think it is worth taking a look around your environment and actually thinking about whether you could use the arrangement of your items and furniture to promote action flows you endorse, disrupt flows you don’t want to engage in, remind yourself about objects you ought to be using (eg. your toothbrush), hide away things that distract you, and emphasise aesthetics that mesh with your values.

Some things, like toothbrush by the sink and shoes by the door, are sufficiently obvious and widely agreed upon them that many people do them by default. Some things, like medications on the bedside table and keys in a designated bowl by the door, are fairly obvious but people sometimes need to be prompted to do them. Other things are not obvious, but it’s hard to give examples because they’re often very idiosyncratic. And sometimes the “obvious” things don’t actually serve you well; toothbrush on bedside table works far better for me than toothbrush by sink.

Why is your desk against that wall? Is it just because that’s the way it was when you first moved into the room? Why do you have a bookshelf for books and a cupboard for useful tools, and not shelves for useful tools and a cupboard for books? Is it just because it’s named a “bookshelf” so it seems like you ought to put books there? Why are your meds or your snacks or your socks in the place that they’re in?

If you’re anything like me, most of the time, you only tidy reactively. You throw sweet wrappers on the floor, or use objects and leave them in places you shouldn’t, or paper builds up on your desk as you continue to ignore the paperwork you should be doing. Then eventually you realise that your room’s really untidy and you should fix this, so you take the out-of-place-objects and return them to their places until the room is in a state you find acceptable. We rarely proactively tidy, with the aim of taking an already-acceptable space and making it better for us.

Let me know if you end up proactively tidying. I would love more ideas about how to optimize home spaces.

Sooooo I too have the thing where I need things to be visible or I forget about them, but my problem is that there are Too Many Things that I need to keep in view, and inevitably they all end up piled deep enough that most of them are no longer as visible as they need to be – and sometimes deep enough that I can’t find them even when I go looking for them.