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I have another post that I was writing about the one-day French immersion class I attended on Saturday. This other idea is ready before that one.
When I woke up this morning, my brain was begging me to begin cleaning out boxes from the Scary Room. The room has four aisles of boxes with what ought to be three walkways between each aisle. However the middle aisles have enough stuff between them that there are only two walkways and only one of these has been navigable by fat dudes. I had concluded yesterday that it would be easiest to start with the aisle of boxes along the kitchen wall, which forms one side of the navigable walkway. As I cleared each stack of boxes (usually four boxes to a columnar stack), I could navigate even more easily and see my task shrink.
I grabbed a box and emptied its contents onto the dining room table. I had a box full of books. many of which I had forgotten I'd owned. Then I grabbed another sealed box and found even more books. Then I found a third box was full of DVDs and video games.
One heuristic I've developed during this organization process is that a box takes an hour to sort. It doesn't matter that a box may take only twenty minutes to handle: if I don't have a full hour to spare, I ought not get started on a box. The contents may take only ten minutes to sort but another forty-five to get into their proper places and clean off the table.
Most of these boxes are about the same size, as they tend to be recycled wine bottle crates or similarly sized moving boxes. Some boxes take less time because they have homogeneous content or pre-sorted content. Other boxes take longer than an hour because they contain bags of other stuff.
The worst boxes are just stacks of papers, each member of which requires a cursory reading before each can be sorted. The papers must unfortunately be sorted immediately because they take up the most physical and mental space otherwise. ( Emotional diversion below the cut. )
In contrast, books are simple to sort: stack them by size and shelve them in the smallest shelf that fits the stack. DVDs are even easier to shelve since their boxes are all the same size. All the books and DVDs will get sorted in the Second Major Phase, which could start a couple weeks from now.
I thought I'd sorted through all of my books already. Instead I was staring at some good ones and some seriously lame ones. Between a lame trivia book about Boston and a stack of old magazines was a book I thought was still at my mother's house: Chambers for a Memory Palace. Two architecture professors write letters back and forth describing the constructs necessary to form memory palaces. Classical orators used these semi-mnemonic devices to remember their speeches, since 3-by-5 cards didn't yet exist and require literacy.
I picked up this book when I was in university. Though I never finished reading it, I loved what I had read and loved the line drawings of various settings. I integrated the ideas with my own experiences, which is how I remember what I want to write later.
I sorted through a couple more boxes, then headed to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fangirl715's place for chocolate cake. We talked and got bummed about the cost of NINJA tickets. It's a dollar shy of a Franklin if one wants to stand in the pit and see 9" Nails and Jane's Addiction at Great Woods this summer. It's a lot cheaper at Jones Beach for mezzanine tickets, but then I'd have to trek out. Either option is still more than I can shell out when I need to live until I get a job.
Then I went home and resumed my Scary Room Excavation. I think I went through an impressive ten boxes today, although I ran out of steam just as I finished tossing stuff from the last box. I still had a sprawl of objects in two rooms: it took another hour before I had enough of the mess wrangled that I could excuse myself to the Internet. I didn't actually spend ten hours on the ten boxes, but I definitely spent a working day on the process.
I filled one and a half big garbage bags today. I still have another half a dozen boxes to sort before that first aisle is clear, the walkway is immense and the items along the back wall are in my grasp. Soon I will have seen all of my possessions for the first time in half a decade. I already own at least a third fewer objects than I did when I started and I can inventory my possessions far more easily.
-investing time to fight entropy, Ps/d
When I woke up this morning, my brain was begging me to begin cleaning out boxes from the Scary Room. The room has four aisles of boxes with what ought to be three walkways between each aisle. However the middle aisles have enough stuff between them that there are only two walkways and only one of these has been navigable by fat dudes. I had concluded yesterday that it would be easiest to start with the aisle of boxes along the kitchen wall, which forms one side of the navigable walkway. As I cleared each stack of boxes (usually four boxes to a columnar stack), I could navigate even more easily and see my task shrink.
I grabbed a box and emptied its contents onto the dining room table. I had a box full of books. many of which I had forgotten I'd owned. Then I grabbed another sealed box and found even more books. Then I found a third box was full of DVDs and video games.
One heuristic I've developed during this organization process is that a box takes an hour to sort. It doesn't matter that a box may take only twenty minutes to handle: if I don't have a full hour to spare, I ought not get started on a box. The contents may take only ten minutes to sort but another forty-five to get into their proper places and clean off the table.
Most of these boxes are about the same size, as they tend to be recycled wine bottle crates or similarly sized moving boxes. Some boxes take less time because they have homogeneous content or pre-sorted content. Other boxes take longer than an hour because they contain bags of other stuff.
The worst boxes are just stacks of papers, each member of which requires a cursory reading before each can be sorted. The papers must unfortunately be sorted immediately because they take up the most physical and mental space otherwise. ( Emotional diversion below the cut. )
In contrast, books are simple to sort: stack them by size and shelve them in the smallest shelf that fits the stack. DVDs are even easier to shelve since their boxes are all the same size. All the books and DVDs will get sorted in the Second Major Phase, which could start a couple weeks from now.
I thought I'd sorted through all of my books already. Instead I was staring at some good ones and some seriously lame ones. Between a lame trivia book about Boston and a stack of old magazines was a book I thought was still at my mother's house: Chambers for a Memory Palace. Two architecture professors write letters back and forth describing the constructs necessary to form memory palaces. Classical orators used these semi-mnemonic devices to remember their speeches, since 3-by-5 cards didn't yet exist and require literacy.
I picked up this book when I was in university. Though I never finished reading it, I loved what I had read and loved the line drawings of various settings. I integrated the ideas with my own experiences, which is how I remember what I want to write later.
I sorted through a couple more boxes, then headed to
fangirl715's place for chocolate cake. We talked and got bummed about the cost of NINJA tickets. It's a dollar shy of a Franklin if one wants to stand in the pit and see 9" Nails and Jane's Addiction at Great Woods this summer. It's a lot cheaper at Jones Beach for mezzanine tickets, but then I'd have to trek out. Either option is still more than I can shell out when I need to live until I get a job.Then I went home and resumed my Scary Room Excavation. I think I went through an impressive ten boxes today, although I ran out of steam just as I finished tossing stuff from the last box. I still had a sprawl of objects in two rooms: it took another hour before I had enough of the mess wrangled that I could excuse myself to the Internet. I didn't actually spend ten hours on the ten boxes, but I definitely spent a working day on the process.
I filled one and a half big garbage bags today. I still have another half a dozen boxes to sort before that first aisle is clear, the walkway is immense and the items along the back wall are in my grasp. Soon I will have seen all of my possessions for the first time in half a decade. I already own at least a third fewer objects than I did when I started and I can inventory my possessions far more easily.
-investing time to fight entropy, Ps/d
