Decluttering and Organizing the Mind

a garbage truck dumping things into a clean, empty, translucent box in the style of Asaf hanuka in a cyberpunk cinematic view

Friday, August 4th, 2023

I have been going through a painful decluttering and organizing process.

In general, I don't think I am particularly well-organized, but I never had a real issue because I stuck to two thoughts: 1) Don't buy much; 2) Stick what I don't use in the Garage.

However, I felt it was time to purge all the things from the second bucket -- things that have accumulated and, till now, were just in a large plastic tote.

But this has always been painful.

At one time, I thought I found an approach which appealed to me, which was to just have very large baskets of things in the garage and a set of notecards. Whenever I put an item into the garage, I would write the name of the item and throw it into whatever container was available.

Now the index cards were the "pointers" to my things.

It was nice in that I didn't have to worry about retrieval. Everything was in the index cards.

The problem: writing the index cards.

I think a secondary problem was I didn't make the boxes easy to access. I think this works if the boxes aren't stacked, but are all easily retrievable and storable.

So this still fell in the "fail" mode.

Then I went onto YouTube, the teacher of all new things, and searched for home organizers that I could grok.

This was always a mixed experience, because the organizers made things look easy, without giving me a set of primitives to work with that I could just follow. It's sort of like a baker providing pictures of their final output and only showing the ingredients, but no real step by step explanation.

The closest I got has been a YouTuber 'Clutterbug' but one of the more eye-opening concepts was that there are different "Organizing Personalities." I think they are named after bugs like Butterfly, Cricket, Bee, and something else.

This was an unlock for me.

Personality Drives Mental Models

Decluttering and Organizing is, like anything else, an exercise in mental models.

Most people don't try to understand their hard-wired mental model. They, like I did, try to read books that show examples, but it's not giving a repeatable approach. It's inspiration from which I can extract possible ideas, but still not very satisfactory.

Inputs -- the mess off stuff, the goals, the worldview regarding these items -- go in, and can have quite a bit of variance from person to person.

The output -- how things are organized and what is considered organized enough -- also varies.

These make sense that they vary by personality. Of course, the thing that varies the most is the "black box" -- what takes the inputs into acceptable outputs.

Who would have thought that organization would also have different personality types?

It's so mundane, low-level, and basic, but it makes sense.

Her own "aha" of always feeling disorganized while it came naturally to other people expressed my own frustrations.

She broke it down into two axis (I loved this approach):

From here, she could be more prescriptive. The "primitives" were ideas that I slowly could begin to incorporate into my decluttering and organizing approach.

I am highly visual, but I am low detail.

So for me, I should just create broad categories of things, but try to have some translucence in order to visualize things.

I found it gave me a rough approximation of things to do. But did also break down in others, but it gave me a sense of direction.

For example, this worked with all the cables, cords, plugs and electronics "stuff" -- big broad categories with boxes.

But I also had a bunch of screws and hardware and batteries. It didn't work to have one big box, however translucent, with them thrown in there. I needed some way to know whether I had something or not with rough approximate sizes or use cases and see it pretty easily (RJ45 couplers somewhere...ah, check!)

I right now have a catch all of electronics "junk" which I may just need to treat to a garbage collection cycle, but maybe these big generalized blobs of categories might be the main start I need to get rid of things.

Honestly, the easiest way in the end is to toss anything that isn't being used now and just assume I need to buy it again when I do discover the need, and that's probably been the biggest blocker.

It's sort of stupid for all the cognitive load, and perhaps the best way to handle it also came from the channel which was to have some kind of hold-over tote. Things go in there and there's an expiration date (six months to a year). If it's not used by then, it's gone. The entire tote is tossed.

I do like this except there is an awfully gleeful point of satisfaction finding some small widget that I kept for the past five years that I can actually re-use!

The question is the trade-offs: how much is it really worth the cognitive load (seeing day after day that big tote of light bulbs which were bought in bulb but that we don't use) vs the additional cost of buying it over again.

The last has been disposal: you'd think it would be much easier in San Francisco to recycle things like cables, old phones, lightbulbs, switches, other things, but honestly it hasn't felt that way. I either have to pay or schedule someone to come on a limited basis.

What does this have to do with the mind?

I want to write further on this, but I think a worthwhile exercise is to go through a decluttering and organizing process and ask questions like:

It is an exercise in one's attachment to the material, as well as ones own mental operating system. I do believe greater discipline and calmness is reflected in the things we keep and how they are organized.

Killing that part which needs to hold onto those cables and chargers is one path to real freedom.