I found a life-hack that helps me keep my living spaces more tidy without the inconvenience of having to put things away immediately. What if you could just throw away clutter as if it were garbage?
Whenever I didn’t know where to put something, I set it on my bedside table. If I didn’t have a bedside table, then I had some other flat surface I used instead. This was the pattern I followed for my whole life. It was convenient and practical. I always knew where to put stuff, and I usually knew where everything was—an organized mess.
I used this strategy to organize pretty much everything in my room. Each item was placed where it was because that was the most convenient place to put it when I needed to put it somewhere. To others, it looked like a mess, but to me… it looked like a mess—but I knew where to find everything, and it didn’t take much effort to maintain.
My primary reason for not keeping things more neat was that I didn’t want to have to put everything away in the correct place all the time. When I walk into my room with five items that I need to quickly stash away before quickly leaving, I just don’t have the time to put each item where it belongs. It gets even worse when I don’t have a designated place for a few of the items. Even if I have time to put everything where it belongs, I certainly don’t have the time to carefully decide on new locations for new items that don’t belong anywhere yet.
Contrasting against my cluttered living space were the tidy, organized, asthetic living spaces of my soon-to-be wife and some of my other friends. As much as I told myself that my room was convenient and functional, and that that was better than asthetic, I simply couldn’t deny that I was craving a life spent in a more beautiful environment.
There had to be a way to manage a living space so that it is both convenient and nice to look at at the same time.
As I scoured the internet for solutions, I came across one of the best life-hacks I’ve ever found: the clutter box. It’s very simple. Find yourself a good-sized box that will suite your needs well, and use it as a sort of catch-all for things you don’t have time to put away. Have some stuff in your pockets before going to bed? Dump it in the box. See a couple things lying on the floor when they shouldn’t be? Box. Bedside table getting a little cluttered? Box. You get the point. If there’s clutter, put it in the box. It’s the clutter box. Then, whenever it’s looking a little full, and you have a free moment, put away everything in the box in the right places all in one go. It’s a lot more efficient that way because you can just dump out the box, sort it depending on which part of the house each thing belongs in, then make one trip around the house, carrying everything in the box, delivering each item to its destination.
There you have it, the convenience of a garbage can, the efficiency of a delivery service, and a living space that is totally free of clutter. Just remember to check the clutter box first if you can’t find something.
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