[wpietri]

For sure. I get the appeal of Having Everything Organized. It's conceptually compelling. But I think the right way to look at it is in terms of minimizing total cost of retrieval and filing.

As an example, take physical paper. Receipts, bills, anything that ends up in one's mailbox and doesn't immediately get recycled. I used to oscillate between two approaches: over-elaborate filing systems and just ignoring the problem and letting the mail pile up in snowdrifts.

Eventually I realized that my love of elaborate systems was a giant fucking problem for my actual life. I thought about it like I was designing a production system. I very rarely needed to retrieve old documents; most of it was for "just in case" conditions. I needed to frequently file things, and if the cost of filing was too high, I wouldn't pay it. So I bought 8 filing boxes, each 3 or 4 inches high and big enough to comfortably hold legal-size paper. Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top. A few exceptional kinds of paper then have their own separate file folders (e.g., tax documents, my current landlord, key retirement paperwork, key medical stuff). Once a year I throw out the contents of the oldest box and relabel it.

This works great. It turns out I almost never need anything from an old box. When I do, it's a quick rummage in one spot. With infrequent, hard-to-predict retrieval, storage-optimized organization is the best organization.

[eternityforest]

I have been handling physical organization by prioritizing filing. My reasoning is that if the house is a mess, filing isn't keeping up with retrieval, and I need to reduce friction on filing, because dealing with the mess is consuming more time than inefficient retrieval.

For paper, I don't have much trouble. Things go on the fridge if I will need them soon, or in one small sterilite plastic file box. It's nowhere near half full and I would not be surprised if it lasts 10+ years before I need any more storage for paper.

As an experiment I've been working on sorting things by category in a more general way, like the dewey decimal system rather than true categories, to remove the overhead of half full containers used to sort things. They're based on observation of what was already stored vaguely together rather than starting with an idea.

One common category is BAM, bulk artificial material. This includes paper towels, laundry soap, paint, water repellant spray, etc.

Another is TAM, tapes attachments and materials, containing tape, steel wire, foam, webbing, carabiners, key split rings, screws, and all similar things often having to do with either attaching things together or long things sold by the foot.

With wider categories I have fewer places to memorize, and organization within a category isn't that critical because they can be rummage-searched, without the overhead of a buch of individual drawers or boxes in some ever evolving system. It's just a formalization of random boxes of junk.

[wpietri]

Yes, same spirit for sure! Rummage-searching is very effective as long as the total rummage space is low, like a single box.

The main place where I'll depart from that is with higher access frequency. E.g., I have a box that is sort of "LRU tech stuff". In there my various cables are sorted by type into gallon ziplocs. Finding the right kind of USB cable is something I do too often to want to pull it out of a 50-wire snarl.

[eternityforest]

Oh I didn't think of that. LRU makes a lot of sense, especially since it's just the default big mess with an expiry.

My first line of defense with tech is volume reduction on the stuff itself. Bluetooth over cables, software over hardware, USB-C over everything else, resisting any kind of random tinkering gadgets in favor of phone apps and zero-friction stuff I'll set up and never bother to upgrade, etc.

If you never buy random stuff just because it looks cool, then when you really do want something you can afford to future proof it and sometimes get one thing that replaces multiple separate things.

I have one box dedicated just to power(Which I may split up into separate cables and batteries boxes) that has all my USBs not in active use.

USB-C has been fantastic. If you don't do a lot of fancy stuff with high data rates, it's an amazing way to collapse down the number of unique objects.

[deafpolygon]

> Each one is marked with a year, and almost everything for that year just gets tossed on top.

This is what I do. Things organize themselves organically this way - the important stuff bubbles to the top, and the rest is already sorted by linear time.