Law 1: Reduce
Law 3: Time
Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
> Excerpted from Pages 11-12 of my book, The Laws of Simplicity
The home is usually the first battleground that comes to mind when facing the daily challenge of managing complexity. Stuff just seems to multiply. There are three consistent strategies for achieving simplicity in the living realm: 1) buy a bigger house, 2) put everything you don’t really need into storage, or 3) organize your existing assets in a systematic fashion.
These typical solutions have mixed results. At first, a larger home lowers the clutter to space ratio. But ultimately, the greater space enables more clutter. The storage route increases the amount of empty space, but it can be immediately filled in with more stuff that will need to go into storage. The final option of implementing a system takes the form of things like closet organizers, that help bring structure to the chaos as long as the organizing principles can be obeyed. I find it compelling that all three clutter-reducing industries—the real estate market, easy storage services such as Door to Door, and rational furnishing retailers like the Container Store—are booming.
Concealing the magnitude of clutter, either through spreading it out or hiding it, is an unnuanced approach that is guaranteed to work by the first Law of reduce. There are only two questions to ask in the de-complicating procedure: “What to hide?” and “Where to put it?” Without much thought and enough hands on deck, a messy room becomes free of clutter in no time, and remains so for at least a few days or a week.
However, in the long term an effective scheme for organization is necessary to achieve definitive success in taming complexity. In other words, the more challenging question of “What goes with what?” needs to be added to the list. For instance in a closet there can be groupings of like items such as neckties, shirts, slacks, jacket, socks, and shoes. A thousand-piece wardrobe can be organized into six categories, and be dealt with at the aggregate level and achieve greater manageability. Organization makes a system of many appear fewer. Of course this will only hold if the number of groups is significantly less than the number of items to be organized.
67 Responses to “Law 2: Organize”
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The tendency of a bigger house to cause more clutter is pretty well understood. Now if only traffic engineers understood that adding more lanes just causes worse traffic. It’s like contending with obesity by purchasing a longer belt.
Needing to take an inch off of my trousers (not by dieting but because I bought the wrong size), I can certainly simplify with your belt analogy.
If by organisation, we are talking about aggregation of related objects, I think abstraction is a similar, but potentially more powerful, concept.
I don’t need to worry about how my clean socks are organised, for example, because I know they’re in my sock drawer. Now I only need concern myself with the (less flexible) interactions between me and the sock drawer rather than with individual socks. (It also makes them easier to count, which I see as a hint that it’s a useful abstraction.)
Somewhat related to abstraction are metaphor, allegory and approximation. When applied helpfully, each allows us to work at a higher level by being able to ignore underlying complexity.
Thanks Andrew, yes, “abstraction” is a good way to frame the entire space of simplicity. It represents the fact that you know where your socks are, thus you do not have to open each drawer to find them. Abstractions work best when they are tacitly understood. Seems kind of odd that abstractions have to be concrete … sort of an oxymoron to mull over on a lazy Saturday
You’re missing one thing; “get rid of it!” I can organize my closet as much as I want but until I get rid of those six-year old shirts that I never wear I won’t have room at all. Same with most of the things I have. I you don’t use it, give it to someone who will, or if it’s no good, recycle it or throw it out.
If I remember correctly, SLIP was part of Organize, and in it you made some comment related to the fact that organization doesn’t create simplicity when the number of categories begins to approximate the number of items being organized.
As I was organizing my thousands of PDFs of journal articles the other day, I was combining like articles in folders, creating a nice little hierarchy to make my sorting and finding of articles more efficient (even though the use of Spotlight probably makes my nice folder structure obsolete). When I was done, I looked at the hierarchy and noticed that some folders (labeled with the common content subject of the articles they contain) had only one or two PDFs, leading me to wonder whether at that level having a folder to contain those few items is more or less simple? While it creates more structure, which I feel is inherently less simple, it also appears to reduce complexity by hiding the actual PDF files.
So, my question is this: is there a widely-accepted rule of thumb for how many items should be in a group in order that it ultimately simplifies (as opposed to creating more mental/physical overhead?) I’m sure, for example, that professional organizers, must have some feeling for this as well.
Would you simplify a video camera’s menus by making a folder for two items? Or would it have to be at least three? or four? Or would you just avoid the question by invoking Reduce? Maybe I have too many journal articles…
(Alas, I also just discovered that the power of the Tab key doesn’t work in web forms, where the tab key moves me to the next field. Well, I tried! I’ll resort to using line breaks)
Hi John! The last sentence of this post reminded me of a chapter title in Jorge Wagensberg’s wonderful “El Gozo Intelectual” (”Intellectual Joy”): “El mundo es inteligible porque no puede haber mas arboles que ramas” (”The word is intelligible because there can’t be more trees than branches”).
Cheers and thanks for making your laws and keys available! (My favorite, btw, is Key #1).
