Tag: organization

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We recently made significant progress helping our kids tidy their things. We have two boys 3 and 6 years old. The improved organization has been a relief for me because for a long time I have felt overwhelmed when I see all the toys, clothes, books, and little knickknacks in their room. To learn from the experience, I’m writing about what worked and what didn’t.

It is important to me to stay connected with my kids, and avoid actions that break the connection. My close relationship with the kids is key to supporting their needs. The associated love and closeness is a need itself, but the connection helps me to see and respond to my kid’s other needs. In my experience, pushing past the kids consent to do something “good” for the kids tends not to be worth it. The kids start to rebel, and then our routine starts to become a nightmarish ordeal. So I wanted to find a way to help the kids tidy their toys that they could consent to. A seemingly impossible task for kids who love toys!

But I felt it was important to do something because our kids needed help with organizing their things, especially with the toys. The main challenge was the sheer number of toys. Between Christmas, birthdays, relatives giving small things on random occasions, the kids using a small allowance to buy toys themselves, little gift bags from friends birthday parties, and toys in happy meals…it really added up. In addition, the toys span a wide range of sizes, shapes, materials, and colors. To make it even harder, many of the toys were part of a set, and if one tiny piece is missing it can ruin the whole set.

This kid’s strategy for organizing their items was to use every horizontal surface in their room as a heap. The advantage with this strategy is that the stuff you use tends to be on top, and there is more room to see a variety of items. Also you never have to worry about putting things “back”, you just put them down (a big plus for anyone, but especially a 3 year old!). The downside is that the sets of toys get completely mixed together so it is almost impossible to find all the pieces. Also it seems like the visual clutter makes it hard for the kids to find all the toys; they tend to play with a small subset. From my perspective, the heap strategy conflicted with my need for order and clear pathways in case of a fire.

To help the kids, I knew that I wanted to use principles from Marie Kondo’s work (see her book, the life-changing magic of tidying up), because it had made a big difference in my life. In 2019, I had gone through the whole Marie Kondo process, and it had really helped. It took me over a year but I finished in April, 2020. I wrote a post about that tidying experience. One of the things I learned was the importance of clearly defining where things will be stored.

That learning didn’t fully sink in, because when we moved into a house in 2021, I didn’t create a well defined storage system, and my things started to build up again. Also we had not yet gone through our jointly held stuff, and with a house we started to get more things. To reverse the trend, I started going through my things again, and after a few off and on attempts, I finished going through my own things this year. I haven’t finished with the storage systems yet. Writing about tidying has helped me remember how important storage is. So I just added a storage project to my to do list!

More than just “walking the walk” tidying my own things is preparing me to be able to help the kids as they go through their things. I don’t have everything figured out, but I’m learning, sometimes the hard way, about what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, I think tidying is building up my ability to hear my own inner voice and experience the joy of following it. I want to share this experience with my kids. I want them each to be free to follow their own inner voice.

I started actively working with the kids on tidying in August this year. I was home to watch the kids on the last week of August because they didn’t have daycare or school. We took a family vacation for the first half of the week, but in the second half I helped the kids go through their things. I did it in the morning before the kids had started watching shows, and each day only worked about an hour on it. That way the kids stayed fresh. We only did a little each day, but we kept on coming back to it and started to make some progress.

We went through things by category as recommended by Marie Kondo, starting with clothes. Despite toys being the more obvious source of clutter, it turned out that they both discarded a good amount of their clothes. So much so that it was a bit of a problem for my wife who wanted to make sure the kids have enough nice clothes. After discussion the kids kept some of the nice clothes and we kept some of our older son’s discarded clothes in storage for our younger son. We saw an immediate benefit from discarding clothes. It was a lot easier to help them get dressed in the morning. There were fewer options, and all the options were clothes the kids liked.

As we went through the decluttering process, it became important to clearly define which things and areas are managed by which people. Marie Kondo recommends that each person have a place for their things, and for them to be free to manage it how they like. I gained more clarity about this idea from sociocracy, which is a form of group organization where things are decided by consent. In sociocracy, there is this idea of domains which are areas in which a group or individual can do things without asking for permission. Domains are super helpful because they allow people to act and be creative within the domain without negatively affecting the larger group.

