A dot a day keeps the clutter away

jmward01

First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this system that come to mind immediately: - The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots and, I think the stated reason for the dots. - The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more. - But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that. So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.

stickfigure

Interesting, 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?

ihaveajob

This is neat but my OCD brain is hurting. I suspect a location based sorting, where most-recently-used boxes are near the top, or closer to your workstation, solves the same problem without the visual clutter.

shermantanktop

My low-tech solution to organizing electronic parts is to use shoeboxes, with written labels at the end, and plastic bags inside to organize the various groups of items. They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used much. On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.

shevy-java

Looks like a huge mess really.

samuelknight

This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.

hecanjog

I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat mundane in-between details about your setup the most. (I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)

brandrick

messy, but there is something endearing about the approach

tayo42

I wouldn't want to clean up the dots when I'm done tracking lol I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me

jvanderbot

Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.

samlinnfer

I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.

comrade1234

Years ago I had a landlord that had been in the British military in some signal/ntelligence role. After, he made a living of stockpiling and selling obscure but simple chips from china to American military contractors.

nighthawk454

Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is like - presumably some kind of power law shape.

dogscatstrees

Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code persistent memory system?

semiquaver

Hilarious that the box labeled “dots” has so many dots on it.

JKCalhoun

I like this system a lot. I always considered I would do something similar if I owned a used book store. Each year would usher in a new colors. All books acquired that year get that colored dot on the inside page. Some 5 years (or so) on I could easily go through each shelf of books and find the ones that were not moving. These get one last chance (a year?) in a bargain bin before then they go to Goodwill or wherever. Otherwise a used bookstore can remain in a "picked over" and cluttered state.

sudonanohome

A lazy wall of AI slop: > I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale. > Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale. > That's not a failure. That's the system working. I wonder if there's a simple regex that could detect these. Perhaps I should ask Claude The entirety of this post could be explained in 20 tokens: 1) use transparent boxes and bags for organizing 2) track the usage with stickers 3) remove rarely accessed boxes We need a sponsorblock-style crowdsourced solution against such slop. Meanwhile I'm just blocking offenders' domains on all of my networks

paulmooreparks

Nice system. I think I'd cut out a bit of adhesive whiteboard material and draw dots on that, but that has its own downsides. Little systems like this are so useful. For example, I have a similar system for clothes hanging in my closet. Shirts hang on the left side of the bar, trousers on the right. Empty hangers go into the middle. Clean clothes are always placed into the middle on the appropriate side. Whenever I pull something out to wear, I choose from the ends, not the middle. This does two things: First, I'm cycling my clothes a little more fairly instead of wearing the same stuff over and over (the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess). Second, clothes that I don't like so much or just don't use, for whatever reason, get pushed to the ends, and every year I pull out the stuff that's been stuck at the ends for a while and donate it to charity, without a moment's thought.

squirtle24

I guess everyone has their own system that works for them, though I feel like this is bit over engineering. Also having to peel tiny stickers adds friction to the flow, even if it’s 2 seconds. To determine what parts were used the most, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the completed projects, then count which parts were used in them? It would likely be a close enough approximation without the overhead of the dot system, and might be good for documenting the project anyway. Plus the dot system doesn’t have a lot of granularity or flexibility, and it relies on the categories being static. Let’s say a box of resistors grows so big you want to split it into two subcategories; reallocating the existing dots correctly is now quite difficult. Also, the annoying thing about collecting dusty components is that you won’t need it most of the time… until you do.

WhyNotHugo

This sounds great, except: how do you know if you've already labelled a box today or not? How do you prevent double, triple, or quadruple labelling? BTW: gonna take a lot of ideas from this article, thanks for sharing!