alt Hacker NewsInteresting, 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?
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> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
The extreme form of this causes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding#Anxiety
For ice cream specifically, America's Test Kitchen has you covered with "How to Make Homemade Ice Cream Without A Machine":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Ml3U39xqs
And their video on some of the science behind making good ice cream:
Something freeing to me that my wife said:
"If you get rid of clutter, there will be cases where you'll have gotten rid of something useful at that moment. It's not about avoiding that -- it's about accepting the right tradeoff between cleanliness and functionality."
towards the end he talks about this, dots determine how frequent it is used, therefore how close in proximity it should be to his work area. stuff which was dotted rarely or not at all was put into his shed outside, but even then he still had it and used it for a project later on.
if you're not going to use your ice cream maker every week, why have it on your kitchen counter, or kitchen shelf, put it away in a cupboard
You should set a rule that if it isn't used yearly it goes. In the case of the ice cream maker that means you have to make ice cream once a year just so you can keep the machine.
I don't follow the above like a religion, but it is good advice. I have a collection of things my grandma made that I look at once a year just because having it gives me joy and that once a year rule means I have to look at it or get rid of it. (I don't know how to explain to my kids why they give me joy - she died long before they were born so they have no memories of her hobbies)
He wasn't really getting rid of stuff though. He was moving it to "cold storage" so the primary storage was clear. When he needed a rarely used thing again, he could get it out of cold storage.
5 years isn't really that long though. I have things that I haven't touched in 25 years that I'm still worried I might need.
> The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
I end up hoarding things for the same reason, and the mental gymnastics I try to play with myself (using that ice cream machine as an example) is to think of cases where I would be willing to make ice cream, but wouldn't be willing to go buy store bought ice cream as an alternative. Usually means I need to quickly go research what I think might be interesting about the thing... and then I fall short because... there's some cool ice cream recipe ideas online... and then I enjoy make the proverbial matcha gelato that weekend... and the machine goes in the packed cupboard for another 3 months.
I'm not 100% sure if that's a good or bad outcome haha. The pattern has repeated itself with any clutter that happens to enable a weekend project once a year.
You give yourself an arbitrary number of years you feel is too long to hold onto something without using it, and you stick to it.
Determine the cost of owning the ice cream maker per year. For some people, owning something costs nothing and in fact provides value, they find comfort in owning things, used or not. For some people, owning things is a burden, a drain, and owning something unused is painful.
An ice cream maker costs maybe $200? How would you feel if you disposed of the ice cream maker and then a week later realized you wanted it?
If you want to soften the blow, don’t throw things away: give them away to someone who will use them.
I hate owning things, owning an ice cream maker that I never use would weigh on me and I would much rather spend $200 on a new ice cream maker every 5 years (that I give away after a month) than have an unused ice cream maker for 5 years.
sometimes I see no dots on things that are cool and I have this innate urge to want to hold onto.
One example is a Picomotor piezo actuator. It's a really cool piece of technology. I want to believe so badly that I'll use it in a project someday.
but after four years and seeing zero dots on it, it's like having concrete evidence PROVING that I'm delusionally optimistic about how useful it is. I can't ignore the reality.
the Picomotor is my version of your ice cream maker. the lack of dots gives me the evidence I need to finally donate it to a better home
Keep it. Go up the list to the next thing that you don't use that you can throw away.
I read an anecdote about someone using eBay as a storage service. Buy what you want, use it, then resell. The difference in the purchase and resell price is the storage fee.
This just sounds like hoarding, not a real problem. It's an irrational psychological attachment to things. It is a prison and a distraction from the substance of life.
Consider that it's just an ice cream maker. Few people need an ice cream maker. Few people need or even benefit from all the crap they buy in consumerist societies and pile into their houses.
You say you may want to make ice cream one day. So what? That's hardly a good basis for keeping something, especially in light of evidence to the contrary. So what if you one day want to make ice cream? So you don't make ice cream. So what Do you have to satisfy every impulse? The psycho-spiritual burden, distraction, and waste this thinking produces far outweighs some one-off use.
Maybe a friend has an ice cream maker, perhaps one he uses all the time. Ask to borrow it for those one-off cases. Or make it a social event.
This is exactly my problem. It's easy enough to say "give it away if you won't use it soon" but how do you know? That urge might come on any time, and the act of giving it away is likely to reignite that passion.
And for small things, like cables you don't often use... You never know when you'll need them. I've been telling myself I'm just going to throw them away after all, but then within a month of deciding that, I end up using a cable that I hadn't even seen in 2 years, and I had to hunt pretty hard for it. And it's a $10+ cable.
The article sounds like it's going to address these issues with the dots, but then just doesn't. I'm actually not even sure what the point of the dots is other than to convince the author that they're doing something about their problem, when they're really just putting stickers on things and buying more bins.