9 ms·

A dot a day keeps the clutter away

585 points by scottlawson 6mo ago

tayo42 6mo ago
I wouldn't want to clean up the dots when I'm done tracking lol I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me
- normie3000 6mo ago
  Don't worry - when you're done tracking it's your children that will clean up.
jmward01 6mo ago
First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this system that come to mind immediately: - The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots and, I think the stated reason for the dots. - The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more. - But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that. So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive. Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes so it works for me. While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey would use than the dot system. I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts I place the most often. I don't quite know what you mean with your question about whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and comparing across years also helps me identify things that were used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year though.
  - jmward01 6mo ago
    I'll give you an example of how the process could be valuable even without the information. A huge amount of doing something is just getting over the initiating energy to start doing something. A trick to help with that is to start with a really low cost task. The point isn't the task, it is that you started which gets you into 'keep doing things' mode. The dots may act as a low cost task and help to get passed the initiating energy. I think there are other things that this could help too. This is a task, although simple, that can help define the phases of projects which could help planning and execution success. This is all just guessing, I'm not a psychologist, but I think there are potentially ways that this is helpful beyond just the data it presents which is a good thing.
  - QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
    > Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive. Decathlon and Zara both have RFID tags in their products. https://sustainability.decathlon.com/product-traceability-and-rfid-technology-at-decathlon https://sustainability.decathlon.com/product-traceability-an... (Decathlon) https://www.inditex.com/itxcomweb/so/en/press/news-detail/7f71fd36-94ec-45fa-a2e6-6837b63f2903/inditex-deploys-rfid-technology-in-its-stores https://www.inditex.com/itxcomweb/so/en/press/news-detail/7f... (Inditex is the parent company of Zara. Link is a press release from 2014.) So if one were to buy all their clothes at Decathlon (clothes for sports and other outdoor activities) and Zara (everyday wear as well as fancier clothing), and found a reader that can read the RFID tags they use, one would save the time needed to add RFID tags to one’s clothes ;) There might be other stores that have RFID tags on all of their products too. I only mention these two in particular because I have purchased products from both of them using their RFID-based self-checkout in their stores and thus seen it first-hand. However, I am not sure if all of the products have the RFID label embedded in the actual fabric or if some or most have the RFID label attached to paper labels that you’d remove before using the clothes. So that would also need to be determined before deciding to replace one’s whole wardrobe with clothes exclusively from these stores.
    - kbaker 6mo ago
      Almost all retail RFID tags are on hanging labels, like with the price, or a sticker on the item. Although I did find one inside a pillow once. A huge number of items at Walmart, Kohls, Target, Academy, Old Navy, and many other stores now (those are just the ones I've seen in store.) Look for the 'EPC' logo, GS1 is the same standards body that controls the UPC barcode numbering. https://www.gs1.org/standards/rfid/guidelines https://www.gs1.org/standards/rfid/guidelines Though - you don't want to use those types for this application, they are too long distance / not selective enough, and the readers are expensive. Buy a big pack of NFC stickers instead, or print up some QR codes.
- jofzar 6mo ago
  Imo NFC tags could be the easiest way of doing the same thing for bigger items, scan it when you use it, log it.
  - pphysch 6mo ago
    Or just a QR code sticker to a URL only accessible from your LAN
    - deadfece 6mo ago
      Homebox seems to be a good way to make that happen, FWIW. I looked at it for when I was moving house and it had way more than I needed. But it does support the QR code printouts.
      - theshrike79 6mo ago
        Didn't homebox have some massive drama too? Stopped development, started, forked, fork stopped and started etc? At least that was my experience when I was looking for an organisation system -and gave up =)
        deadfece 6mo ago
        If it does have an issue, you host all of your own data and you own 100% of the URLs involved on the QR codes. Idk about the drama, I just get stuff done and keep going.
- TGower 6mo ago
  The easiest way would be to setup some cameras and start recording everything. Gemini could already sort that into events you could query. If you have privacy concerns, at the current pace of progress, local LLMs should be up to the task soon if they aren't already.
  - spaceywilly 6mo ago
    Another nice benefit of this would be location tracking. Once you had established the database of tools and the CV setup to recognize them, you could ask the LLM, “where did I last place my Stanley knife”?
- zeckalpha 6mo ago
  I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the cost, you can mount with noatime.
stickfigure 6mo ago
Interesting, but this seems to solve the wrong problem. I already know that the ice cream maker sitting on the shelf hasn't been used in 5 years. The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
- starvit35 6mo ago
  towards the end he talks about this, dots determine how frequent it is used, therefore how close in proximity it should be to his work area. stuff which was dotted rarely or not at all was put into his shed outside, but even then he still had it and used it for a project later on. if you're not going to use your ice cream maker every week, why have it on your kitchen counter, or kitchen shelf, put it away in a cupboard
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  sometimes I see no dots on things that are cool and I have this innate urge to want to hold onto. One example is a Picomotor piezo actuator. It's a really cool piece of technology. I want to believe so badly that I'll use it in a project someday. but after four years and seeing zero dots on it, it's like having concrete evidence PROVING that I'm delusionally optimistic about how useful it is. I can't ignore the reality. the Picomotor is my version of your ice cream maker. the lack of dots gives me the evidence I need to finally donate it to a better home
  - locao 6mo ago
    "a better home": probably someone who also thinks it's cool and also will never use it :)
- fontain 6mo ago
  Determine the cost of owning the ice cream maker per year. For some people, owning something costs nothing and in fact provides value, they find comfort in owning things, used or not. For some people, owning things is a burden, a drain, and owning something unused is painful. An ice cream maker costs maybe $200? How would you feel if you disposed of the ice cream maker and then a week later realized you wanted it? If you want to soften the blow, don’t throw things away: give them away to someone who will use them. I hate owning things, owning an ice cream maker that I never use would weigh on me and I would much rather spend $200 on a new ice cream maker every 5 years (that I give away after a month) than have an unused ice cream maker for 5 years.
ihaveajob 6mo ago
This is neat but my OCD brain is hurting. I suspect a location based sorting, where most-recently-used boxes are near the top, or closer to your workstation, solves the same problem without the visual clutter.
- switchbak 6mo ago
  That's close to what I do - except I use dust. Every ten years I get rid of the ones that have enough dust to make me sneeze. And I put them in the crawl space :)
- dave_universetf 6mo ago
  This is probably just a difference in how your brain and the author's work. A variety of home organizers have told me that people mean different things when they say they want an organized space. Some people want everything precisely labeled and sorted into narrow categories, and hidden away in drawers or closets. Others want everything visible and coarser categories. Each system looks and feels very distressing to brains of the other types. It's especially a problem for people with ADHD, because the "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily socialized as the _only_ way to be organized, but it's also the exact opposite of how (some) ADHD brains want to operate. OTOH the very exposed and "emergent" organization that works for an ADHD brain probably is mild torture to an OCD brain :) For myself, the sorting system in this post looks pretty ideal. All the stuff is right there where I can see it and scan for what I'm after, it explicitly allows for emergent organization where classification happens incrementally over time, and the dots thing has near zero activation energy but still gives me long-term information I can use. It's much better than an electronic or "clean" inventory system precisely because I'll never be able to consistently keep using those, whereas slapping a dot on a box, even on bad brain days I can manage that!
  - switchbak 6mo ago
    > "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily socialized as the _only_ way to be organized In some circles perhaps. I'm more of a fan of Adam Savage's First Order Retrievability - an overly fancy term for a pretty simple concept. There's certainly large swaths of folks that adopt that vs the everything-in-a-drawer approach, especially in workplaces where otherwise it would just cause entirely too much friction for common operations. I give myself a lot of grief for a messy workshop, but it is nice once you realize there's a lot of ways to be organized and it's a very personal process. The important part is to devote a bit of time and energy to it, and to slowly pay down the organizational debt. And to let go of the perfectionism! At the end of the day, if someone doesn't like my open workspace style, they probably don't value working the way I do, and I'm ok with that.
shermantanktop 6mo ago