That’s a great one Elzr. I can read Spanish so it made it even more enjoyable. Muchas Gracias, John
wow, this is a good topic. i find myself wondering about how to organize things in my room and on my drive nearly on a daily basis.
now, i realized that the most complex thing in organizing is to actively realize the moment in time when you have gathered enough stuff of mutual content to have it collectively labeled in your head, to then move it to some kind of folder.
i always find this process very interesting: you stumble into a topic and just browse around, then some documents start lying around on your drive/ floor/ desktop for a few days, sometimes weeks, and then, at some point, (for instance while cleaning up your room) you realize, wow, some of this stuff fits together: it all deals with xyz: let’s make a new folder for it!
at that very moment the topic often becomes tangible to me for the first time and i feel like suddenly being offered the opportunity to decide what to do with it, because the whole thing has a name now and thus has become accessible at will (i.e. google, conversations, books..)
sometimes i don’t even know the name of the topic and instead enter all its instances i have lying around into google to find a topic name to group them by, or even to be able to do better searches by adding the genre/topic name to my queries.
i’ve actually just gotten aware of the existence of this whole process a few months ago and i was impressed (and a bit self ashamed) about how complex all that organizational meta-thinking about one’s life has gotten over the past years. sites like lifehacker etc. deal with all that stuff a lot and i think it’s all due to some sort of fascination with being on the meta-level, looking from a distance at others as well as yourself.
in a technological context however, i have for long been wondering how long it will take until operating systems really will start helping you with all that organizational stuff via metadata, sql-ish query filesystems, priorization of data, expiry dates, version tracking and ideas like that. currently it seems to me that all the offline-thinking done in those fields (from GTD to simplify, lifehacker to ikea ) is far ahead of everything that’s happening in the digital domain. maybe because inefficiency in square meters is more costly than it is in megabytes..
funny, innit?
i’m really interested in all this stuff (topic name still missing here). if someone has any good hints on what to read about it, or just wants to drop me a line, don’t hesitate to do so!
Joe: with regard to the number of categories c for n things, I have a suspicion that the closer c is to sqrt(n) the more useful it is. From an information theoretic perspective, this is equivalent to a balanced c-ary tree of depth 2.
However, for things you treat as identical (5mm ball bearings, pairs of black socks, blank Post-It notes) you can have more items in a given category because any one will suffice: you’ll never be looking for a particular 5mm ball bearing.
Enjoying the blog very much, John, thanks.
I am a great fan of Google’s technologies and use it as much as I can. I’ve noticed, though, that it has made me completely lazy about organizing of digital media. As long as the file has a name, subject line or some other descriptive meta data (and sometimes not even that is necessary), my Google Desktop or Google search can find it quickly. So now I *could* just fling files about willy nilly – just dump everything into “Documents”… but old habits die hard and I just *feel better* stuffing common project files into a folder.
On a number of Web2.0ish sites, I have a similar experience. For example, my tasks don’t need to be stored in coherent lists around topic; i.e., “Operations” or “Marketing”. I can keep them in a single list and just TAG them with keywords. Then to see my Marketing items, I simply filter by that Tag. I’ve come to realize that tags are actually more useful than folders: I can categorize a single item with multiple tags so that different filters and searches can find the same item. For you GTD fans, this means tagging a single item with a context (”@home”) and a topic (”repairs”).
I originally worked this out for myself on email clients. I was a fanatic filer of email into folders. I came to realize that it was a big waste of time. Better was to tag the email with tags (”Categories” in MS Outlook, for example). Then I can search on a category and presto find all the relevant messages. So now all my email is in my Inbox.
One regret is that I can’t make this work for the physical world. My attempts to tag socks to make matching easier has not worked!
Great blog and great summary of your book. Its an interesting observation you make that the 3 industries that support amassing more stuff are booming. It is certainly true for 2 out of the 3 but I would beg to differ about the current Real Estate market. Who knows, maybe the sub-prime mortgage crisis will lead to more people adopting your simplicity principals.
I think it is also important for us humans to be less lazy. If I organize all the clutter in my house and arrange all my clothes in neat categories in my cupboard, it also means that searching for a particular cloth the next time requires more time than simply yanking it off the hangar. The same applies to getting up from a cosy TV position to switch on the fan, or drinking water from a glass instead of from the bottle directly.
If someone from 200 hundred years back were to appear here today, he would be astonished at the convenience we now live in and the laziness we have developed. Personally, I would prefer to have an organized desk/house and get up to do anything, than have everything at arm’s length but a messy place.
You say: There are three consistent strategies for achieving simplicity in the living realm: 1) buy a bigger house, 2) put everything you don’t really need into storage, or 3) organize your existing assets in a systematic fashion.
But what about exercising restraint in acquiring? Giving away surplus? Rethinking the thingyness of modern life? Not living beyond our means (= saving rather than borrowing)?
The suggestions of bigger house, storing stuff, and organizing systematically relate to Law # 2, organize.
Your suggestions, restraint in acquiring, giving away surplus, and saving money would, I think, fall under Law #1, Reduce… reduce the acquisition of stuff, reduce the amount of existing stuff, and reduce spending.
I love your book, and am trying to find the tool you mention in the “Organize” chapter that helps the reader through the exercise of prioritizing/clustering. I cannot find it on the site.
Many thanks, Todd B.
Hi Todd, It’s right here:
http://www.lawsofsimplicity.com/slip1B/
Best,
John
thnak you from
But what about exercising restraint in acquiring? Giving away
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Talk about the home being a battleground, that is something that can tear a family apart, but very good article.
thank you.
Thank you too. JM
Thanks for this nice article!
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