So I started thinking about how to apply domains to the kid’s room. Making sure there were clear paths in the room for fire safety is under the parents domain, but determining which regular clothes to keep is under the kids domain. The exact boundaries need to be negotiated. For example, at first I was thinking the choosing of the kid’s clothes could be under the kid’s domain, but we needed to make an exception for the parents to ensure there are some nice clothes for the kids. Similarly as we went through books, there were some children’s books that were old favorites of us parents, but that the kids were ready to discard. We decided to designate the bookshelf downstairs as under the parents domain, and we put those parent favorite, kid books downstairs. The kids could decide which books to keep in the shelf in their room.

The kids don’t have much paper yet, so we skipped it and went to toys. Although, we will need to come back to papers because my oldest is in 1st grade and starting to get lots of papers from school. We started with discarding the toys that didn’t spark joy. The “does this spark joy?” question can be a bit hard to understand for kids. I found that asking “Do you love this or do you think someone else would love this?” worked out pretty well. It seemed easier for the kids to part with toys if they thought that maybe another kid would take care of the toy. We put the toys they want to keep in a separate room to clearly separate them from the toys they hadn’t gone through yet.

After a couple Saturday mornings of going through toys, the kids lost energy in the discarding process. Most of the good toys were in the separate room. To shift things up, we applied domains. I got some large plastic bins and assigned 4 bins to each of my sons and put them in the kid’s room. Then we took the toys they had decided to keep and put them in the bins. These toy bins are under their domain. All the rest of the many miscellaneous toys we moved to the other room. The room is under the parent’s domain, but we hoped that the kids would still help go through the rest of the toys so the pile was under the shared domain of the parents and the kids. So now anything left in the pile needs the consent of the parents to keep, or the kids could move the items to their bins in their room. The shift in framing helped to give the kids another burst of energy to go through their toys.

As we went through the remaining toys we realized that many of them were part of sets and that it would be better for us parents to manage storing them. The toy sets are difficult to keep organized (especially for young children) and tend to be better as shared toys. Instead of each kid having their own small Duplo collection, it’s more fun to have one large set of blocks. Also practically it is much easier to put all the blocks of a certain kind together, instead of remembering which blocks belong to which kid. Thankfully the kids were open to this, so we put aside the toy sets they wanted to keep.

At this point the kids got tired of going through toys. The last bit my wife and I agreed to go through. It took us a while to find the time to go through the toys. We didn’t feel like we had the capacity to have more toys coming in until we had finished going through the current toys, so we stopped occasionally buying small toys for the kids on grocery store trips. This change motivated the kids, especially our older son, to persistently ask us to finish going through the toys. With that push, my wife and I were able to make some time to go through the toys. We decided what we were willing to store and bagged up the rest to be given away. In mid-November, we got a baby sitter to watch the kids while we went through the final things and set up storage for the toys.

The toys all have a spot now. There are shared sets of toys like hot wheels cars and tracks, dino figures, puzzles, and Magnatiles in the other room. Then in the kids room there are the favorite, random toys in their bins. There are still toys and various items scattered across the floor most days, but it is much more manageable to quickly put them away. That’s a win!

This organization effort definitely cost time and energy, but for us it was a good investment. We were already spending a good amount of effort clearing paths through piles of toys, so it made sense to spend effort now to get to a more sustainable situation. I’m glad that the kids were involved. I feel pretty confident there won’t be any big upset in the future about missing toys that we gave away. It was helpful using domains to clarify where stuff goes and who decides what. I’m hopeful that this perspective could help in other areas. Most importantly with things more organized, there is more room to play!

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The following post was written in early May 2020, but for some reason I never published it. I’m not sure why. I found it recently because I was trying to remember when I had gone through my Marie Kondo tidying challenge. I’m working on a followup post on tidying with kids, and I want to reference my original tidying challenge.

About a year and a month ago, I took on the challenge to tidy my possessions according to Marie Kondo’s KonMarie system. It’s been a marathon, but a great experience. I started at the end of March 2019, and called it done about two weeks ago [end of April 2020].

The idea is simple: go through all of my possessions and only keep the ones that “spark joy”. The challenge for me was my large numbers of possessions.

The KonMarie system breaks down the process into first discarding things that do not spark joy, and then finding ways to store all the things that do bring joy. Furthermore the discarding step is broken down by category: Clothes, Books, Paper, Komono (miscellaneous), and Sentimental.

