A Spot for Everything
One of the concepts I enjoyed learning about in university was entropy. The amount of energy required to maintain order found a metaphor in keeping things organized in your room. Over time, order will decay and that nice throw pillow will end up on the floor, a cup will be left on the coffee table, some crumbs will end up on the sofa, oops… I little tomato sauce on the rug.
I wonder how how much of my life is spent just picking up things around the house and putting them away. This is a metaphor for many other activities that involve simple clean up and repetition.
Mari Kondo talks about having a place to put everything. I’m wondering if that’s something that should be a hard requirement before we purchase anything new, or even replace something. Nail scissors? I know where they are every few weeks and only for the few hours after I returned them to where I found them.
Kevin Kelly has a rule and it’s to put an item back to the first place you looked for them, not where you last found them. That reminds me of the “tracks in the snow” method for the apocryphal story of how a dean decided where to pave paths on campus, aka Desire Paths.
It requires less energy to organize systems that have pockets of stable equilibriums. Placing a dishwasher next to the sink or a hamper next to where one normally finds a pile of clothes on the ground are examples. Maybe it’s also automation that automatically saves versions whenever a change is detected.
Much energy that could be redirected towards improving humanity is spent maintaining it.
