May 5, 2023

Stuff - avoiding chaos

I am deep into a major cleanup and purge of my workshop. I have made numerous discoveries about myself and life in the process, hence this essay. First a couple of well known quotes:
Do you own stuff, or does stuff own you?
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
If you have trouble with procrastination, make up your mind to do something about it right now!
As with many things in life, change is hard, and change demands a change in mindset. Much of this essay has to do with changing mindset. It is harder than you think.

Not everything must be saved!

The dumpster and trash can can become your friend. Somewhere in life it was deeply imprinted into me that nothing should be wasted. Avoiding waste is certainly good, but this is a virtue that does not override all other considerations. When something has outlived its usefulness -- for me -- it needs to go. Sometimes it is possible to find a new home for things, but often this wastes the most valuable resource of all -- time! So throw it away.

My workbench

Recently I had a visitor looking over my shoulder as I did something on the computer and I had at least 25 tabs open on my browser. What does this tell you? I work on something for a while, then something else grabs my attention and I just "shove it aside" and open a new tab. I'll get back to that "some fine day".

What does this have to do with my workbench? I just spent the morning cleaning it up. I recognize that a lot of things on my workbench are exactly like those browser tabs. They are unfinished projects that I will get back to "some fine day".

Apart from parked projects, I also find that my workbench has become "the place" for certain things as in "everything in its place". So I had to take a hard look at those things and find them another "place". In some cases these were just objects of no particular priority that had no place other than my workbench to be stored.

This leads to the next topic, namely boxes. I have a multitude of boxes piled up in my workshop, full of random things. Many of these are things that got moved off of my workbench "for now" and placed in a box so I could do something on my workbench. And they have stayed in the box and been all but forgotten for years. Beware of the "for now", which is ultimately a form of procrastination.

The goal is this -- nothing on the workbench that is not an active project. At the end of the day, the workbench gets cleared unless I plan to work on the project tomorrow (or at the very next opportunity). If clearing the workbench means shoving everything into the wastebasket, so be it.

I plan to institute the same policy towards browser tabs -- and end of the day cleanup and purge. Unless they are related to something I plan to dive back into the very next day, delete them or copy the link into a TODO file.

This might be useful someday

More empty words were never spoken. I could probably pick up any object on planet earth and make this statement. Some other guideline for whether to keep or to discard an item is clearly needed. I have recently been tossing many items that I once said this about. After storing them for over 10 or 20 years, then rediscovering them, I can still in many cases say the same thing. A better guide would be, "am I likely to use this in the next 5 years?".

I have boxes labeled, "shoes and hats" or "old camping gear". In the first case, I ask myself, "why am I storing these? For what occasion?" I either get them out and begin to use and wear them, or I get rid of them. In the case of "old camping gear" the entire box ought to just be thrown out, but there might be one or two sentimental items that I can justify keeping.

Sentimental items

These should be few and far between. They should also be on display and enjoyed on a daily basis, not packed in a box to be admired the next time you get busy with a cleanup. I must be honest. I find I have an emotional attachment to all kinds of stuff. I have analyzed that and come to a surprising realization. In many times I am attached to old useless junk with no particular usefulness simply because it has become like an old friend. Realizing this, I have said goodbye to many old friends and moved on in life.

More is always better

No, it isn't! It may be fine (and even good) to have some scraps of wood and metal around for projects, but there is a tipping point. Whatever space you have limits the amount of "stuff" you can store and organize. Beyond that limit, stuff becomes a liability rather than an asset. You can just order and buy things when you need them and this is often the best option. When you have too much stuff, you can never find what you want anyway (and you know you have it somewhere), so after a certain amount of searching, you just drive to the store and buy it.

It may be good to have a transformer or two (or three) if you are an electronics experimenter -- but do you need 20? At some point in my life, every such acquisition seemed like adding to my pirates hoard giving me joy as the pile got bigger. Now I look at those piles with a new mindset. I ask, "how many of those have I used in the past 20 years?" That is a pretty good predictor of how many I will need in the future (and in the future, even less because the nature of things I am doing has changed). So pruning that pile of 20 transformers down to 2 makes a lot of sense.

You could probably do a probability analysis of warehousing practices, and I'll bet big companies have done it. They can tie up thousands of square feet of space storing supplies (versus a "just in time" strategy of buying things when the are needed) and only using a small fraction of those supplies. And some supplies become obsolete or otherwise loose their relevance, or become damaged in storage.

Beyond the workshop

This revision of mindset applies to not just the workshop. It applies to the closet, the bookshelf, and every place "stuff" piles up. Clothes go out of style. My interest shifts and certain books no longer interest me (even some I never got around to reading). My interest in old Sun workstations and 680x0 processors has run its course and is now relegated to the past.

Over the past weeks I have become fairly draconian about getting rid of things. I have yet to have regrets. I feel pleasure, release, even joy. It boils down to this -- I have been letting things own me, rather than me owning them. Where did this deeply ingrained notion of "everthing must be saved" come from?

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Money pages / tom@mmto.org