This breaking down by category was critical for being able to get through this monumental task. Sometimes I would go for a few weeks without doing anything, but when I started again, I wouldn’t be starting from scratch. I would pick up at the category where I left off.

I finally finished the sentimental items around February or March, and so then I worked on storing things. I’ve found storage to be critical for two reasons: first good storage sparks joy and second good storage helps give natural feedback that helps to keep things tidy.

The joy of good storage surprised me. I had always thought of clothes drawers as utilitarian items. Discarding clothes didn’t change that, although it did help prevent that kind of guilty feeling of seeing clothes that I never wear. But following Marie Kondo’s advice, I rearranged the clothes first off by folding them vertically, then sorting by color, and using empty spaces to store things that go with clothes like hats, ties, and sunglasses. The end result is that I smile when I open my drawers.

I’ve found that good storage will naturally tell me when I need to do a bit of tidying. Marie Kondo recommends that you keep your storage areas about 90% full. So when I get a new shirt or a new book I can put it in the drawer or on the book shelf, but as the last 10% gets used up I can tell that I need to discard things that I no longer need. This has already happened with clothes and with books.

Working on storage was hard in a different way than discarding things. It requires creativity and sometimes materials like boxes. Also there is no clear definition of done. I ended up going with the it’s done if feels done to me. Essentially, I aimed for the areas where I store things to spark joy in some way and to look maintainable.

It’s not perfect for sure, but I’m happy about my stuff and how I’m storing it. I’m proud of that, and can say that I have finished.

Of course there is more to do. Maybe I’ll hang up some pictures or artwork. I’d love to go through my digital possessions and discard what doesn’t spark joy and find good ways to store what brings joy. Hopefully, we’ll go through our joint possessions as a family. We’ll take those things on at some point, but for now I’ll just celebrate this milestone.

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I’m interested in building up a personal store of knowledge – good ideas, data, memories, and notes – and saving it in a way that I can quickly and easily make use of this information. Without some external way of saving things, I tend to forget them. The dream is that these ideas and pieces of information don’t have to be re-thought up or re-found each time but can be explored to rapidly generate more ideas. Ideally this would help me solve problems and help generate new knowledge for the wider society.

In reality this has turned out to be much harder than I expected. In my experience, it is easy to save information but hard to find it and make use of it later. The vast majority of my files have never been used after I saved them. When I do happen to remember a piece of information that I want to look up, I tend to have trouble finding it. This unfortunate situation surprised me. I had bought into the idea that there is essentially no cost to saving things digitally so I should save everything, and second that digital tools should make it easy to find things. I was wrong on both counts.

The difficulty of storing information became a real problem for me in grad school when I was doing research for my PhD in physics. I had to deal with countless journal articles, presentations, calculations, brainstorming sketches, experimental data, notes from talks/classes, and different versions of code (I wasn’t using version control, aaahhh!). At first, I thought my problems were just caused by the wrong organizational system. So I tried different systems, but despite having advantages and disadvantages they didn’t solve the underlying problem for me.

Thanks to my misadventures, I’m learning that forgetting is a feature not a bug. When I try to remember all my ideas and information, the default organizational systems struggle and while specialized tools can help they also tend to silo information. It turns out, there is a need to limit the inflow of information and the amount of work in progress. I need the information and ideas that are relevant to me, and everything else is unlikely to be needed, and should be let go. In a way my organization system for saving ideas and information is an extension of my brain. My brain is quite good at forgetting things (sometimes too good!). So while it is important to have good tools and organization, shouldn’t my system also forget things?

The default ways of organizing tend to be digital analogues to the way we store papers: papers on the desk, in notebooks, and in folders. These systems fail in similar ways to paper based systems. The simplest approach is to just put everything you need on the desktop, but this quickly fails if you have more than around ten files. The next simplest is to create notebooks; essentially storing the files in chronological order (for example by starting the filename with the date). This helps because you can quickly find a file if you remember when you worked on it, which tends to happen for things you recently worked on. However this approach makes it hard to see connections between ideas from different times1. You can’t re-arrange the ideas as you learn more; they are fixed in chronological order.

The next strategy that I’ve tried is putting files in a folder structure according to topic. This seems like a reasonable idea, but quickly becomes quicksand for ideas. Inevitably, I need to change the folder structure as I learn to better reflect the association between my files. The changes make it hard to remember where things are and breaks any references to file paths. As I create more folders, I find it difficult to remember the context underlying the relationships between folders. This can lead to folders with mashed up collections of files and sub-folders that don’t make sense.