My low-tech solution to organizing electronic parts is to use shoeboxes, with written labels at the end, and plastic bags inside to organize the various groups of items. They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used much. On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear containers.
  - shermantanktop 6mo ago
    No, I think I prefer it. Less visual noise.
  - bloomingeek 6mo ago
    It does. I have a sizeable ball cap collection, all in labeled shoe boxes. I'll be changing them for plastic bins on my next Ikea Swedish meatball run.
- heyethan 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    IT is still a signal because you only need to look at things with few dots. Maybe that charger is for something that broke years ago and you can get rid of it this time. Meanwhile you don't even need to ask about the boxes of things you use often but don't think of (nor do you confuse them for the boxes of almost the same thing you never use)
shevy-java 6mo ago
Looks like a huge mess really.
samuelknight 6mo ago
This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.
hecanjog 6mo ago
I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat mundane in-between details about your setup the most. (I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)
- dave_universetf 6mo ago
  +1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  thats fair, I appreciate your feedback very much! Initially, I typed out easily two or three times as much text as what made it into the final post, and had to trim and summarize what I wrote down to size. I totally hear what you are saying about generic structure and prose.
  - hecanjog 6mo ago
    I understand -- still, FWIW, I would have enjoyed reading (and maybe partly skimming in sections) the longer version, warts and all. A lot of what I enjoyed most about the article were the in-between details, the LLM-assisted sections felt a bit like fluff in comparison, even though I could squint and imagine the input somewhat?
brandrick 6mo ago
messy, but there is something endearing about the approach
jvanderbot 6mo ago
Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.
- Dansvidania 6mo ago
  I see what you did there
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that make it the hardest?
samlinnfer 6mo ago
I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  > I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind. One product many have at home (if they've got a wife or if they're a woman): nail polish remover. This is a magical tool for it's ubiquitous. Sure, you can go and buy the proper stuff: but this one many already have some at home. It works also should sticky stuff fall from trees on your car's windshield (do not use it on the car paint). It's really miracle stuff. I also "steal" my wife's nail polish itself: I love to put marks on components so I know where they should be plugged. Even on my guns: there are pins that go one side but the other (say the two pins to take apart the lower and upper receiver of many rifles), so I mark them with nail polish from different colors. Cables on motherboard? Color code with nail polish: both on the mobo and on the cable. Now you don't it to attack the plastic of the box: quickly wipe the sticky gum then clean it with some water. Besides that from TFA: > The first thing I did was get rid of every opaque container I owned. Every toolbox, every parts organizer with little pockets, anything I couldn't see through. I saw a friend of mine doing that 25 years ago and immediately adopted that technique.
  - BeetleB 6mo ago
    Goo Gone is the way to go: https://googone.com/original https://googone.com/original
    - mceachen 6mo ago
      Yup. No noxious fumes.
  - squirtle24 6mo ago
    I would add a word of caution before using nail polish remover (which is acetone). Acetone can damage and melt certain plastics. It can cause clear plastic to become cloudy. Using a hair dryer to soften the adhesive, or a bottle of Goo Gone, is often a better alternative for peeling off stickers.
comrade1234 6mo ago
Years ago I had a landlord that had been in the British military in some signal/ntelligence role. After, he made a living of stockpiling and selling obscure but simple chips from china to American military contractors.
nighthawk454 6mo ago
Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is like - presumably some kind of power law shape.
- deepfriedbits 6mo ago
  Kind of an IRL heatmap.
dogscatstrees 6mo ago
Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code persistent memory system?
semiquaver 6mo ago
Hilarious that the box labeled “dots” has so many dots on it.
JKCalhoun 6mo ago
I like this system a lot. I always considered I would do something similar if I owned a used book store. Each year would usher in a new colors. All books acquired that year get that colored dot on the inside page. Some 5 years (or so) on I could easily go through each shelf of books and find the ones that were not moving. These get one last chance (a year?) in a bargain bin before then they go to Goodwill or wherever. Otherwise a used bookstore can remain in a "picked over" and cluttered state.
sudonanohome 6mo ago
A lazy wall of AI slop: > I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale. > Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale. > That's not a failure. That's the system working. I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with stickers 3) remove rarely accessed boxes We need a sponsorblock-style crowdsourced solution against such slop. Meanwhile I'm just blocking offenders' domains on all of my networks
- fgfarben 6mo ago
  Learn how to skim?
  - sudonanohome 6mo ago
    Skimming thru shit doesn't make the end result taste any better. All this terrible "writing" deserves is to be fed to another LLM and summarized into 3 sentences. Because that's all there is to the whole post. Why would the author choose to sloppost in a personal blog is beyond me. Personal blogs used to be a place for posting cool stuff you did in your basement. Now it's just another "personal brand" promotion engine. Hacker news is turning into linkedin, and people are turning into algorithmically entertainable slop-fed cattle. The end is near, I hope
    - twoodfin 6mo ago
      This is the real apocalypse scenario. Not Skynet, but a model trained so well to trigger dopamine hits across the bulk of the human population that our creative muscles totally atrophy. Then we’re the stochastic parrots.
- Karuma 6mo ago
  Yeah, I've been just slowly blocking all these domains, users, etc. But nowadays it's just unbearable. We have already lost this war. And seeing every day this kind of crap at the top of the front page of the websites I used to love, with hundreds of comments of intelligent people not even noticing all this useless AI slop... Very sad future ahead.
paulmooreparks 6mo ago
Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides. Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle. This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.
- mordechai9000 6mo ago
  > the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess More like a FIFO buffer. But you probably don't strictly enforce the rotation - you might still pick a preferred garment over the one on the end, I am guessing. So kind of like a network queue that might prioritize some packets - er, garments - over others.
squirtle24 6mo ago
I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it’s 2 seconds. To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts were used in them? It would likely be a close enough approximation without the overhead of the dot system, and might be good for documenting the project anyway. Plus the dot system doesn’t have a lot of granularity or flexibility, and it relies on the categories being static. Let’s say a box of resistors grows so big you want to split it into two subcategories; reallocating the existing dots correctly is now quite difficult. Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  it isn't quite true that the categories are static, in fact, I've changed them a fair bit as I've reorganized containers. Sometimes I realize that two different containers should really be one container, and when that happens, I'll write down the sum of the dots on the new box label and continue it, so I don't lose the information. Less often, I'll take some parts out of a box and put them in a different one, accepting the loss of partial information. But I generally do that because I notice a subset of parts doesn't really belong in the box, and so the dots weren't really conveying information about those migrated parts anyways. It's more fluid than you might think at first.
WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
This sounds great, except: how do you know if you've already labelled a box today or not? How do you prevent double, triple, or quadruple labelling? BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for sharing!
- scottlawson 6mo ago
  short term memory, but I'll admit it isn't perfect and sometimes I'm pretty sure that I might be double labelling. But that's okay because even an occasional mistaken double label is still a partially valid signal that the box is being used a lot.
ANarrativeApe 6mo ago
This also works for kitchens. What is most interesting is that it begins to impact what one buys. It turns out that, after a decade or so, one can predict which 'must have' gadget or appliance is actually just a very seductive dotless wonder.
- frantathefranta 6mo ago
  Honestly I think kitchens have way less stuff than a lab like this and following Alton Brown's advice of avoiding "unitaskers" will basically guarantee you don't get overwhelmed.
  - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
    Chefs tend to be gear addicts in my experience. The unitasker advice is also a bit difficult for inexperienced people to follow, from what I've seen. A stand mixer is a great multitasker on paper, whereas a speed peeler does exactly one thing. Yet the latter will be used massively more often than the former in most kitchens. Probably the most used tool in my kitchen (after knives and cutting boards) is the kettle, another unitasker.
    - ghaff 6mo ago
      I generally agree with that and there are some small kitchen appliances I don’t use often but when I need them I need them. Funnily an electric drip coffee maker is one of the things I somewhat regret replacing after a kitchen fire but I think insurance and may be handy for company at some point.
rakeshd 6mo ago
I've found that a simple "done" list for tasks each day is surprisingly effective for keeping my own digital clutter manageable. This post's approach seems like a good visual way to track that.
PopAlongKid 6mo ago
