A dot a day keeps the clutter away

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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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

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!)

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.

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.

Brilliant. So now you have no clutter but your office looks like it has chicken pox.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

But is he actually throwing anything away, based on the lack of dots? Because that is the hard bit!

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

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

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