I’m copying in @dreev’s “cluttermania” daily beemail from 22 December, 2022 because it’s a clever enhancement to the original Control Systems approach for dealing with clutter.
Happy Solstice!
Here’s a holiday special beemail: My and Bee’s new scheme for beeminding decluttering. It starts with the obvious thing everyone does: a do-more goal to put items of clutter away. You get a +1 for putting away something that was cluttering the house.
The new twist is that we designate a big box or closet or cordoned off area which we call purgatory. If there’s a piece of clutter you don’t know what to do with, you get half a point for putting it in purgatory and another half for taking it out and putting it where it belongs. So if you need 2 points today, you can put 4 things into purgatory, take 4 things out, or anything in between.
This seems to be helpful because sometimes you’re in shove-things-under-the-bed mode and other times you can gradually whittle down that mass of clutter as Beeminder demands.
Of course you can use the control systems [1] approach to dial up your decluttering rate as purgatory threatens to overflow, and dial it down to keep it from ever quite dwindling to nothing.
Let me know if you’re inspired to try that, or if you have your own variant you like!
[1] I recently realized that the term “cybernetics” is an even fancier term for control systems, as if I weren’t already making such a dirt simple idea seem seventeen times more complicated than it is: Control Systems For Backlogs | Beeminder Blog