>Time turns out to be a great universal organizer, just like how a photo collection is wonderfully organized by date more than by any other single dimension. I have found this same thing to be true. I even tell my family that if for some reason they need to access all our critical info on my computer, the most recent files in each directory are almost always the most interesting ones.
nine_k 6mo ago
This is brilliant. Upon reading this, I remembered that the original kanban system in the 1960s at Japanese car factories used physical tags attached to physical parts [1]. Low-tech with a right process around it works wonders. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards)
s0rce 6mo ago
I also really like standard size clear boxes. I buy cases of smaller ones for my lab at work. They all get used up quick.
refulgentis 6mo ago
"These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares." - bravo!!!!!!!
codazoda 6mo ago
I also use clear boxes, called “shoe boxes” at my local big box store. I started 8-years ago, when I devoted a closet in a new house to them. They’re now everywhere. I often answer a lot of questions with, “in the box in the closet”. Even my guests don’t need more info than that to find what they’re looking for. I have some I don’t think I use. I’m going to adopt this idea. Instead of dots, however, I think I’ll just use a pen/pencil. Maybe I’ll print space for the marks on my labels. I just purchased a cheap thermal sticker printer that I may use instead of my label maker. But handwriting labels would be fine too.
zeckalpha 6mo ago
I use a variant of access tracking by treating things like stacks. My bins are stacked like in the article's photos. When I am done with a bin, it goes on the top. Least recently accessed bin is on the bottom. I need to get better about cache eviction though. This also works with clothing on a rack. Put clean clothes on the left. Choose what to wear from the right. Eventually, the things you don't like wearing will all be on the right. This also happens to sort clothes by season.
Liftyee 6mo ago
Genius. I need to try this for organising my endless boxes of random parts, some of which I never use. At some point I believed that eventually once I accumulated a critical mass of parts projects would spontaneously appear, but there's some law of the universe that says you always are missing at least one part. For small common components (diode, resistor, LED) though I prefer the traditional wall-mounted array of trays for sorting by values. Also, my commonly used tools and supplies (soldering, cutting...) live in other wall mounted open top bins (like the stereotypical "mechanic's shop" kind that hook on at the rear). I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only the "Really Useful" stacking boxes. Clear, robust, and the different sizes have lips to stack and tile on each other. Who knew that a simple storage box could have an ecosystem.
- Steve44 6mo ago
  > I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only the "Really Useful" stacking boxes. Same here. I've been using them at home and work for years and they are absolutely fantastic; we've probably got well over 100 and it's rare for one a year to break and even then it's usually just the lid. I think they've been very clever in how they manage their range. I generally use the 12L and 18L boxes, but I don't need to remember any dimensions because a different profile box would say be 11L or 19L. All you need to do is remember the capacity and it'll be the right matching box.
Dnguyen 6mo ago
This is a preview to show HN? I made an app that help me keep track of my home inventory. I try to keep it as simple as possible so I can stick to the process. The app keeps track of containers and items. Just like a file system, containers are folders and items are files. Of course you can have containers within a container. For example, my house has a garage. In it I have a rack of 5 rows by 7 columns of 27 gallon bins (https://www.tameru.app/tote-rack-planner https://www.tameru.app/tote-rack-planner). One bin has my power tools such as drills, router, bits, etc. To inventory a bin, I either scan the barcode of the item if it has one. Ninety nine percent of the time the result will fill in the title, description, and picture. If there's no barcode, then taking a picture and AI will give a pretty good title and description. There are other attributes you can have, but just a title and description from the scan is all that is needed. Once the items are in the system, I can search with keywords based on the title, description, notes, etc. If the same items are spread across multiple locations, they will show up in the result. Selecting one will show me the breadcrumb to the location: Garage->Tote Rack->Row4Col2->Corded Drill. I can select certain containers or items to share with different groups. My siblings can see my mitre saw, my friends can see my camping laterns. The app has a check out/check in mechanism. It keeps a historical track of who checked out, when, how many, and when they intend to return the items. Similarly, when checking in items, who, when, quantity, and condition returned. The history report is similar to the dot system in the article. I can get a list of what I haven't used more than, say two years, and consider selling or donating. The side effect is now I know what I have so I'm less likely to buy duplicates. There are many other features, but I'll have to wait for a show HN when my app is approved in the stores. I just want to share how I organize and declutter. Hopefully it resonates with others, like this dot system.
- tim-fan 6mo ago
  Hey me too, I also have a DIY inventory system, maybe yours is more developed. But I also had the concept of items for n arbitrarily nested containers. I also track historical movements to see which items are never used. Recently I've moved towards everything being stored in numbered bags, which are hung in order on a line for O(N) retrieval. For storage it tells you which bag to put it in, for retrieval it tells you where it is. I'm thinking more and more the optimal system will have a physical as well as digital component. Also, I feel this system would be great for shared workshops at work places and maker spaces etc. I was just rummaging through our lab at work today, there's so many parts in the lab no one would know about, if it was inventorised with a good integrated (AI?) search function the equipment could be much more useful/available. https://github.com/tim-fan/hordor https://github.com/tim-fan/hordor
taftster 6mo ago
I need this for the junk in my life. Like, did I even use such-and-such thing in the past decade? If not, toss it out (ideally to a reuse store). I'm trying to get to a place where I think of all my purchases as rentals. That it's OK, if justified, that a tool served its purpose one time, and if it doesn't get used again or goes to the donation center, I have received the benefit. Something that can be reused is then just bonus. If not reused by me, then at least, someone else can benefit from the good. Switching my mental thinking to "renting" instead of buying items has help me be able to get rid of items which I haven't used in some time, reducing my footprint. I have a long way to go, but I come from a family of clutterbugs and it's just kind of baked in. Dots would be useful in my scenario just to capture utility of everyday things.
- assimpleaspossi 6mo ago
  Within 24 hours, whatever you threw out and can no longer retrieve, you will find a need and its replacement will cost an arm and a leg.
  - duckmysick 6mo ago
    That's why you do a "soft delete" and move things from your main area to out-of-sight closet/attic/storage unit. A cold storage, as the OP called it. Then clean it once a year (or when you need more space) and get rid of things you haven't used. I regretted throwing out a thing like that maybe once. Don't do it to "insurance" items like a fire extinguisher or a drain snake. Now, what happened to me more often was: losing a thing, doing an extensive search for it, not finding it, buying a replacement, and then finding the original item the day after.
    - theshrike79 6mo ago
      We did this when we were moving. We rented a storage unit, took all of our stuff that wasn't immediately in use there. Then we did the main move (a LOT less stuff to move) and kept the storage unit for a bit over a year, going there to grab stuff as needed. After that we sold, donated and/or threw away pretty much everything in there. So much useless crap we were bringing along "just because".
tshaddox 6mo ago
For me, the hard part isn’t remembering how many times I’ve used a container or item in the last month or year. The hard part isn’t simply dedicating the time to comb through a bunch of stuff and get rid of the unused stuff.
- _HMCB_ 6mo ago
  The second sentence should read “is” not “isn’t?”
- ghaff 6mo ago
  I sorta know the stuff I use and don’t use. Had a kitchen fire last year and had to get the whole house emptied out for smoke damage mitigation. I’ve thrown out, donated, or recycled the better part of two large dumpsters worth of stuff. For me it’s about getting into the mode of going through and parting with stuff.
  - LoganDark 6mo ago
    I've found it helps me to take photos of everything I'm parting with.
- bubble_instr 6mo ago
  Well, what is the hard part, then?
- theshrike79 6mo ago
  But wouldn't this help? You have 10 containers, slap a marker on one every time you take something out of it. 12 months later you have 2 containers that haven't been touched (zero stickers). -> 80% reduction of the amount of stuff to comb through to find unused/useless cruft.
  - tshaddox 6mo ago
    If your decision procedure is so simple that you always throw out any container with zero dots and always keep any container with non-zero dots, then perhaps it saves a small amount of time. But that's a pretty coarse decision procedure, both because there might be an item that's very important but gets used less than once per year and because there might be a container that is 99% full of unused stuff but happens to have 1 item that gets used once a year.
apricot13 6mo ago
in my own organisation quest I found similar results, my "stick stuff to other stuff" box (it's real name has more swear words!) is the box with glue, tape, scissors, string, glue dots etc I also keep a pair of scissors in there since there's no reason to look in two places at once. my collection isn't quite the same categories since it's a hash of craft, electronics, DIY and just general household stuff so my categories are more about size and actions vs likelihood of use. I have "very tiny things", "smart devices", "covers, cases and stands", "cables modern", "cables ancient", "adaptors & extenders". the best two boxes we've ever implemented: "gribbins: known use" "gribbins: unknown use" for the leftover bits at the end of a project or the spares for something you bought online all labelled in the known box and thrown into three unknown box. if your looking for something in our house its in one of these two boxes! sometimes things are sub-bagged and labelled in IKEA sandwich bags because free colour coding others it's a free for all because we use it often
