Out of sequence Column number 2 (of 3). This one about organizing.
For posterity: Before writing Column 500 I decided to back-fill Columns I’d accidentally skipped. Column 253 here, along with 357, are out-of-sequence. It’s currently October 2026, even though Columns 252 and 254 both took place around early August, 2015.
For my fellow nerds & neat freaks:
Organization Update
A place for everything
A place for everything, and everything in its place. If things have no home they end up wherever.
Having a home for an object means you’ll know where it is… but more importantly you’ll remember you have it at all.
We bought painter’s tape 3 times because we didn’t really have one spot for it. Is it with the tapes or the painting supplies, or in the mobile “active project” bucket?
… but there is a “miscellaneous” drawer
There’s a long tail of things worth keeping, but not worth having a dedicated home for.
So - “have a place for things, unless you don’t” – am I saying anything here?
Yes.
You should have a limited number of miscellaneous drawers. If you’ve got 3 miscellaneous drawers, you have 3 places to check when you need to find something that doesn’t otherwise have a home. If you have multiple miscellaneous drawers by context, that works so long as you can cleanly articulate what miscellaneous context a particular thing falls into.
But
Avoid partitioning digital things
When it comes to digital things, in my experience, having a huge miscellaneous drawer is a good thing. The fewer places things even could live, the better! I’m stopping just short of having one folder that just says “Things”:
If you can:
- Sort
- Search
- Filter
- Assign metadata
I’d go so far as to say there’s very few reasons to have folders at all.
Halloween
It’s Halloween. Boo.
I just watched The Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time. It was fun. The idea of the movie always scared me as a kid. Now I can say:
veni vidi vici
…about a kid’s movie.
Also we did some Trick or Treating:
Top 5: Absolute Rabbit Holes I’ve Run Down Recently
5. How can I make 5Ks feel easier at faster paces?
4. Puzzle Box 2026
3. Plaintext organization systems
2. Plaintext organization systems
1. Plaintext organization systems
I put this on here 3 times on purpose. It swallowed my mental faculties wholly for months. Only recently do I feel like I’ve properly “moved on”… and wouldn’t you know it was because I Took the First Step.
Quote:
I’m soaking with Candy - My 6 year old
Coin flips come out tails 55% of the time, according to my research - My 8 year old
That’s not why you eat ice cream - Vic