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) for them.
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. RUBs have played a significant part in enabling me to manage all this.
Yeah, we have a similar setup for haberdashery - white Ikea Billys, a few extra shelves, and a lot of 9l RUBs. They're a couple of inches deeper than the shelf, but that's not really a problem. Larger projects and long-term storage go in 35l's or 64l's. The 84l's tend to be too big for us - we've got one, and I hate lugging it around.
That's a hell of a collection. Is there any risk of them degrading over time, as they're organic?
I discovered recently that IKEA actually do a deeper Billy that you can order online. I've seen them as deep as the Kalax. I used to work there and never knew. Might be helpful for the overhang
if they're the ones I'm thinking of (wide, but not very tall, good for large flat things - basically map drawers but not quite that big) just be forewarned that the drawers don't fully extend. (There are mods to fix that which involve doing some drilling and grinding on the drawer slides...)
i have lots of boxes like these filled with various hobby stuff. I keep two boxes on my desk though, one labeled 'A' and one labeled 'B'. Any time I use something like a tool or microprocessor or cable it goes in the A box, when the A box gets too full i pour some of it into the B box. When the B box gets too full i put the contents away where they belong. It's basically like a 2 stage MRU cache of my hobbies, all the stuff i'm currently messing with is right there in the A box or, if it's been a while, in the B box. If i'm doing something new i have to get up and go get what i need from the shelf or other boxes.
Thanks for the Really Useful Boxes referral. I've been using made in the UK Wham Plastics organizers and IKEA boxes, but front-loading is what I really need.
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.
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.
Really Useful Boxes are excellent. The best feature for me is that the lids are raised, so you have some room that's slightly higher than the rim of the crate. Sure, buy a bigger crate, but it's nice to pack things just about level and not worry about one annoying part poking up.
I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby. You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not significantly pricier than Really Useful.
There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids, only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.
I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per compartment box.
As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient. You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each project. This way is much easier to drop back into something you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the BOM items for a project).
I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed signal Picoscope.
(Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for baking.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
This is exactly my problem. It's easy enough to say "give it away if you won't use it soon" but how do you know? That urge might come on any time, and the act of giving it away is likely to reignite that passion.
And for small things, like cables you don't often use... You never know when you'll need them. I've been telling myself I'm just going to throw them away after all, but then within a month of deciding that, I end up using a cable that I hadn't even seen in 2 years, and I had to hunt pretty hard for it. And it's a $10+ cable.
The article sounds like it's going to address these issues with the dots, but then just doesn't. I'm actually not even sure what the point of the dots is other than to convince the author that they're doing something about their problem, when they're really just putting stickers on things and buying more bins.
Pick a dollar amount and delivery time period you are comfortable with. Get rid of everything you haven’t used in a month that you can get cheaper than that amount and within that time period.
Dont justify after the fact just dumbly implement the rule.
I can think of two instances from the past year or two where this happened: "printer cable" (USB-A to USB-B?), and USB-A extension cable (both at separate times). I think I spent ~$10 for each of these, so my total bill was $20.
So $20 fee to pay for getting rid of a bunch of other cables I didn't need years ago and saving ~500 cubic cm of space.
And I gave the printer cable away to a friend when I was done with it, happy to repurchase it in a few years in the increasingly unlikely scenario that I need it again.
Yeah, after years and years of hoarding lots of hardware and cables that's how I operate now. I have so much less tech trash in my house now, LOL.
Keep a few extra cables of sorts I actually use fairly often (a few spare HDMI cables, some ethernet cables, and a few types of USB cables are no-brainers, for instance). Toss all the rest (am I ever, ever going to use a DVI cable again in my life? Decent odds, no, and on the off chance I do I can just buy another)
Any cable that's more than ~2 spares for a port on some device that is plugged in or otherwise in-use in your house, or isn't a kind of port you've used in a couple years (even if you could) should at least get some serious scrutiny and more often than not be donated or go in the trash.
Like, I held on to a couple coax cables more than ten years after the last time I plugged anything into a coax jack. So stupid, in hindsight.
The dollar amount and delivery time is a good rule is a good one. This varies quite a bit based on the nature of your projects. The month might be flexible. Maybe a quarter or half year for some people?
At some point you may need some old cable but you probably end up buying one because you can’t find it.
I simplified a lot of things when I was moving back in. I’m sure I threw out some things I should have kept. For cables specifically I need a better system than going through a large plastic box. Probably some garage reorganization thing.