Eaglesight02 6mo ago
Wouldn't having multiple dots on the box defeat the purpose of it being see through to reveal it's contents? This would be especially true if the boxes are stacked and you would need to look at them from the side..
Ajakks 6mo ago
Small direction limited NFC Tags and the right NFC Ring might render this system effortless - tags maybe placed under the lid with a metal back to limit accidental scans. I like the dots, they are visual, you can see at a glance - standing in the lab. You could graph your digital data of box usage in the lab over time from home. I understand you've attained desired function and have no reason to do that. I'm not picking on you - I'm seeing this type of content all over and I also understand why we are retreating from digital spaces... but, This is a clever "life hack" - partly bc it isn't reliant on any technology and that is clearly stated -> very functional but almost anti-tech, being such a hit on HN is actually quite interesting.
jimnotgym 6mo ago
Dots are very common in real professional warehouses. They get added every time it is counted on a stocktake. Even with full electronic control, ERP, Barcodes etc. If you are auditing the count you can see everything was counted. If you find an old dusty box you know why it is not in the system. If you are looking for slow moving stock, find the ones with lots of dots. Even with electronic systems it is not uncommon to find rotation (First In First Out) is not working. Now I'm thinking about the boxes of electronic components in my own garage. Clear boxes, labelled on the front, bags inside, just like the article... and untouched year after year! It just feels so good when a psu breaks and you pull a capacitor and replace it with one you had already on hand...
- HeyLaughingBoy 6mo ago
  ... only to discover that the electrolyte dried up a decade ago :-)
  - jimnotgym 6mo ago
    I was lucky that time, but indeed. A bit like the tons of computer hardware I used to hoard, only to find it was always the wrong form factor, the wrong cables etc.
flir 6mo ago
As the article mentions using standardized clear bins, which really do help: In the UK I settled on Really Useful Boxes. Not their new cheaper range, the chunky straight-sided ones. Transparent, they don't go brittle in a few years (I guess they will eventually), the front-opening ones are handy if you're racking them, and you've got some guarantee you can go back and buy more in a couple of years. I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent £1k on RUBs over the years, but they really were worth it. The only problem I've found is that they don't have overhanging lips, so you can't build floating bin shelving (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYX50-Vw9AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYX50-Vw9AQ) for them.
- tsak 6mo ago
  Second that. Our garage is full of their 50L boxes with the XL lid, perfectly fitting those industrial shelves. Very versatile and long lasting. Even after nearly ten years, they look pretty much the same, and we live in harsh climate near the coast.
  - flir 6mo ago
    My oldest ones (about a decade, same as you) are a touch more yellow than the ones I bought last year. I still think that, kept away from UV, they'll probably outlast me.
    - koralatov 6mo ago
      Same. I have one that’s about 15 years old, lived in a cupboard its whole life, and it’s slightly yellowed but still going strong.
- animal531 6mo ago
  Although looking at his, several of them are so covered in dots as to be opaque anyway. I'd have maybe used different colored dots, e.g. N blue, then remove them and place 1 green etc. as a counter and so on.
- tristramb 6mo ago
  Just behind me where I am sitting at the moment I have 21 RUBs containing my collection of about 42000 pinned out flies (mostly). The RUBs are stacked in and on top of bookshelves. I seem to remember that you could buy a rack to hold them but it looked too flimsy for what I wanted. The flies are pinned out onto plastic foam sheets in small clear plastic presentation boxes, 48 of which fit in each 12 litre RUB. I still have to properly identify about half of the flies. Photos of the presentation boxes and CSV files of the identifications are backed up to https://github.com/tristrambrelstaff/flies https://github.com/tristrambrelstaff/flies. RUBs have played a significant part in enabling me to manage all this.
randusername 6mo ago
I do a similar thing for books. A lone dot on the spine means I read it carefully enough to take notes on it. I like to write commentary in the margins, so the dots help me know which books are "devalued" and which are fine to donate or loan out to others. Multiple dots are an indication I return to a book often. Each time I re-read I take notes in a different ink color and try to record the date in that ink color in the front matter.
- coldpie 6mo ago
  > I like to write commentary in the margins Oh man, tangent into one of my favorite library book experiences. I checked out a sci-fi book at the library. It was good I was enjoying it. Then a few chapters in, I found a previous library patron had written nit-picky notes in the margin, poking holes in the author's fictional science tech explanations. And these weren't little one-word exclamations, they were whole sentences written in perfectly legible, almost impossibly-tiny pencil handwriting. Some of them even had little drawn diagrams! It went through the whole book, every hundred pages or so some little margin notes about how such-and-such sci-fi babble didn't reflect how space-time actually works or whatever. It was a hoot, a little bonus on top of the book itself.
  - randusername 6mo ago
    I had a similar experience with a second-hand copy of House of Leaves [0]. This was a special treat because the book itself already uses copious footnotes and cross-references from fictional characters to create a maze. And now a real person added to the effect by trying to make sense of it themselves. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves
    - darth_aardvark 6mo ago
      You obviously need to add your own footnotes trying to make sense of those footnotes, then anonymously donate it to a used bookstore.
l00sed 6mo ago
Reminds me of Yoyoi Kusama's projects https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/obsessed-polka-dots https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/obsess...
Vinnl 6mo ago
I think this is the first time I read something online where an organised person has a system that works well, but it doesn't look good, haha.
endeavour 6mo ago
Brilliant. So now you have no clutter but your office looks like it has chicken pox.
- xpe 6mo ago
  And the haphazard bin stacking (see photograph) is a knolling knightmare
noisy_boy 6mo ago
To those saying it doesn't look good, why not make the dots like levels? Say you have only 5 colors: green, blue, orange, purple, red. 1st year: green 2nd year: replace the green dot with blue 3rd year: replace the blue dot with orange 4th year: replace the orange dot with purple 5th year: replace the purple dot with red 6th year: red + add green dot 7th year: red + replace the green dot with blue Even if you use a box for 10 years, you will have max two dots. Sure, granularity is only yearly. An alternative refinement is to continue with the current system but collapse all the 1st year dots with a single next year's dot.
- OhNoNotAgain_99 6mo ago
  [dead]
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Because you need to do something yearly which is tedious and so a task you are likely to postpone. Does it really matter if the green dot on the box is from this year or 10 years ago? The important signal is the box with the red dot hasn't been touched in 9 years so if you need some space that is a candidate for getting rid of.
OhNoNotAgain_99 6mo ago
[dead]
sublinear 6mo ago
I agree with the clear boxes. I bought a ton of them in bulk from amazon a few years ago. I have yet to deploy even half of them. I don't know about the dots, though. These boxes are so flimsy that I immediately know which ones are used most often by how beat up they've become in less than a year. :)
dbgrman 6mo ago
Extremely fascinating and a relatable DIY system. I love the analogy to dashboards.
hermitcrab 6mo ago
But is he actually throwing anything away, based on the lack of dots? Because that is the hard bit!
scrivna 6mo ago
What’s the point? Unless you are going to ruthlessly throw stuff away you’re still just accumulating things, tracking it doesn’t make the issue of unused clutter go away. Sure you move some stuff to a cupboard further away but it’s not difficult to intuit most of this stuff, and now you have a mess of stickers
matevz_smallPMS 6mo ago
[dead]
a2dam 6mo ago
I do nearly this exact thing with these shoeboxes, so you can pull them out from the front and have enough collapsed in storage to always have more on hand: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T6TC4FW https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T6TC4FW
lenerdenator 6mo ago
It took every ounce of concentration in my ADHD-riddled head to read that without stopping, but I'm glad I did. I have too much stuff in my place and need a system to start dealing with it. Classifying what actually needs to stay could help.
deleted 6mo ago
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kashunstva 6mo ago
I feel as if this is solving a problem I don’t have, at least not yet. My issue is that I’m contemplating building something and I’m sitting ordering from DigiKey and I can’t recall if I have a certain part. For example I have way too many 74xx1G14 in various SMD packages because I haven’t recalled my inventory. I finally spent much of the winter cataloguing everything in PartKeepr. Each storage area in the lab has a designated named area. Akro-Mils 64 drawer cabinets are named by letter then row and column. It ends up being a RAM-like system rather than categorically organized. SMD parts are removed from their tapes and go into AideTek 144 cell boxes. I never order anything now without checking the PartKeepr db.
throwawaytea 6mo ago
I use the Costco black and yellow bins in the garage. Have probably 24 of them. I put a strip of yellow or blue painters tape on it, and write with a sharpee a general description of the box. Might just add another piece of tape to add marks for usage. Peeling dots would kill me.

