[theshrike79]

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]

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.

[theshrike79]

You're speaking to a serial hoarder in (at least) the third generation. My grandfather was an (organised) hoarder - we're still picking through his stuff and he died almost a decade ago.

No, I won't throw stuff away all willy-nilly.

What I tried to convey is that the dot system is good at reducing the amount of stuff you need to go through and make the Marie Kondo decision of "does this spark joy" or "is this a rare tool that's hard to find if I throw it away now and need it 5 years from now".

Like I have my grandfather's wood carving tools. Do I carve wood? No. Might I when I retire. Certainly. They're _VERY_ high quality tools so if I throw them out, I'd need to either spend an inordinate amount of money to get ones of similar workmanship or make do with some chinesium crap with plastic handles.