How organizing systems are like computer code
and what that means about how simple they need to be
As Joel Spolsky famously said:
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
In my experience, it’s the same with organizing systems.
I was working with a client today who was (very relatable!) poking around in a bunch of boxes trying to figure out which one was which. The one she had thought was one for one thing turned out to be for another thing. And then there was another box she figured she most have decided to put photos in at some point, even though the top layer of the box had been a bunch of other things, too.
And watching her trying to reconstruct her thinking process at the time made me realize that, as with code, it’s harder to remember and implement organizing systems than it is to design them.
Once upon a time, I used to keep my kids’ out-of-rotation toys in a complicated series of bags, shelves, and boxes in a hard-to-access crawl space. As you much expect, it was a lot of work to remember what went where! At the time I was putting things away, the systems all seemed very logical. I think the systems were very logical, with all the context I had loaded up in my head. Without it… not so much.
Eventually, I realized I couldn’t rely on my memory, so I labeled all the boxes, took pictures of all the items, and entered what they were into a database. When I think about having done that now, it seems pretty silly to me, because, while I had arguably fixed the part about having to rely on my memory, I had not yet learned that maintaining such a complicated system was also a bunch of work!
Even assuming that every time I was putting away toys that already had an entry I was consistently filing them correctly and updating the database (which I was emphatically not doing!), for this system to keep making sense, I had to update it when I got new toys, and update it when I donated old toys (which of course I was not doing nearly enough of).
And with multiple little kids, did I really want a part time job maintaining a toy database?
As it happened, I eventually came to terms with the fact that I did not.
And this isn’t meant to be a categorical knock on databases, or other systems to keep track of inventory. Usually, these days, I’d rather have less than come up with a system, but sometimes we really do need to keep track of a lot, and a system can be very helpful. Maybe even a database with pictures and locations.
But my advice to my past self would be:
Consider your intuitive sense of how complicated to make the system, and whether you’re perhaps judging something like “how much complication about this system can I fit into my brain right now.”
Keep in mind that right now, you’ve recently loaded up a bunch of relevant context in your head about all of these objects and how they relate to each other.
Now consider that the most likely scenario is that the next time you have to use this system, all, or almost all, of that context will be gone.
And consider that the other possibility is that you will have been living your life carrying around a bunch of fiddly context about a toy organizing system in your brain because you allocated a bunch of brain space to this toy organizing system, and that too is a cost.
Now, please consider making your organizing system much less complicated than you were originally thinking.
If you can get it to the point where you would expect a randomly chosen adult to understand the system if they thought about it for a minute, but without asking any questions, that is probably much better.
Now also see if you can get it to the point where a randomly chosen young child would probably have a pretty good idea of what the system was without having to think about it.
Because it’s harder to maintain organizing systems than it is to create them.