585 points by scottlawson 6mo ago

I wouldn't want to clean up the dots when I'm done tracking lol I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me

normie3000 6mo ago
Don't worry - when you're done tracking it's your children that will clean up.

jmward01 6mo ago

First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this system that come to mind immediately: - The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots and, I think the stated reason for the dots. - The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more. - But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that. So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.

scottlawson 6mo ago
I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive. Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes so it works for me. While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey would use than the dot system. I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts I place the most often. I don't quite know what you mean with your question about whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and comparing across years also helps me identify things that were used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year though.
- jmward01 6mo ago
  I'll give you an example of how the process could be valuable even without the information. A huge amount of doing something is just getting over the initiating energy to start doing something. A trick to help with that is to start with a really low cost task. The point isn't the task, it is that you started which gets you into 'keep doing things' mode. The dots may act as a low cost task and help to get passed the initiating energy. I think there are other things that this could help too. This is a task, although simple, that can help define the phases of projects which could help planning and execution success. This is all just guessing, I'm not a psychologist, but I think there are potentially ways that this is helpful beyond just the data it presents which is a good thing.
- QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
  > Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive. Decathlon and Zara both have RFID tags in their products. https://sustainability.decathlon.com/product-traceability-and-rfid-technology-at-decathlon https://sustainability.decathlon.com/product-traceability-an... (Decathlon) https://www.inditex.com/itxcomweb/so/en/press/news-detail/7f71fd36-94ec-45fa-a2e6-6837b63f2903/inditex-deploys-rfid-technology-in-its-stores https://www.inditex.com/itxcomweb/so/en/press/news-detail/7f... (Inditex is the parent company of Zara. Link is a press release from 2014.) So if one were to buy all their clothes at Decathlon (clothes for sports and other outdoor activities) and Zara (everyday wear as well as fancier clothing), and found a reader that can read the RFID tags they use, one would save the time needed to add RFID tags to one’s clothes ;) There might be other stores that have RFID tags on all of their products too. I only mention these two in particular because I have purchased products from both of them using their RFID-based self-checkout in their stores and thus seen it first-hand. However, I am not sure if all of the products have the RFID label embedded in the actual fabric or if some or most have the RFID label attached to paper labels that you’d remove before using the clothes. So that would also need to be determined before deciding to replace one’s whole wardrobe with clothes exclusively from these stores.
  - kbaker 6mo ago
    Almost all retail RFID tags are on hanging labels, like with the price, or a sticker on the item. Although I did find one inside a pillow once. A huge number of items at Walmart, Kohls, Target, Academy, Old Navy, and many other stores now (those are just the ones I've seen in store.) Look for the 'EPC' logo, GS1 is the same standards body that controls the UPC barcode numbering. https://www.gs1.org/standards/rfid/guidelines https://www.gs1.org/standards/rfid/guidelines Though - you don't want to use those types for this application, they are too long distance / not selective enough, and the readers are expensive. Buy a big pack of NFC stickers instead, or print up some QR codes.
jofzar 6mo ago
Imo NFC tags could be the easiest way of doing the same thing for bigger items, scan it when you use it, log it.
- pphysch 6mo ago
  Or just a QR code sticker to a URL only accessible from your LAN
  - deadfece 6mo ago
    Homebox seems to be a good way to make that happen, FWIW. I looked at it for when I was moving house and it had way more than I needed. But it does support the QR code printouts.
    - theshrike79 6mo ago
      Didn't homebox have some massive drama too? Stopped development, started, forked, fork stopped and started etc? At least that was my experience when I was looking for an organisation system -and gave up =)
      - deadfece 6mo ago
        If it does have an issue, you host all of your own data and you own 100% of the URLs involved on the QR codes. Idk about the drama, I just get stuff done and keep going.
TGower 6mo ago
The easiest way would be to setup some cameras and start recording everything. Gemini could already sort that into events you could query. If you have privacy concerns, at the current pace of progress, local LLMs should be up to the task soon if they aren't already.
- spaceywilly 6mo ago
  Another nice benefit of this would be location tracking. Once you had established the database of tools and the CV setup to recognize them, you could ask the LLM, “where did I last place my Stanley knife”?
zeckalpha 6mo ago
I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the cost, you can mount with noatime.

stickfigure 6mo ago

Interesting, but this seems to solve the wrong problem. I already know that the ice cream maker sitting on the shelf hasn't been used in 5 years. The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?

starvit35 6mo ago
towards the end he talks about this, dots determine how frequent it is used, therefore how close in proximity it should be to his work area. stuff which was dotted rarely or not at all was put into his shed outside, but even then he still had it and used it for a project later on. if you're not going to use your ice cream maker every week, why have it on your kitchen counter, or kitchen shelf, put it away in a cupboard
scottlawson 6mo ago
sometimes I see no dots on things that are cool and I have this innate urge to want to hold onto. One example is a Picomotor piezo actuator. It's a really cool piece of technology. I want to believe so badly that I'll use it in a project someday. but after four years and seeing zero dots on it, it's like having concrete evidence PROVING that I'm delusionally optimistic about how useful it is. I can't ignore the reality. the Picomotor is my version of your ice cream maker. the lack of dots gives me the evidence I need to finally donate it to a better home
- locao 6mo ago
  "a better home": probably someone who also thinks it's cool and also will never use it :)
fontain 6mo ago
Determine the cost of owning the ice cream maker per year. For some people, owning something costs nothing and in fact provides value, they find comfort in owning things, used or not. For some people, owning things is a burden, a drain, and owning something unused is painful. An ice cream maker costs maybe $200? How would you feel if you disposed of the ice cream maker and then a week later realized you wanted it? If you want to soften the blow, don’t throw things away: give them away to someone who will use them. I hate owning things, owning an ice cream maker that I never use would weigh on me and I would much rather spend $200 on a new ice cream maker every 5 years (that I give away after a month) than have an unused ice cream maker for 5 years.

ihaveajob 6mo ago

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

switchbak 6mo ago
That's close to what I do - except I use dust. Every ten years I get rid of the ones that have enough dust to make me sneeze. And I put them in the crawl space :)
dave_universetf 6mo ago
This is probably just a difference in how your brain and the author's work. A variety of home organizers have told me that people mean different things when they say they want an organized space. Some people want everything precisely labeled and sorted into narrow categories, and hidden away in drawers or closets. Others want everything visible and coarser categories. Each system looks and feels very distressing to brains of the other types. It's especially a problem for people with ADHD, because the "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily socialized as the _only_ way to be organized, but it's also the exact opposite of how (some) ADHD brains want to operate. OTOH the very exposed and "emergent" organization that works for an ADHD brain probably is mild torture to an OCD brain :) For myself, the sorting system in this post looks pretty ideal. All the stuff is right there where I can see it and scan for what I'm after, it explicitly allows for emergent organization where classification happens incrementally over time, and the dots thing has near zero activation energy but still gives me long-term information I can use. It's much better than an electronic or "clean" inventory system precisely because I'll never be able to consistently keep using those, whereas slapping a dot on a box, even on bad brain days I can manage that!
- switchbak 6mo ago
  > "very sorted and hidden" mode of organizing is heavily socialized as the _only_ way to be organized In some circles perhaps. I'm more of a fan of Adam Savage's First Order Retrievability - an overly fancy term for a pretty simple concept. There's certainly large swaths of folks that adopt that vs the everything-in-a-drawer approach, especially in workplaces where otherwise it would just cause entirely too much friction for common operations. I give myself a lot of grief for a messy workshop, but it is nice once you realize there's a lot of ways to be organized and it's a very personal process. The important part is to devote a bit of time and energy to it, and to slowly pay down the organizational debt. And to let go of the perfectionism! At the end of the day, if someone doesn't like my open workspace style, they probably don't value working the way I do, and I'm ok with that.

shermantanktop 6mo ago

My low-tech solution to organizing electronic parts is to use shoeboxes, with written labels at the end, and plastic bags inside to organize the various groups of items. They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used much. On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.

scottlawson 6mo ago
shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear containers.
- shermantanktop 6mo ago
  No, I think I prefer it. Less visual noise.
- bloomingeek 6mo ago
  It does. I have a sizeable ball cap collection, all in labeled shoe boxes. I'll be changing them for plastic bins on my next Ikea Swedish meatball run.
heyethan 6mo ago
[flagged]
- bluGill 6mo ago
  IT is still a signal because you only need to look at things with few dots. Maybe that charger is for something that broke years ago and you can get rid of it this time. Meanwhile you don't even need to ask about the boxes of things you use often but don't think of (nor do you confuse them for the boxes of almost the same thing you never use)

shevy-java 6mo ago

Looks like a huge mess really.

samuelknight 6mo ago

This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.

hecanjog 6mo ago

I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat mundane in-between details about your setup the most. (I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)

dave_universetf 6mo ago
+1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.
scottlawson 6mo ago
thats fair, I appreciate your feedback very much! Initially, I typed out easily two or three times as much text as what made it into the final post, and had to trim and summarize what I wrote down to size. I totally hear what you are saying about generic structure and prose.
- hecanjog 6mo ago
  I understand -- still, FWIW, I would have enjoyed reading (and maybe partly skimming in sections) the longer version, warts and all. A lot of what I enjoyed most about the article were the in-between details, the LLM-assisted sections felt a bit like fluff in comparison, even though I could squint and imagine the input somewhat?

brandrick 6mo ago

messy, but there is something endearing about the approach

jvanderbot 6mo ago

Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.

