Effective Organizing: The Twin Tasks of the Tidy’er
Keeping and “Sparking Joy”
How should we organize? This is a two-fold task. First, it is the question of deciding whether something is useful enough to keep. The second involves the question of categorization.
Everything else being equal, the more different things you have, the harder it is to find the thing you need. The resulting frustration is bad. You already have other things to worry about. So, throw away the things that are not useful.
Organization Guru Marie Kondo, famous for her eponymous Netflix show, suggests that if something does not “spark joy,” then get rid of it. How should you decide whether something is useful and “sparks joy”? At times, that is a deeply personal question for you to ponder. Deciding whether something is useful depends on you, not just the object in question. As the saying goes, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Most of the time, however, you can speed up the process of deciding by thinking about two things: Pareto-optimality and redundancy.
For example, if you have two knives for cutting meat, one of which is sharper than the other, Pareto-optimality tells you that you might want to look into throwing away the dull blade. After all, if you had to go live in the wild and you could only take one knife with you, you would take the one you deem better — the sharp knife.
Pareto-optimality doesn’t always have to mean something is better. It might sometimes mean something can do more. Think multi-purpose. For example, having a state-of-the-art Swiss Army Knife might give you a reason to throw away both your dull-knife, your bottle-opener, and your pair of old scissors.
However, redundancy also matters. Going back to our two kitchen knife example, sometimes having another blade as backup is useful and saves time. The decision to keep is thus a function of both the general rate of wear to the sharp blade (and probability you will lose it), expected difficulty of its replacement, as well as your tolerance for keeping something you may not use.
There are gray areas when it comes to such a decision, but it can be clearly black-and-white. It may be hard to decide whether to throw out the second knife. But if you had twenty knives and you are not an avid cook, the decision of whether to keep the least valuable knife is pretty straightforward.
Categorization
Life is a series of activities. Whether you are eating, working, sleeping, or changing the world. Thus, the best and most natural way to categorize objects, in my opinion, is to group objects by their need category as well as the situation we need them in.
By need category, I mean the following categories objects fall under as it relates to us as homo sapiens. They fulfill a particular function during an activity:
1. Materials (anything that is a building block of our activity, or something we consume)
2. Tools (help us perform our activity)
3. Knowledge — these inform us about our activity (two subcategories)
a. Shallow “Working” Knowledge (“Cheat Sheets / Current To-Do-List”)
b. Deep Knowledge (e.g. Textbooks)
4. Personal symbols/authorizers (e.g. our driver’s license, our car keys)
5. Sources for the other four object types (e.g. faucets and outlets, book library)
By situation, I mean the activity we are trying to perform, whether it is cooking, exercising, or tinkering.
This framework is the most natural because when we are performing an activity, we want all the situation-relevant objects to be available. For example, if you wanted to cook, among many other things you would want to have your ingredients, your pots and pans, and your cookbook. At the same time, we humans inherently group things by need category as we perform the activity. For example, we may put the cookbooks together in the same place, and the utensils together. After all, if we mixed them together so that some cookbooks and some utensils were in one drawer, and other books and other utensils in another, that would make our life very difficult.
In the next section, we will examine the nature of the objects we organize.