And in my case, if I actually had a summer BBQ which I probably will this summer I’ll drive 5 minutes to the local excellent ice cream stand and pick some up. Fun activity for kids though.
"If you get rid of clutter, there will be cases where you'll have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff between cleanliness and functionality."
You should set a rule that if it isn't used yearly it goes. In the case of the ice cream maker that means you have to make ice cream once a year just so you can keep the machine.
I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me joy - she died long before they were born so they have no memories of her hobbies)
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
He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold storage.
Not at all necessarily. It could be, but it is definitely not necessarily true.
It depends entirely on usage patterns and attitudes.
I just used a piece of material that was sitting on the shelf for at least ten and probably closer to fifteen years. I'd purchased it as an off-cut from a supplier just on a thought of "this might be useful, and it's a good deal". Carried it through two moves and never got around to using it. Suddenly it turned out to be the perfect thickness for this one customer project when the expected material didn't work — never could have predicted it. Not only that, but when I went to check how much it would cost today, I literally cannot find that particular thickness. It literally saved by butt on this job.
OTOH, I do have other materials I've used once or twice, but the needs have shifted so they're going on Craigslist for free.
> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.
I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.
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.
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
I read an anecdote about someone using eBay as a storage service. Buy what you want, use it, then resell. The difference in the purchase and resell price is the storage fee.
This just sounds like hoarding, not a real problem. It's an irrational psychological attachment to things. It is a prison and a distraction from the substance of life.
Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.
You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.
Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A friend of mine used to once a year hang all his shirts with the open end of the cloth hangers' hooks facing forward. After wearing and washing them he'd hang them back with the hanger facing the other way. After a year he'd toss out any shirts that were still facing the original way and had thus not been worn.
I’ve gotten rid of a lot of clothing in the past 18 months. I bring a very limited amount of specific clothing traveling, don’t fuss much around the house, local hikes, the theater now and then etc. I just have no use for a lot of to the office clothing I wore into the office every day.
> 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.
I would say that Decathlon stuff has the RFID inside the internal labels (the ones that you should cut off if you don't want them to scratch your skin but sometimes you don't notice them)
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.
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.
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”?
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.
The point is you don't have to. You instead just look at the boxes a few years latter and if at a glance you see one box with few/no dots you know it is safe so you spend just a few seconds thinking about only that box - then you move on to something else. Sure there might be more boxes you can get rid of, but you only need to do one box at a time when you have a few seconds. (or you look at the box and decide you are not ready to get rid of that so you put a dot on it making it less likely this one will come up next time you have a few seconds)
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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?
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
> "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.
> 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
It's such a shame too because the author clearly cares about sharing their system, they went to the lengths of taking nice photos etc. - but then it's this low quality, meandering, repetitive, predictable AI writing.
It's also surprising to see that most people in the comments here just do not seem to be affected one bit. Not sure if it's because it's become so standard now that everyone's completely accepted that this is what content is going to be from now on... or if most people just don't care about poor writing.
The second hypothesis seems less likely given how central to the ethos of this board pg's old essays about good writing seem to be, but maybe that's just a bygone era.
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.
Technically it's against the rules to use AI for comments. I don't think you have to be 100% sure that AI wasn't used for a submission before submitting or upvoting
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they aren't plastic, but surprisingly, I'm able to remove them with fine tweezers and transplant them when needed. They are 6mm diameter so pretty small and I've never seen them shred like larger labels/stickers.
> 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.
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.
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). 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.
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.
My system has a list mechanism as well. You can create a shopping list and add to it. Either scan barcode or AI Vision. You can add notes too, such as found at Target for $16.99 and Walmart for $19.99. If the items you add exist in the inventory, it will have the breadcrumb to the items and the quantity. If not, they're added as external.
You can also create a camping list, and add the things you need. When you pack and check things off, they are checked out from the system. When you're done, uncheck will check them back into the system.
Another use for list is for projects. You can have a list for your workshops and keep track what is being used and what need to be replenished.
One more feature I have that could be useful for your workshop is related items. For example, when you look up soldering iron, you'll also see related items such as solder, wick, flux. That way you don't forget.
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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..
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. :)
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) for them.
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. RUBs have played a significant part in enabling me to manage all this.
Yeah, we have a similar setup for haberdashery - white Ikea Billys, a few extra shelves, and a lot of 9l RUBs. They're a couple of inches deeper than the shelf, but that's not really a problem. Larger projects and long-term storage go in 35l's or 64l's. The 84l's tend to be too big for us - we've got one, and I hate lugging it around.