Based on these struggles, I have turned to more specialized tools as a way to solve my organizational challenges. They can make a huge difference, but can create silos of information. For example, I started using Zotero in grad school, to keep track of all my research articles. This was a huge improvement over putting papers in topic based folders and trying to cram paper keywords into the filenames. Zotero has useful tools that allowed me to generate bibliographies automatically and to save papers directly from the browser. But now I had a separate store of papers that wasn’t tightly integrated with my research data and information; it was in a separate silo. This turned into a problem when I needed to reinstall my operating system. All my other files were restored but I had trouble recovering my Zotero papers. Eventually I was able to recover them, but it highlights that separate silos increase the complexity of securing my data.

Ultimately tools won’t help if the information is not useful. Marie Kondo says throw away all papers (except what you really need)2, and I think the same could be said for digital information too. She says this because according to her core principle, your things should “spark joy” and she finds papers rarely spark joy. Do my digital files and information spark joy? The majority probably don’t. I’m not totally sure because most are in these old folders that I never look at.

Information tends to bring me more joy when it is connected to something bigger, and this is where tools can help. For example, the “Untitled” file in an old folder called “New” is probably not useful. The context is lost; it is just a fragment. In contrast, a note in an Evernote notebook is part of something bigger. Evernote allows the notes to be displayed in different ways which can help the context to be recovered, and it is easy to search. It’s also easier to make connections between different notes with tags or with links.

Based on these experiences, I have begun to seriously fight the accumulation of unnecessary fragments and now try to only keep things that are part of a “whole”. One practice that has helped a lot is to channel the inflow of information. By default, there many different places that new files are saved, which is bad because it’s hard to evaluate what should be kept. To make things more manageable, I create a single “Inbox” folder where any new file is saved temporarily until it can be saved in an appropriate place (I got the idea from this blog post3). This little change gave visibility to the problem, because I could easily see files building up. Now that the files were in one place, it was more straightforward to decide what to keep and what to delete (although I still put it off sometimes!). This is a small step toward protecting my digital space and being intentional about what I allow in.

Limiting the amount of work in progress is also critical. Work in progress can be many things: unfinished projects, ideas that need to be pursued, or emails that need to be responded to. Too much work in progress is bad for multiple reasons (Agile frameworks like Kanban4 and Scrum5 are dedicated to limiting work in progress), but in regard to storing information, the unfinished work means that there are lots of associated files and information that don’t bring joy. Instead of being sources of useful information, these incomplete files require additional work and are difficult to understand because of missing context. One tactic that helps limit the work in progress is to create a single “Current Projects” folder for things that are being actively worked on (this is another good idea from this blog post3). With all the active work in one place it is easier to see when things are getting overwhelming. When that happens, I need to let go of things that I am never going to do and work to finish the projects that are important.

Organization requires deep change in behavior. I am part of the knowledge organization system, so if the system is going to succeed then I need to be working too. This means being more intentional with what I keep and with how I keep the things that are important. The hard part is letting go. Sometimes that means deleting now and sometimes it means letting something be buried in the bottom of a list of notes. Either way this reserves the prime spots for the most useful information. As part of my system, I also need to focus on what is most important. This is a huge challenge because it requires saying “No” to some demands, and risking the disapproval of others. When those demands come from bosses, significant others, or children it’s difficult to say no. But by setting limits, I will be able to make the most of my limited resources and give the most back to those in my life.

The effort is worth it for me. As I have been implementing these changes, I have found that I spend less time searching for files, notes or projects from a few months ago. It still happens sometimes, but usually when I didn’t follow my own rules! My store of information is not some magically useful thing that I will use in the future, but a limited resource that I rely on and enjoy now. It has room to grow, with plenty of unneeded information that can be pruned and lots more that can be added in an integrated way. This practice is helping me to think more clearly. Letting go of information, forgetting, is helping me to make connections between the important ideas that are left.

  1. David B. Clear, “Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive”, https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125.
  2. Kondo, Marie. the life-changing magic of tidying up. 2014 p 96.
  3. Mark Virtue, “Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization”, https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15677/zen-and-the-art-of-file-and-folder-organization/.
  4. David J. Anderson, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.
  5. Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process.