11 ms·

How to avoid losing items? Holding pens

417 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
Reminds me of this classic bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oHBG3ABUJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oHBG3ABUJU
ggm 2y ago
But if you don't lose things, how do future archeologists find them?
m463 2y ago
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.
- doubled112 2y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    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.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Counter-depth fridges are the way to go. All we lost when we switched was the space where stuff was slowly going bad.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    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.
tonymet 2y ago
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
- hn_user82179 2y ago
  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’
  - clumsysmurf 2y ago
    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&mid=627 https://www.sterilite.com/product-page.html?product=14723V06...
  - madamelic 2y ago
    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.
  - fnord77 2y ago
    I've seen smallish, stiff cloth baskets with handles at Daiso that would be suitable
taneq 2y ago
Ah yes, that fifth step is the trick…
- ghaff 2y ago
  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.
  - flicken 2y ago
    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/filing/#:~:text=1.2.%20Wire%20or-,spike%20filing,-%3A%C2%A0In%20this https://www.enotesnepal.com/class-11/notes/business-studies/...
Mistletoe 2y ago
Thought this solution was going to be holding a pen in your hand...
- pixelatedindex 2y ago
  Glad to know I’m not the only one who read the title this way!
- whartung 2y ago
  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.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  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!
- fuzztester 2y ago
  solutions can't hold anything, they dont have hands. i thought it was going to be about how to hold a pen.
kleiba 2y ago
Of course, point 5 is the weakest link in this approach.
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  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. ;-)
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
Not sure I want to take advice from someone who keeps their keys on their back pocket.
- ghaff 2y ago
  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.
  - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      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.
      - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
        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.
tombert 2y ago
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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  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.
  - tombert 2y ago
    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.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - jon-wood 2y ago
fnord77 2y ago
My holding pen would just end up overflowing with stuff.
sublinear 2y ago
I have such a hard time relating to this in the same way I get deeply annoyed by sloppy code from coworkers. Any advice?
- anon35 2y ago
  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.
  - sublinear 2y ago
    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.
    - maxbond 2y ago
      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.
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
treetalker 2y ago
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.
- bubblebeard 2y ago
  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!
  - loopdoend 2y ago
    A place for everything and everything in its place...
  - pipes 2y ago
    Ah yes, same here, my wife stacks stuff in any available free space, anywhere in the house.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      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.
      - bubblebeard 2y ago
paulpauper 2y ago
Anyone else misread this to mean holding a pen .. like a ballpoint pen
deleted 2y ago
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Nadimakthae 2y ago
[flagged]
refurb 2y ago
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.
- flysand7 2y ago
  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
EGreg 2y ago
How would holding a pen prevent you from losing things?
- theqwxas 2y ago
  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 https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/pen
placebo 2y ago
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...
- margalabargala 2y ago
  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.
- a_e_k 2y ago
  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!
- dcminter 2y ago
  "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
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/
aquafox 2y ago
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).
- bubblebeard 2y ago
  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.
- luguenth 2y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/-sYZEOftpw4?si=T4btvhTJpfSzA9q2&t=35
- NeoTar 2y ago
  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.
maxglute 2y ago
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 https://muji.ca/products/pp-file-box-standard-wide-1-2
wodie 2y ago
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.
- atoav 2y ago
  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.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  This breaks down when there are two of you with different places you would search first.
  - kodt 2y ago
    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!
- prmoustache 2y ago
  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.
canjobear 2y ago
I believe this is called a “junk drawer”
sundvor 2y ago
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 https://findorbit.com/products/orbit-glasses-x exists but that's for Apples only).
pokstad 2y ago
So basically a junk drawer.
bluSCALE4 2y ago
This is a recipe for disaster.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
Also AirTags. My keys, wallet, backpack, briefcase all have AirTags. As long as I can find my phone, I am good.
treflop 2y ago
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.
- graposaymaname 2y ago
  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.
  - loopdoend 2y ago
    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.
    - treflop 2y ago
      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.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      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.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      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.
silisili 2y ago
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.'
- duckmysick 2y ago
  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.
  - silisili 2y ago
    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
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    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.
dools 2y ago
> 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-about-making-your-bed/ https://www.benkophone.com/2018/12/20/theres-nothing-magical...
- matrix2003 2y ago
  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.
  - dools 2y ago
    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.
- wiether 2y ago
  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!
fmajid 2y ago
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-baskets/?p=1 https://www.reisenthel.com/en/shopping/categories/shopping-b...
Modified3019 2y ago
My solution is to just keep buying more until I reach environmental saturation. This is why I have at least six measuring tapes.
sscarduzio 2y ago
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.
- jakepage91 2y ago
  Is there even a need for a holding pen if there is an order freak in the house?
gleenn 2y ago
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.
- fire_lake 2y ago
  I put things in my shoes. Then I remember when it’s time to leave!
  - beAbU 2y ago
    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.
- 2y ago
cranium 2y ago
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), ...
paxcoder 2y ago
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alfiedotwtf 2y ago
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!
- andai 2y ago
  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.
- rigrassm 2y ago
  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.
  - alfiedotwtf 2y ago
    > 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
alfiedotwtf 2y ago
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 :)
nytesky 2y ago
We tried this but holding pens became eventual long term storage for abandoned property. I like the tote idea.
nytesky 2y ago
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…
kqr 2y ago
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...
MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
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.
- wiredfool 2y ago
  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.
anonu 2y ago
> 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.
boesboes 2y ago
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
Metacelsus 2y ago
Funny, from reading the title I thought this would be about holding a pen while walking between rooms.
yeneek 2y ago
My home is too small for me to have such a problem.
mprovost 2y ago
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".
- ta988 2y ago
  TikTok and ADHD...
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
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.
- jdhzzz 2y ago
  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.
zuckerma 2y ago
Great idea.
ineedaj0b 2y ago
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.
codazoda 2y ago
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.
- neilv 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
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glitchc 2y ago
And when the holding pen overflows, pandemonium ensues.
consf 2y ago
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leashless 2y ago
https://www.westonboxes.com/ 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.
cnees 2y ago
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.
jxramos 2y ago
Brilliant, a dedicated staging area in the physical world for temporary short term storage. Love it.
thrwaway1985882 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke
- MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
renewiltord 2y ago
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.
eschneider 2y ago
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.
marcusverus 2y ago
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!
- foobarian 2y ago
  > 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.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Am I overlooking something, or is this just "have a junk drawer in every room".
- lkbm 2y ago
  Junk drawers accumulate homeless items. This is for temporarily holding items which you will move to a different, correct location either daily or weekly.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    I think junk drawers also start out with good intentions.
baxtr 2y ago
Good idea. An image would have helped tremendously.
powersnail 2y ago
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.)
- skydhash 2y ago
  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.
JTbane 2y ago
>>> 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.
kazinator 2y ago
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.
chrisbrandow 2y ago
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.
- doctorhandshake 2y ago
  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.
- unbalancedevh 2y ago
  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.
fudged71 2y ago
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
NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
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.
wakasaka 2y ago
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.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  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.
meindnoch 2y ago
Oh, ok. I thought it's going to be about how to hold your pens properly, to avoid losing them.
jsdwarf 2y ago
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.
- digging 2y ago
  > 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.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  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).
  - deleted 2y ago
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emsign 2y ago
What if those holding pens are the rooms?
lencastre 2y ago
I understand it, I like it, I’ll use it! Thanks!
beryilma 2y ago
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.
uncivilized 2y ago
250 comments as a Hacker News discovers interior design.
swah 2y ago
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/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C8pTP29pk-O/
somastoma 2y ago
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...
- rrnechmech 2y ago
  > 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

