
The Economics of Tidying Up - efm
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/an-economist-reads-marie-kondo/392921/?single_page=true
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cantrevealname
Obligatory link to Paul Graham's article on the same issue:

[http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html](http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html)

Quote: " _I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental
model of what 's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less
energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally
exhausting._"

You need to de-clutter to think better. It is certainly true for me.

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hanniabu
A good organizer is a hoarder. It's better to take a good at everything
around, go category by category, and get rid of everything you don't need.
Save nothing for those 'what if' scenarios that never come. Say goodbye to
momentos that serve no purpose. If you feel joy when holding or looking at it,
I would say that serves a purpose, but that's a fine line and easy to cross by
putting everything in that category. Get together everything you're getting
rid of and have a yard sale. Anything you don't sell, drop off what you can at
a goodwill and throw the rest out.

You'll feel a huge weight lifted off your shoulders when done, a weight you
didn't even know was there when you started.

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jhallenworld
My experience is that a large fraction of creative people are basically lazy
slobs. What can be done?

A professor I know installed two dishwashers in his apartment: one for dirty
and one for clean. This seems awesome, but it's certainly tricky to make it
really work: You need to limit yourself to only one load of dishes. You can
get into the situation where you have two washers with clean dishes. You
either have to mark one of them as dirty and re-clean those dishes, or ugh,
sweep the clean dishes into one washer. Also pots never fit.

~~~
rabboRubble
That seems entirely doable. I've wanted two silverware baskets. One for the
holding the clean utensils outside of the washer, and one to be in the dish
washer to receive the dirty.

Pots absolutely fit. The only pots and pans that don't go in the washer are
non-stick. Everything else, including the jumbo soup pots fit. Not much else
does along with the pots, and I don't care because I'm not washing a pot by
hand.

As an aside, I actually finished up Kondo-izing my apartment about 2 months
ago. I am working on selling the items that were too valuable to simply throw
away. Very nearly close to being "finished".

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adamio
Japanese manufacturing calls this "5S"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_(methodology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_\(methodology\))

