Project Re-Rail: The Clutter Hypothesis

This month I spent a lot of money on Amazon that I shouldn't have. I returned a lot of stuff, but not all of it, for the pretty simple reason that I genuinely have a use for a lot of it. Primarily the big bundles of storage and display baskets currently scattered throughout my room. There's one on the table by my door (recently moved from a different house) that's just full of random junk. Another on my bookcase for the same purpose. Really!

See, I have a hypothesis that I'm testing. The hypothesis is this: Clutter is not the result of insufficient organizational systems, or even the result of having too much crap.

Wait, you're saying as you work through that sentence. But clutter is stuff that isn't organized. So it has to be the result of not being organized. Or of having too much stuff. Right?

 Well. Kind of. Let me clarify the details of this hypothesis.

  1. Having organizational systems is, obviously, good. Books go on the bookcase. Clothes go in the dresser. Pens go in the desk, or a convenient desk-side pen holder. HOWEVER:
  2. It is impossible, given a sufficient variety of stuff, to have a place for everything and everything in its place. Attempting to do so will result in increasingly convoluted systems that will only result in having more trouble finding things.
  3. If you have too much stuff and literally cannot fit everything in the square footage of your house, you're going to have to put it somewhere it doesn't belong. HOWEVER:
  4. I've never seen a home where the clutter couldn't have fit somewhere. Be honest: Have you?
Which means that there must be a different cause. So here's the weird iteration of this hypothesis that I'm testing.

The best solution to clutter is not to try to eliminate the stuff that is not in its place, but instead to create places for clutter.

Those random things on my table and my bookcase are contained. By their nature, they are in the place where they belong.  They're not clutter, because they've been put where they belong. Thus I've transformed the random junk that accumulates anywhere you live long enough from "clutter" to "stuff I don't have to deal with." I've simultaneously relaxed the boundaries on where things are supposed to go. The PS4 games I play the most are on top of the PS4 instead of on a shelf somewhere. The entire top shelf of a bookcase is taken up with medications that just don't fit in any smaller container.

The intention here is that rather than looking around my room and going "dammit why is all this crap where it doesn't belong?" and having to clean up the clutter every week or two, I'll shrug and periodically clean out the clutter catchers when they just can't hold any more crap.

That's the hypothesis. Let's see how it goes.

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