Silver Clipboard

Clear Your iPod Clutter with Smart Playlists

Merlin Mann has made a list of smart playlists that help you cut through the clutter of music on your iPod. The ‘Big and Useless’ playlist is particularly great for getting rid of big songs you never listen to that just waste space.

[Click here for ‘Smart playlists for pack rats’ on 43 Folders]

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Header photograph by powerbooktrance

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Autohide Your Inactive Apps with Spirited Away

Spirited Away is a free program that will autohide your inactive applications. If you haven’t used a program for a predetermined number of minutes, spirited away will hide the program — the icon will still be in the dock, but when you use expose, it won’t show up. I’m a big fan of spirited away, because it’s a gentle way to encourage you to monotask rather than multitask.

[Click here to download Spirited Away]

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Header photograph by peasap

The Mess Box

On your desk live a bunch of miscellaneous objects: scissors, coins, a stapler, hole punch, etc. These are not objects you use every day, but you do use them frequently enough that putting them in storage is inconvenient. Slowly they spread across your desk, cluttering the space and annoying you in worst way possible: just below the threshold of doing something about it.

The solution to this desk detritus? The mess box. To reign in my desk clutter I took the lid from an old shoe box, turned it upside-down and decided that all miscellaneous desk stuff would live in there from now on.

The mess box makes a surprisingly profound difference. First, it gives a clear border to the mess — it will never be more than a square foot of space. Instead of slowing creeping across my desk when I’m not looking, the hole punch and its friends are confined to that box. Secondly, the mess box discourages me from carelessly leaving random things on my working space. With undefined stuff on a surface, adding one more item makes little difference. By having a mess box to hold cluttery items, the desk is always clear for whatever needs working on.

Instead of just letting the mess happen without thinking about it, consciously put boundaries around it. This lets you stop repeating the thought: ‘my desk is a mess’. You can let go of that constant, nagging thought because you’ve made a decision about it. I suggest looking over the mess box during your weekly review and decided what objects you want to keep in there.

Go flip over a box top and get your desk mess under control.

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Header photograph by Syntopia

The Packing Problem

This past summer I helped my parents retire from New York to a Confederate elephant graveyard of suburban development in search of a lower cost of living.

To pack for the move, my parents individually wrapped each of their belongings, placed them in boxes, then wrote on the outside a list of the contents. They didn’t write ‘kitchen supplies’ or ‘books’ as normal people would, instead they listed all the kitchen supplies and the titles of the books. My parents are obsessively neat people.

Near the end of the packing, my mother looked around the house — 80% empty at this point and said: “I’m glad most of this stuff is packed. It shouldn’t take long to finish.”

But it did. Many more hours of work lay ahead — more than had passed already.

In our packing, we forgot an important truth: the 80/20 rule applies to all things, even moving. In this case, the last 20% of stuff takes 80% of the time to pack.

Why is this so? Because people start packing with the easy items: books, dishes, clothes. These things live in clearly defined places and fit snugly into boxes. The last 20% of stuff is widely dispersed throughout the house and is awkwardly shaped. These knickknacks, souvenirs, gifts and other unintentionally accumulated stuff, straddle the line between between ‘throw out’ and ‘keep’. They drag on the mind and require the most decisions.

To help quicken the packing of the last twenty percent of stuff here are two suggestions:

1. Decide your default position. Make a decision, in advance, about what you are going to do with unclear items — things you aren’t immediately sure if you want to keep or ditch. The two options are: ‘when it doubt, throw it out’ or ‘when in doubt, keep it’. It doesn’t matter which option you choose, just decided before you start to save yourself hours of dithering and trips down memory lane. (Alternatively you can also photograph your items, then throw them out.)
2. Get thyself to a Container Store. Buy a big box filled with many smaller boxes. For that last 20% of stuff you keep, don’t try and sort it — that will take forever. Just start packing a small box with the miscellanea and when it’s full, add it to the bigger box. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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Header photograph by Jared

Heaven on Earth: The Container Store

The last time I was in San Francisco I stumbled across a utopia of organization: The Container Store.

Leave it to San Francisco — a mixture of the free spirited and intensely productive — to have such a place. Outside the entrance to The Container Store, dirty hippies mumbled psudo-zen nonsense through the fog of drug smoke that surrounded them.

“Woah,” said one to the other. “They only sell containers? Like, with nothing in them?”

“Yeah man, emptiness is the product.”

“That’s deep. Like really deep.”

Having no patience for such things, I knocked down the hippies, rushing past them to satisfy my office-supply-fetish glee.

Inside, The Container Store was everything I hoped for: shelves filled with empty containers of all shapes and sizes. Each box whispered seductive promises of a life more organized if only I would take it home. Had I not just been passing through San Francisco on a road trip. I would have emptied my wallet and taken all I could carry.

It’s worth a pilgrimage to San Francisco for the organizational faithful.

[Click here to visit The Container Store]

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Header photograph by photohome_uk