Dansvidania 6mo ago
I see what you did there
scottlawson 6mo ago
since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that make it the hardest?

samlinnfer 6mo ago

I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.

TacticalCoder 6mo ago
> I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind. One product many have at home (if they've got a wife or if they're a woman): nail polish remover. This is a magical tool for it's ubiquitous. Sure, you can go and buy the proper stuff: but this one many already have some at home. It works also should sticky stuff fall from trees on your car's windshield (do not use it on the car paint). It's really miracle stuff. I also "steal" my wife's nail polish itself: I love to put marks on components so I know where they should be plugged. Even on my guns: there are pins that go one side but the other (say the two pins to take apart the lower and upper receiver of many rifles), so I mark them with nail polish from different colors. Cables on motherboard? Color code with nail polish: both on the mobo and on the cable. Now you don't it to attack the plastic of the box: quickly wipe the sticky gum then clean it with some water. Besides that from TFA: > The first thing I did was get rid of every opaque container I owned. Every toolbox, every parts organizer with little pockets, anything I couldn't see through. I saw a friend of mine doing that 25 years ago and immediately adopted that technique.
- BeetleB 6mo ago
  Goo Gone is the way to go: https://googone.com/original https://googone.com/original
  - mceachen 6mo ago
    Yup. No noxious fumes.
- squirtle24 6mo ago
  I would add a word of caution before using nail polish remover (which is acetone). Acetone can damage and melt certain plastics. It can cause clear plastic to become cloudy. Using a hair dryer to soften the adhesive, or a bottle of Goo Gone, is often a better alternative for peeling off stickers.

comrade1234 6mo ago

Years ago I had a landlord that had been in the British military in some signal/ntelligence role. After, he made a living of stockpiling and selling obscure but simple chips from china to American military contractors.

nighthawk454 6mo ago

Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is like - presumably some kind of power law shape.

deepfriedbits 6mo ago
Kind of an IRL heatmap.

dogscatstrees 6mo ago

Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code persistent memory system?

semiquaver 6mo ago

Hilarious that the box labeled “dots” has so many dots on it.

JKCalhoun 6mo ago

I like this system a lot. I always considered I would do something similar if I owned a used book store. Each year would usher in a new colors. All books acquired that year get that colored dot on the inside page. Some 5 years (or so) on I could easily go through each shelf of books and find the ones that were not moving. These get one last chance (a year?) in a bargain bin before then they go to Goodwill or wherever. Otherwise a used bookstore can remain in a "picked over" and cluttered state.

sudonanohome 6mo ago

A lazy wall of AI slop: > I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale. > Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale. > That's not a failure. That's the system working. I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with stickers 3) remove rarely accessed boxes We need a sponsorblock-style crowdsourced solution against such slop. Meanwhile I'm just blocking offenders' domains on all of my networks

fgfarben 6mo ago
Learn how to skim?
- sudonanohome 6mo ago
  Skimming thru shit doesn't make the end result taste any better. All this terrible "writing" deserves is to be fed to another LLM and summarized into 3 sentences. Because that's all there is to the whole post. Why would the author choose to sloppost in a personal blog is beyond me. Personal blogs used to be a place for posting cool stuff you did in your basement. Now it's just another "personal brand" promotion engine. Hacker news is turning into linkedin, and people are turning into algorithmically entertainable slop-fed cattle. The end is near, I hope
  - twoodfin 6mo ago
    This is the real apocalypse scenario. Not Skynet, but a model trained so well to trigger dopamine hits across the bulk of the human population that our creative muscles totally atrophy. Then we’re the stochastic parrots.
Karuma 6mo ago
Yeah, I've been just slowly blocking all these domains, users, etc. But nowadays it's just unbearable. We have already lost this war. And seeing every day this kind of crap at the top of the front page of the websites I used to love, with hundreds of comments of intelligent people not even noticing all this useless AI slop... Very sad future ahead.

paulmooreparks 6mo ago

Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides. Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle. This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.

mordechai9000 6mo ago
> the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess More like a FIFO buffer. But you probably don't strictly enforce the rotation - you might still pick a preferred garment over the one on the end, I am guessing. So kind of like a network queue that might prioritize some packets - er, garments - over others.

squirtle24 6mo ago

I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it’s 2 seconds. To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts were used in them? It would likely be a close enough approximation without the overhead of the dot system, and might be good for documenting the project anyway. Plus the dot system doesn’t have a lot of granularity or flexibility, and it relies on the categories being static. Let’s say a box of resistors grows so big you want to split it into two subcategories; reallocating the existing dots correctly is now quite difficult. Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.

scottlawson 6mo ago
it isn't quite true that the categories are static, in fact, I've changed them a fair bit as I've reorganized containers. Sometimes I realize that two different containers should really be one container, and when that happens, I'll write down the sum of the dots on the new box label and continue it, so I don't lose the information. Less often, I'll take some parts out of a box and put them in a different one, accepting the loss of partial information. But I generally do that because I notice a subset of parts doesn't really belong in the box, and so the dots weren't really conveying information about those migrated parts anyways. It's more fluid than you might think at first.

WhyNotHugo 6mo ago

This sounds great, except: how do you know if you've already labelled a box today or not? How do you prevent double, triple, or quadruple labelling? BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for sharing!

scottlawson 6mo ago
short term memory, but I'll admit it isn't perfect and sometimes I'm pretty sure that I might be double labelling. But that's okay because even an occasional mistaken double label is still a partially valid signal that the box is being used a lot.

ANarrativeApe 6mo ago

This also works for kitchens. What is most interesting is that it begins to impact what one buys. It turns out that, after a decade or so, one can predict which 'must have' gadget or appliance is actually just a very seductive dotless wonder.

frantathefranta 6mo ago
Honestly I think kitchens have way less stuff than a lab like this and following Alton Brown's advice of avoiding "unitaskers" will basically guarantee you don't get overwhelmed.
- AlotOfReading 6mo ago
  Chefs tend to be gear addicts in my experience. The unitasker advice is also a bit difficult for inexperienced people to follow, from what I've seen. A stand mixer is a great multitasker on paper, whereas a speed peeler does exactly one thing. Yet the latter will be used massively more often than the former in most kitchens. Probably the most used tool in my kitchen (after knives and cutting boards) is the kettle, another unitasker.
  - ghaff 6mo ago
    I generally agree with that and there are some small kitchen appliances I don’t use often but when I need them I need them. Funnily an electric drip coffee maker is one of the things I somewhat regret replacing after a kitchen fire but I think insurance and may be handy for company at some point.

rakeshd 6mo ago

I've found that a simple "done" list for tasks each day is surprisingly effective for keeping my own digital clutter manageable. This post's approach seems like a good visual way to track that.