That's a hell of a collection. Is there any risk of them degrading over time, as they're organic?
I discovered recently that IKEA actually do a deeper Billy that you can order online. I've seen them as deep as the Kalax. I used to work there and never knew. Might be helpful for the overhang
if they're the ones I'm thinking of (wide, but not very tall, good for large flat things - basically map drawers but not quite that big) just be forewarned that the drawers don't fully extend. (There are mods to fix that which involve doing some drilling and grinding on the drawer slides...)
I initially read "42000 pinned out files" and sat there, processing, for a minute. Professional deformation at its finest.
i have lots of boxes like these filled with various hobby stuff. I keep two boxes on my desk though, one labeled 'A' and one labeled 'B'. Any time I use something like a tool or microprocessor or cable it goes in the A box, when the A box gets too full i pour some of it into the B box. When the B box gets too full i put the contents away where they belong. It's basically like a 2 stage MRU cache of my hobbies, all the stuff i'm currently messing with is right there in the A box or, if it's been a while, in the B box. If i'm doing something new i have to get up and go get what i need from the shelf or other boxes.
Future availability is such an underrated feature. I buy IKEA food storage containers exactly because of this.
I wonder if how we build/cycle software would change if we stopped calling it "backward compatibility" and started calling it "future availability."
Thanks for the Really Useful Boxes referral. I've been using made in the UK Wham Plastics organizers and IKEA boxes, but front-loading is what I really need.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really Useful Boxes are excellent. The best feature for me is that the lids are raised, so you have some room that's slightly higher than the rim of the crate. Sure, buy a bigger crate, but it's nice to pack things just about level and not worry about one annoying part poking up.
I've switched to UTZ Rako/Euroboxes for longer term storage. I even bought a beat-up dolly so I could easily transport 60L boxes around. They stack, they're divisible (e.g. 2x30L on top of a 60L) and the smaller ones fit neatly into a KALLAX cubby. You can buy them used for cheap, if you're willing to spend an afternoon scrubbing factory dirt off them. But they're not significantly pricier than Really Useful.
There are other suppliers like Auer, who make all kinds of interesting variations like toolboxes and latching/lockable boxes, but can get really expensive. You can get insert containers for them, but same problem: no transparent lids, only generic gray unless you want to buy 100.
I've been lusting after some of the Sortimo boxes that Adam Savage recommends, but I can't justify 50-100 quid per compartment box.
As for the original article... I like the idea of dots, but I would try a gridded label with sharpie marks. Having worked in a lot of workshops and labs though, boxes are not efficient. You want a good rack/drawers for things you use all the time (tape). I do like one box per project for convenience, which is often more useful than a box with generic grouped parts. If you really need to, you can do things like cut SMD tapes for each project. This way is much easier to drop back into something you only have time for on the weekend, and it's also what we would do in hardware shops (single sorted organizer with the BOM items for a project).
I do agree about the hardware side being surprising. When I was working on electronics for work, having a 4 channel scope was indispensable. But most of the time, debugging on chip/breakpoints are enough. I switched to a 4 channel mixed signal Picoscope.
(Someone else mentioned kitchen containers. I spent some time in a professional kitchen which hooked me on Cambro-style containers, or whatever Nisbet's sell in the UK. Also standardized alu sheet pans and matching silicone mats for baking.)
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.
> 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.
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
You obviously need to add your own footnotes trying to make sense of those footnotes, then anonymously donate it to a used bookstore.
That's how you get Talmud.
Sometimes the marginalia are more interesting than the work itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia
i have a truly marvelous story about interesting marginalia which this comment box is too small to contain
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?
This is exactly my problem. It's easy enough to say "give it away if you won't use it soon" but how do you know? That urge might come on any time, and the act of giving it away is likely to reignite that passion.
And for small things, like cables you don't often use... You never know when you'll need them. I've been telling myself I'm just going to throw them away after all, but then within a month of deciding that, I end up using a cable that I hadn't even seen in 2 years, and I had to hunt pretty hard for it. And it's a $10+ cable.
The article sounds like it's going to address these issues with the dots, but then just doesn't. I'm actually not even sure what the point of the dots is other than to convince the author that they're doing something about their problem, when they're really just putting stickers on things and buying more bins.
Pick a dollar amount and delivery time period you are comfortable with. Get rid of everything you haven’t used in a month that you can get cheaper than that amount and within that time period.
Dont justify after the fact just dumbly implement the rule.
I can think of two instances from the past year or two where this happened: "printer cable" (USB-A to USB-B?), and USB-A extension cable (both at separate times). I think I spent ~$10 for each of these, so my total bill was $20.