417 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

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

ggm 2y ago

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

m463 2y ago

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.

doubled112 2y ago
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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  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.
vundercind 2y ago
Counter-depth fridges are the way to go. All we lost when we switched was the space where stuff was slowly going bad.
- ghaff 2y ago
  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.

tonymet 2y ago

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

hn_user82179 2y ago
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’
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  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&mid=627 https://www.sterilite.com/product-page.html?product=14723V06...
- madamelic 2y ago
  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.
- fnord77 2y ago
  I've seen smallish, stiff cloth baskets with handles at Daiso that would be suitable

taneq 2y ago

Ah yes, that fifth step is the trick…

ghaff 2y ago
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.
- flicken 2y ago
  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/filing/#:~:text=1.2.%20Wire%20or-,spike%20filing,-%3A%C2%A0In%20this https://www.enotesnepal.com/class-11/notes/business-studies/...

Mistletoe 2y ago

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

pixelatedindex 2y ago
Glad to know I’m not the only one who read the title this way!
whartung 2y ago
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.
1123581321 2y ago
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!
fuzztester 2y ago
solutions can't hold anything, they dont have hands. i thought it was going to be about how to hold a pen.

kleiba 2y ago

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

Brajeshwar 2y ago
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. ;-)

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

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

ghaff 2y ago
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.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    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.
    - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
      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.

tombert 2y ago

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.

ghaff 2y ago
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.
- tombert 2y ago
  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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jon-wood 2y ago

fnord77 2y ago

My holding pen would just end up overflowing with stuff.

sublinear 2y ago

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

anon35 2y ago
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.
- sublinear 2y ago
  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.
  - maxbond 2y ago
    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.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago

treetalker 2y ago

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.