PopAlongKid 6mo ago

>Time turns out to be a great universal organizer, just like how a photo collection is wonderfully organized by date more than by any other single dimension. I have found this same thing to be true. I even tell my family that if for some reason they need to access all our critical info on my computer, the most recent files in each directory are almost always the most interesting ones.

nine_k 6mo ago

This is brilliant. Upon reading this, I remembered that the original kanban system in the 1960s at Japanese car factories used physical tags attached to physical parts [1]. Low-tech with a right process around it works wonders. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban#Kanban_(cards)

s0rce 6mo ago

I also really like standard size clear boxes. I buy cases of smaller ones for my lab at work. They all get used up quick.

refulgentis 6mo ago

"These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares." - bravo!!!!!!!

codazoda 6mo ago

I also use clear boxes, called “shoe boxes” at my local big box store. I started 8-years ago, when I devoted a closet in a new house to them. They’re now everywhere. I often answer a lot of questions with, “in the box in the closet”. Even my guests don’t need more info than that to find what they’re looking for. I have some I don’t think I use. I’m going to adopt this idea. Instead of dots, however, I think I’ll just use a pen/pencil. Maybe I’ll print space for the marks on my labels. I just purchased a cheap thermal sticker printer that I may use instead of my label maker. But handwriting labels would be fine too.

zeckalpha 6mo ago

I use a variant of access tracking by treating things like stacks. My bins are stacked like in the article's photos. When I am done with a bin, it goes on the top. Least recently accessed bin is on the bottom. I need to get better about cache eviction though. This also works with clothing on a rack. Put clean clothes on the left. Choose what to wear from the right. Eventually, the things you don't like wearing will all be on the right. This also happens to sort clothes by season.

Liftyee 6mo ago

Genius. I need to try this for organising my endless boxes of random parts, some of which I never use. At some point I believed that eventually once I accumulated a critical mass of parts projects would spontaneously appear, but there's some law of the universe that says you always are missing at least one part. For small common components (diode, resistor, LED) though I prefer the traditional wall-mounted array of trays for sorting by values. Also, my commonly used tools and supplies (soldering, cutting...) live in other wall mounted open top bins (like the stereotypical "mechanic's shop" kind that hook on at the rear). I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only the "Really Useful" stacking boxes. Clear, robust, and the different sizes have lips to stack and tile on each other. Who knew that a simple storage box could have an ecosystem.

Steve44 6mo ago
> I have a rare brand loyalty for the brand of box I use - only the "Really Useful" stacking boxes. Same here. I've been using them at home and work for years and they are absolutely fantastic; we've probably got well over 100 and it's rare for one a year to break and even then it's usually just the lid. I think they've been very clever in how they manage their range. I generally use the 12L and 18L boxes, but I don't need to remember any dimensions because a different profile box would say be 11L or 19L. All you need to do is remember the capacity and it'll be the right matching box.

Dnguyen 6mo ago

This is a preview to show HN? I made an app that help me keep track of my home inventory. I try to keep it as simple as possible so I can stick to the process. The app keeps track of containers and items. Just like a file system, containers are folders and items are files. Of course you can have containers within a container. For example, my house has a garage. In it I have a rack of 5 rows by 7 columns of 27 gallon bins (https://www.tameru.app/tote-rack-planner https://www.tameru.app/tote-rack-planner). One bin has my power tools such as drills, router, bits, etc. To inventory a bin, I either scan the barcode of the item if it has one. Ninety nine percent of the time the result will fill in the title, description, and picture. If there's no barcode, then taking a picture and AI will give a pretty good title and description. There are other attributes you can have, but just a title and description from the scan is all that is needed. Once the items are in the system, I can search with keywords based on the title, description, notes, etc. If the same items are spread across multiple locations, they will show up in the result. Selecting one will show me the breadcrumb to the location: Garage->Tote Rack->Row4Col2->Corded Drill. I can select certain containers or items to share with different groups. My siblings can see my mitre saw, my friends can see my camping laterns. The app has a check out/check in mechanism. It keeps a historical track of who checked out, when, how many, and when they intend to return the items. Similarly, when checking in items, who, when, quantity, and condition returned. The history report is similar to the dot system in the article. I can get a list of what I haven't used more than, say two years, and consider selling or donating. The side effect is now I know what I have so I'm less likely to buy duplicates. There are many other features, but I'll have to wait for a show HN when my app is approved in the stores. I just want to share how I organize and declutter. Hopefully it resonates with others, like this dot system.

tim-fan 6mo ago
Hey me too, I also have a DIY inventory system, maybe yours is more developed. But I also had the concept of items for n arbitrarily nested containers. I also track historical movements to see which items are never used. Recently I've moved towards everything being stored in numbered bags, which are hung in order on a line for O(N) retrieval. For storage it tells you which bag to put it in, for retrieval it tells you where it is. I'm thinking more and more the optimal system will have a physical as well as digital component. Also, I feel this system would be great for shared workshops at work places and maker spaces etc. I was just rummaging through our lab at work today, there's so many parts in the lab no one would know about, if it was inventorised with a good integrated (AI?) search function the equipment could be much more useful/available. https://github.com/tim-fan/hordor https://github.com/tim-fan/hordor

taftster 6mo ago

I need this for the junk in my life. Like, did I even use such-and-such thing in the past decade? If not, toss it out (ideally to a reuse store). I'm trying to get to a place where I think of all my purchases as rentals. That it's OK, if justified, that a tool served its purpose one time, and if it doesn't get used again or goes to the donation center, I have received the benefit. Something that can be reused is then just bonus. If not reused by me, then at least, someone else can benefit from the good. Switching my mental thinking to "renting" instead of buying items has help me be able to get rid of items which I haven't used in some time, reducing my footprint. I have a long way to go, but I come from a family of clutterbugs and it's just kind of baked in. Dots would be useful in my scenario just to capture utility of everyday things.

assimpleaspossi 6mo ago
Within 24 hours, whatever you threw out and can no longer retrieve, you will find a need and its replacement will cost an arm and a leg.
- duckmysick 6mo ago
  That's why you do a "soft delete" and move things from your main area to out-of-sight closet/attic/storage unit. A cold storage, as the OP called it. Then clean it once a year (or when you need more space) and get rid of things you haven't used. I regretted throwing out a thing like that maybe once. Don't do it to "insurance" items like a fire extinguisher or a drain snake. Now, what happened to me more often was: losing a thing, doing an extensive search for it, not finding it, buying a replacement, and then finding the original item the day after.
  - theshrike79 6mo ago
    We did this when we were moving. We rented a storage unit, took all of our stuff that wasn't immediately in use there. Then we did the main move (a LOT less stuff to move) and kept the storage unit for a bit over a year, going there to grab stuff as needed. After that we sold, donated and/or threw away pretty much everything in there. So much useless crap we were bringing along "just because".

tshaddox 6mo ago

For me, the hard part isn’t remembering how many times I’ve used a container or item in the last month or year. The hard part isn’t simply dedicating the time to comb through a bunch of stuff and get rid of the unused stuff.

_HMCB_ 6mo ago
The second sentence should read “is” not “isn’t?”
ghaff 6mo ago
I sorta know the stuff I use and don’t use. Had a kitchen fire last year and had to get the whole house emptied out for smoke damage mitigation. I’ve thrown out, donated, or recycled the better part of two large dumpsters worth of stuff. For me it’s about getting into the mode of going through and parting with stuff.
- LoganDark 6mo ago
  I've found it helps me to take photos of everything I'm parting with.
bubble_instr 6mo ago
Well, what is the hard part, then?
theshrike79 6mo ago
But wouldn't this help? You have 10 containers, slap a marker on one every time you take something out of it. 12 months later you have 2 containers that haven't been touched (zero stickers). -> 80% reduction of the amount of stuff to comb through to find unused/useless cruft.
- tshaddox 6mo ago
  If your decision procedure is so simple that you always throw out any container with zero dots and always keep any container with non-zero dots, then perhaps it saves a small amount of time. But that's a pretty coarse decision procedure, both because there might be an item that's very important but gets used less than once per year and because there might be a container that is 99% full of unused stuff but happens to have 1 item that gets used once a year.

apricot13 6mo ago

in my own organisation quest I found similar results, my "stick stuff to other stuff" box (it's real name has more swear words!) is the box with glue, tape, scissors, string, glue dots etc I also keep a pair of scissors in there since there's no reason to look in two places at once. my collection isn't quite the same categories since it's a hash of craft, electronics, DIY and just general household stuff so my categories are more about size and actions vs likelihood of use. I have "very tiny things", "smart devices", "covers, cases and stands", "cables modern", "cables ancient", "adaptors & extenders". the best two boxes we've ever implemented: "gribbins: known use" "gribbins: unknown use" for the leftover bits at the end of a project or the spares for something you bought online all labelled in the known box and thrown into three unknown box. if your looking for something in our house its in one of these two boxes! sometimes things are sub-bagged and labelled in IKEA sandwich bags because free colour coding others it's a free for all because we use it often

Eaglesight02 6mo ago

Wouldn't having multiple dots on the box defeat the purpose of it being see through to reveal it's contents? This would be especially true if the boxes are stacked and you would need to look at them from the side..