So $20 fee to pay for getting rid of a bunch of other cables I didn't need years ago and saving ~500 cubic cm of space.
And I gave the printer cable away to a friend when I was done with it, happy to repurchase it in a few years in the increasingly unlikely scenario that I need it again.
Yeah, after years and years of hoarding lots of hardware and cables that's how I operate now. I have so much less tech trash in my house now, LOL.
Keep a few extra cables of sorts I actually use fairly often (a few spare HDMI cables, some ethernet cables, and a few types of USB cables are no-brainers, for instance). Toss all the rest (am I ever, ever going to use a DVI cable again in my life? Decent odds, no, and on the off chance I do I can just buy another)
Any cable that's more than ~2 spares for a port on some device that is plugged in or otherwise in-use in your house, or isn't a kind of port you've used in a couple years (even if you could) should at least get some serious scrutiny and more often than not be donated or go in the trash.
Like, I held on to a couple coax cables more than ten years after the last time I plugged anything into a coax jack. So stupid, in hindsight.
The dollar amount and delivery time is a good rule is a good one. This varies quite a bit based on the nature of your projects. The month might be flexible. Maybe a quarter or half year for some people?
At some point you may need some old cable but you probably end up buying one because you can’t find it.
I simplified a lot of things when I was moving back in. I’m sure I threw out some things I should have kept. For cables specifically I need a better system than going through a large plastic box. Probably some garage reorganization thing.
> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
The extreme form of this causes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding#Anxiety
For ice cream specifically, America's Test Kitchen has you covered with "How to Make Homemade Ice Cream Without A Machine":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Ml3U39xqs
And their video on some of the science behind making good ice cream:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St-8kZ7vmfI
And in my case, if I actually had a summer BBQ which I probably will this summer I’ll drive 5 minutes to the local excellent ice cream stand and pick some up. Fun activity for kids though.
Something freeing to me that my wife said:
"If you get rid of clutter, there will be cases where you'll have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff between cleanliness and functionality."
You should set a rule that if it isn't used yearly it goes. In the case of the ice cream maker that means you have to make ice cream once a year just so you can keep the machine.
I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me joy - she died long before they were born so they have no memories of her hobbies)
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
He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold storage.
5 years isn't really that long though. I have things that I haven't touched in 25 years that I'm still worried I might need.
This is called hoarding.
Not at all necessarily. It could be, but it is definitely not necessarily true.
It depends entirely on usage patterns and attitudes.
I just used a piece of material that was sitting on the shelf for at least ten and probably closer to fifteen years. I'd purchased it as an off-cut from a supplier just on a thought of "this might be useful, and it's a good deal". Carried it through two moves and never got around to using it. Suddenly it turned out to be the perfect thickness for this one customer project when the expected material didn't work — never could have predicted it. Not only that, but when I went to check how much it would cost today, I literally cannot find that particular thickness. It literally saved by butt on this job.
OTOH, I do have other materials I've used once or twice, but the needs have shifted so they're going on Craigslist for free.
> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.
I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.
You give yourself an arbitrary number of years you feel is too long to hold onto something without using it, and you stick to it.
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.
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
"a better home": probably someone who also thinks it's cool and also will never use it :)
I read an anecdote about someone using eBay as a storage service. Buy what you want, use it, then resell. The difference in the purchase and resell price is the storage fee.
Keep it. Go up the list to the next thing that you don't use that you can throw away.
This just sounds like hoarding, not a real problem. It's an irrational psychological attachment to things. It is a prison and a distraction from the substance of life.
Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.
You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.
Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> Clothes? maybe RFID patches that are unobtrusive.
Decathlon and Zara both have RFID tags in their products.
https://sustainability.decathlon.com/product-traceability-an... (Decathlon)
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.
A friend of mine used to once a year hang all his shirts with the open end of the cloth hangers' hooks facing forward. After wearing and washing them he'd hang them back with the hanger facing the other way. After a year he'd toss out any shirts that were still facing the original way and had thus not been worn.
I’ve gotten rid of a lot of clothing in the past 18 months. I bring a very limited amount of specific clothing traveling, don’t fuss much around the house, local hikes, the theater now and then etc. I just have no use for a lot of to the office clothing I wore into the office every day.
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
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.
> 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.
I would say that Decathlon stuff has the RFID inside the internal labels (the ones that you should cut off if you don't want them to scratch your skin but sometimes you don't notice them)
Imo NFC tags could be the easiest way of doing the same thing for bigger items, scan it when you use it, log it.