bubblebeard 2y ago
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!
- loopdoend 2y ago
  A place for everything and everything in its place...
- pipes 2y ago
  Ah yes, same here, my wife stacks stuff in any available free space, anywhere in the house.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    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.
    - bubblebeard 2y ago

paulpauper 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago

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Nadimakthae 2y ago

[flagged]

refurb 2y ago

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.

flysand7 2y ago
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

EGreg 2y ago

How would holding a pen prevent you from losing things?

theqwxas 2y ago
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 https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/pen

placebo 2y ago

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...

margalabargala 2y ago
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.
a_e_k 2y ago
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!
dcminter 2y ago
"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
lazyasciiart 2y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/

aquafox 2y ago

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).

bubblebeard 2y ago
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.
luguenth 2y ago
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 https://youtu.be/-sYZEOftpw4?si=T4btvhTJpfSzA9q2&t=35
NeoTar 2y ago
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.

maxglute 2y ago

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

wodie 2y ago

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.

atoav 2y ago
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.
lazyasciiart 2y ago
This breaks down when there are two of you with different places you would search first.
- kodt 2y ago
  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!
prmoustache 2y ago
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.

canjobear 2y ago

I believe this is called a “junk drawer”

sundvor 2y ago

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 https://findorbit.com/products/orbit-glasses-x exists but that's for Apples only).

pokstad 2y ago

So basically a junk drawer.

bluSCALE4 2y ago

This is a recipe for disaster.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

Also AirTags. My keys, wallet, backpack, briefcase all have AirTags. As long as I can find my phone, I am good.

treflop 2y ago

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.

graposaymaname 2y ago
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.
- loopdoend 2y ago
  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.
  - treflop 2y ago
    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.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    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.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    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.

silisili 2y ago

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.'

duckmysick 2y ago
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.
- silisili 2y ago
  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
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  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.

dools 2y ago

> 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-about-making-your-bed/ https://www.benkophone.com/2018/12/20/theres-nothing-magical...

matrix2003 2y ago
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.
- dools 2y ago
  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.
wiether 2y ago
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!

fmajid 2y ago

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-baskets/?p=1 https://www.reisenthel.com/en/shopping/categories/shopping-b...

Modified3019 2y ago

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

sscarduzio 2y ago

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.

jakepage91 2y ago
Is there even a need for a holding pen if there is an order freak in the house?

gleenn 2y ago

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.

fire_lake 2y ago
I put things in my shoes. Then I remember when it’s time to leave!
- beAbU 2y ago
  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.
2y ago

cranium 2y ago

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), ...

paxcoder 2y ago

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alfiedotwtf 2y ago

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!

andai 2y ago
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.
rigrassm 2y ago
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.
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  > 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

alfiedotwtf 2y ago

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 :)

nytesky 2y ago

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

nytesky 2y ago

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…

kqr 2y ago

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...

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago

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.

wiredfool 2y ago
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.

anonu 2y ago

> 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.

boesboes 2y ago

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

Metacelsus 2y ago

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

yeneek 2y ago

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

mprovost 2y ago

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".

ta988 2y ago
TikTok and ADHD...

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

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.

jdhzzz 2y ago
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.

zuckerma 2y ago

Great idea.

ineedaj0b 2y ago

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.

codazoda 2y ago

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.

neilv 2y ago
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.

deleted 2y ago

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glitchc 2y ago

And when the holding pen overflows, pandemonium ensues.

consf 2y ago

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leashless 2y ago

https://www.westonboxes.com/ 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.

cnees 2y ago

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.

jxramos 2y ago

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

thrwaway1985882 2y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

MezzoDelCammin 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

renewiltord 2y ago

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.

eschneider 2y ago

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.

marcusverus 2y ago

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!

foobarian 2y ago
> 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.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

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

lkbm 2y ago
Junk drawers accumulate homeless items. This is for temporarily holding items which you will move to a different, correct location either daily or weekly.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  I think junk drawers also start out with good intentions.

baxtr 2y ago

Good idea. An image would have helped tremendously.

powersnail 2y ago

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.)

skydhash 2y ago
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.

JTbane 2y ago

>>> 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.

kazinator 2y ago

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.

chrisbrandow 2y ago

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.

doctorhandshake 2y ago
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.
unbalancedevh 2y ago
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.

fudged71 2y ago

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

NovemberWhiskey 2y ago

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.

wakasaka 2y ago

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.

WalterBright 2y ago
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.

meindnoch 2y ago

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

jsdwarf 2y ago

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.

digging 2y ago
> 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.
WalterBright 2y ago
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).
- deleted 2y ago
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emsign 2y ago

What if those holding pens are the rooms?

lencastre 2y ago

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

beryilma 2y ago

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.

uncivilized 2y ago

250 comments as a Hacker News discovers interior design.

swah 2y ago

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/ https://www.instagram.com/p/C8pTP29pk-O/

somastoma 2y ago

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...

rrnechmech 2y ago
> 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