![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
I've been practicing these two new systems for a few months at least and am pretty satisfied with them.
The problem: Doodad Management -- how to keep track of the increasing number of electronic and other doodads one has to carry around constantly.
The solutions:
There are two, the first is for outside the home, the second for inside.
1. Designated Pocket: Each doodad has an assigned pants (or backpack) pocket. Whenever you leave the house you religiously stick each doodad in its assigned pocket. Advantage: you can feel with a pat of the hand whether you've got everything. Example: my wallet and cell phone go in my left pocket, my keys and audio recorder go in my right, my ipod and headphones go in my middle backpack pocket.
2. Cube of Forth (aka "Mobile Command Station", aka "Portable Spot"): This sytem requires a
"prop." My wife was getting tired of finding my doodads on every surface in the house, and got me a transparent plastic cube to keep them in. I immediately fell in love with the thing, and it made me realize why I hadn't been able to solve this problem before. It had always been obviously to me that the key to organization is giving every object an appropriate place. But objects that necessarily move from room to room frequently can't have just ONE appropriate place or you'd be running around the house non-stop retrieving them and putting them back, and multiple appropriate places gets unmaintainably complex. Cube of forth solves this problem by being a mobile appropriate place. Yes, there's now the danger that you will misplace ALL your doodads, but "putting your eggs in one basket" makes the basket a lot easier to find. I've never actually had a problem with this. The name is sort of D&Dish ("Cube of Force"). It's a cube of "forth" because, well, it's a cube, and you can move it forth. The D&D pun gives it an inspiring dose of nerd awesome.
They may seem like tiny, tiny behavioral tweaks, barely worthy of being called systems, things that a sensible person might do more or less naturally and automatically, but a) I'm not such a person and b) small as they are, they've made a big difference to me in terms of time saved looking for stuff, anxiety ("oh no, did I forget my phone?"), and interpersonal relations ("Honey, can you stop sprawling your stuff all over the counter!?!!").
Reinhard