Or just a QR code sticker to a URL only accessible from your LAN
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.
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 =)
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.
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”?
I think of atime as the electronic version. And to address the cost, you can mount with noatime.
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.
The point is you don't have to. You instead just look at the boxes a few years latter and if at a glance you see one box with few/no dots you know it is safe so you spend just a few seconds thinking about only that box - then you move on to something else. Sure there might be more boxes you can get rid of, but you only need to do one box at a time when you have a few seconds. (or you look at the box and decide you are not ready to get rid of that so you put a dot on it making it less likely this one will come up next time you have a few seconds)
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.
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.
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.
I've found it helps me to take photos of everything I'm parting with.
The second sentence should read “is” not “isn’t?”
Well, what is the hard part, then?
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!)
+1, the information content is nice, but the AI telltales and writing patterns were annoyingly distracting.
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.
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?
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
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.
Yeah, frequency and importance are different signals.
This works well for deciding what stays nearby, but not necessarily what to get rid of.
Something like a toolbox or a charger you rarely use might only get a few dots, but when you need it, you really need it.
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)
shoeboxes are a great size for containers, but does it bother you that they aren't transparent? I really like having clear containers.
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.
No, I think I prefer it. Less visual noise.
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.
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.
Brilliant. So now you have no clutter but your office looks like it has chicken pox.
And the haphazard bin stacking (see photograph) is a knolling knightmare
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
> "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.
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 :)
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
Seriously.
It's such a shame too because the author clearly cares about sharing their system, they went to the lengths of taking nice photos etc. - but then it's this low quality, meandering, repetitive, predictable AI writing.
It's also surprising to see that most people in the comments here just do not seem to be affected one bit. Not sure if it's because it's become so standard now that everyone's completely accepted that this is what content is going to be from now on... or if most people just don't care about poor writing.
The second hypothesis seems less likely given how central to the ethos of this board pg's old essays about good writing seem to be, but maybe that's just a bygone era.
I was just disappointed that they didn't include a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:... joke (or maybe that's also a tell...)
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.
> The habit takes seconds. No database. No server. No app.
> It wasn't the specialized components. It wasn't the sensors I had so many of.
> These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares.
It's against the rules as of 2 weeks ago, in the short term, you're more likely to get downvoted for complaining than see less of it.
And it's astounding. Because this is awful writing.
Author, one year ago: "you replied to an LLM generated comment. if you look at the posting history you can confirm it"
Now they can't be bothered to take an edit pass on the most rote slop.
> Because this is awful writing.
Can you describe what you think is awful (beyond rhetorical choices that have become LLM markers)?
Technically it's against the rules to use AI for comments. I don't think you have to be 100% sure that AI wasn't used for a submission before submitting or upvoting
Learn how to skim?
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
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.
Extremely fascinating and a relatable DIY system. I love the analogy to dashboards.
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.
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.
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)
Reminds me of Yoyoi Kusama's projects https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/obsess...
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.
they aren't plastic, but surprisingly, I'm able to remove them with fine tweezers and transplant them when needed. They are 6mm diameter so pretty small and I've never seen them shred like larger labels/stickers.
> 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.
Goo Gone is the way to go:
https://googone.com/original
Yup. No noxious fumes.
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.
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). 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.
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
My system has a list mechanism as well. You can create a shopping list and add to it. Either scan barcode or AI Vision. You can add notes too, such as found at Target for $16.99 and Walmart for $19.99. If the items you add exist in the inventory, it will have the breadcrumb to the items and the quantity. If not, they're added as external. You can also create a camping list, and add the things you need. When you pack and check things off, they are checked out from the system. When you're done, uncheck will check them back into the system. Another use for list is for projects. You can have a list for your workshops and keep track what is being used and what need to be replenished. One more feature I have that could be useful for your workshop is related items. For example, when you look up soldering iron, you'll also see related items such as solder, wick, flux. That way you don't forget.
Hilarious that the box labeled “dots” has so many dots on it.
Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is like - presumably some kind of power law shape.
Kind of an IRL heatmap.
Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.
since this is cache invalidation AND naming things, does that make it the hardest?
I see what you did there
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
But is he actually throwing anything away, based on the lack of dots? Because that is the hard bit!
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
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.
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..
Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code persistent memory system?
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. :)
This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.
messy, but there is something endearing about the approach
"These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares." - bravo!!!!!!!
Looks like a huge mess really.
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
Don't worry - when you're done tracking it's your children that will clean up.