# Advent 2022: 13. Inbox and Backlog Reduction and Freshening

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/advent-2022-13-inbox-and-backlog-reduction-and-freshening/10667>\
**Category:** Akrasia\
**Created:** [December 13, 2022, 12:46pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/advent-2022-13-inbox-and-backlog-reduction-and-freshening/10667 "2022-12-13T12:46:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![alys](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/alys/32/4726_2.png) [@alys](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/alys)\
**Post date:** [December 26, 2022, 2:36am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/advent-2022-13-inbox-and-backlog-reduction-and-freshening/10667/4 "2022-12-26T02:36:38Z")

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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](https://blog.beeminder.com/control/)

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