Ajakks 6mo ago

Small direction limited NFC Tags and the right NFC Ring might render this system effortless - tags maybe placed under the lid with a metal back to limit accidental scans. I like the dots, they are visual, you can see at a glance - standing in the lab. You could graph your digital data of box usage in the lab over time from home. I understand you've attained desired function and have no reason to do that. I'm not picking on you - I'm seeing this type of content all over and I also understand why we are retreating from digital spaces... but, This is a clever "life hack" - partly bc it isn't reliant on any technology and that is clearly stated -> very functional but almost anti-tech, being such a hit on HN is actually quite interesting.

jimnotgym 6mo ago

Dots are very common in real professional warehouses. They get added every time it is counted on a stocktake. Even with full electronic control, ERP, Barcodes etc. If you are auditing the count you can see everything was counted. If you find an old dusty box you know why it is not in the system. If you are looking for slow moving stock, find the ones with lots of dots. Even with electronic systems it is not uncommon to find rotation (First In First Out) is not working. Now I'm thinking about the boxes of electronic components in my own garage. Clear boxes, labelled on the front, bags inside, just like the article... and untouched year after year! It just feels so good when a psu breaks and you pull a capacitor and replace it with one you had already on hand...

HeyLaughingBoy 6mo ago
... only to discover that the electrolyte dried up a decade ago :-)
- jimnotgym 6mo ago
  I was lucky that time, but indeed. A bit like the tons of computer hardware I used to hoard, only to find it was always the wrong form factor, the wrong cables etc.

flir 6mo ago

As the article mentions using standardized clear bins, which really do help: In the UK I settled on Really Useful Boxes. Not their new cheaper range, the chunky straight-sided ones. Transparent, they don't go brittle in a few years (I guess they will eventually), the front-opening ones are handy if you're racking them, and you've got some guarantee you can go back and buy more in a couple of years. I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent £1k on RUBs over the years, but they really were worth it. The only problem I've found is that they don't have overhanging lips, so you can't build floating bin shelving (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYX50-Vw9AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYX50-Vw9AQ) for them.

tsak 6mo ago
Second that. Our garage is full of their 50L boxes with the XL lid, perfectly fitting those industrial shelves. Very versatile and long lasting. Even after nearly ten years, they look pretty much the same, and we live in harsh climate near the coast.
- flir 6mo ago
  My oldest ones (about a decade, same as you) are a touch more yellow than the ones I bought last year. I still think that, kept away from UV, they'll probably outlast me.
  - koralatov 6mo ago
    Same. I have one that’s about 15 years old, lived in a cupboard its whole life, and it’s slightly yellowed but still going strong.
animal531 6mo ago
Although looking at his, several of them are so covered in dots as to be opaque anyway. I'd have maybe used different colored dots, e.g. N blue, then remove them and place 1 green etc. as a counter and so on.
tristramb 6mo ago
Just behind me where I am sitting at the moment I have 21 RUBs containing my collection of about 42000 pinned out flies (mostly). The RUBs are stacked in and on top of bookshelves. I seem to remember that you could buy a rack to hold them but it looked too flimsy for what I wanted. The flies are pinned out onto plastic foam sheets in small clear plastic presentation boxes, 48 of which fit in each 12 litre RUB. I still have to properly identify about half of the flies. Photos of the presentation boxes and CSV files of the identifications are backed up to https://github.com/tristrambrelstaff/flies https://github.com/tristrambrelstaff/flies. RUBs have played a significant part in enabling me to manage all this.

randusername 6mo ago

I do a similar thing for books. A lone dot on the spine means I read it carefully enough to take notes on it. I like to write commentary in the margins, so the dots help me know which books are "devalued" and which are fine to donate or loan out to others. Multiple dots are an indication I return to a book often. Each time I re-read I take notes in a different ink color and try to record the date in that ink color in the front matter.

coldpie 6mo ago
> I like to write commentary in the margins Oh man, tangent into one of my favorite library book experiences. I checked out a sci-fi book at the library. It was good I was enjoying it. Then a few chapters in, I found a previous library patron had written nit-picky notes in the margin, poking holes in the author's fictional science tech explanations. And these weren't little one-word exclamations, they were whole sentences written in perfectly legible, almost impossibly-tiny pencil handwriting. Some of them even had little drawn diagrams! It went through the whole book, every hundred pages or so some little margin notes about how such-and-such sci-fi babble didn't reflect how space-time actually works or whatever. It was a hoot, a little bonus on top of the book itself.
- randusername 6mo ago
  I had a similar experience with a second-hand copy of House of Leaves [0]. This was a special treat because the book itself already uses copious footnotes and cross-references from fictional characters to create a maze. And now a real person added to the effect by trying to make sense of it themselves. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves
  - darth_aardvark 6mo ago
    You obviously need to add your own footnotes trying to make sense of those footnotes, then anonymously donate it to a used bookstore.

l00sed 6mo ago

Reminds me of Yoyoi Kusama's projects https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/obsessed-polka-dots https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/obsess...

Vinnl 6mo ago

I think this is the first time I read something online where an organised person has a system that works well, but it doesn't look good, haha.

endeavour 6mo ago

Brilliant. So now you have no clutter but your office looks like it has chicken pox.

xpe 6mo ago
And the haphazard bin stacking (see photograph) is a knolling knightmare

noisy_boy 6mo ago

To those saying it doesn't look good, why not make the dots like levels? Say you have only 5 colors: green, blue, orange, purple, red. 1st year: green 2nd year: replace the green dot with blue 3rd year: replace the blue dot with orange 4th year: replace the orange dot with purple 5th year: replace the purple dot with red 6th year: red + add green dot 7th year: red + replace the green dot with blue Even if you use a box for 10 years, you will have max two dots. Sure, granularity is only yearly. An alternative refinement is to continue with the current system but collapse all the 1st year dots with a single next year's dot.

OhNoNotAgain_99 6mo ago
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bluGill 6mo ago
Because you need to do something yearly which is tedious and so a task you are likely to postpone. Does it really matter if the green dot on the box is from this year or 10 years ago? The important signal is the box with the red dot hasn't been touched in 9 years so if you need some space that is a candidate for getting rid of.

OhNoNotAgain_99 6mo ago

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sublinear 6mo ago

I agree with the clear boxes. I bought a ton of them in bulk from amazon a few years ago. I have yet to deploy even half of them. I don't know about the dots, though. These boxes are so flimsy that I immediately know which ones are used most often by how beat up they've become in less than a year. :)

dbgrman 6mo ago

Extremely fascinating and a relatable DIY system. I love the analogy to dashboards.

hermitcrab 6mo ago

But is he actually throwing anything away, based on the lack of dots? Because that is the hard bit!

scrivna 6mo ago

What’s the point? Unless you are going to ruthlessly throw stuff away you’re still just accumulating things, tracking it doesn’t make the issue of unused clutter go away. Sure you move some stuff to a cupboard further away but it’s not difficult to intuit most of this stuff, and now you have a mess of stickers

matevz_smallPMS 6mo ago

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a2dam 6mo ago

I do nearly this exact thing with these shoeboxes, so you can pull them out from the front and have enough collapsed in storage to always have more on hand: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T6TC4FW https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T6TC4FW

lenerdenator 6mo ago

It took every ounce of concentration in my ADHD-riddled head to read that without stopping, but I'm glad I did. I have too much stuff in my place and need a system to start dealing with it. Classifying what actually needs to stay could help.

deleted 6mo ago

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kashunstva 6mo ago

I feel as if this is solving a problem I don’t have, at least not yet. My issue is that I’m contemplating building something and I’m sitting ordering from DigiKey and I can’t recall if I have a certain part. For example I have way too many 74xx1G14 in various SMD packages because I haven’t recalled my inventory. I finally spent much of the winter cataloguing everything in PartKeepr. Each storage area in the lab has a designated named area. Akro-Mils 64 drawer cabinets are named by letter then row and column. It ends up being a RAM-like system rather than categorically organized. SMD parts are removed from their tapes and go into AideTek 144 cell boxes. I never order anything now without checking the PartKeepr db.

throwawaytea 6mo ago

I use the Costco black and yellow bins in the garage. Have probably 24 of them. I put a strip of yellow or blue painters tape on it, and write with a sharpee a general description of the box. Might just add another piece of tape to add marks for usage. Peeling dots would kill me.