4 ms·
This is an excellent rule for cleaning up (a room, a house, an office...): touch any given thing once at most. In extreme cases, it doesn't work because you do
by dsr_ 7y ago
This is an excellent rule for cleaning up (a room, a house, an office...): touch any given thing once at most.
In extreme cases, it doesn't work because you don't actually know where things are going to go, in which case a two-round approach is good: everything gets pulled out and sorted in round one, and things go to their destinations in round two.
- degenerate 7y agoThat's how I clean - pull everything out, assess, and put it all away. It's very efficient if you have enough space, but it drives people nuts because they see it as causing more of a mess.
- UI_at_80x24 7y agoI get scorned for doing it this way all the time!
- war1025 7y agoMy wife attempts to use this method, but usually gets distracted at peak-messiness and things just end up worse off than they started.
- bradknowles 7y agoNo, you can't blame your wife for that method. It was my method first. She must have stolen it from me. ;)
- FooHentai 7y agoAn issue with this approach is it turns 'cleaning' into a time-consuming task that needs to be completed to avoid making the situation worse. That can cause some folks anxiety and require a building up of sufficient willpower to even begin the task. Contrast that with a transaction-based approach to cleaning where an individual item is moved to it's destination place/state, then you move on to the next item. No middle state where things are worse, and you can stop at any time yet still have gained the benefit of any work completed to that point. However, with the second approach it's key that everything has a suitable destination 'home' to be moved to. Often, that 'home' is the trash can :)
- kortex 7y agoHeap sort vs insertion sort.
- debatem1 7y agoIt's interesting, I use precisely the opposite approach. I work in passes, each one intended to make the room cleaner as a whole but not necessarily finish any part of it. For example, let's say I've had a big party and the kitchen is a mess. Step one might be to put the trash can in the center of the room and dispose of all visible debris. Step two might be to move all remaining small objects to one side of the room to improve visibility, then repeat the trash pass. Step three might then be to wipe down the counters, which are now clear of objects. Etc. I tend to work in a similarly incremental way on programming tasks. Do you have a more "touch-once" approach there?