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David_Gerard comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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Dealing with serious clutter-- the kind of situation where the house has never been in good order and there isn't any obvious place to put most things.
Sometimes I take a crack at it, but there's so little progress and so many non-obvious decisions to be made.
The key point I have discovered in my own recent massive household declutter:
Distinguish "generally useful" or "potentially useful" from actually useful.
No, you'll never eBay it. No, you'll never wear that shirt or those boots. No, you'll never fix that laptop. No, you'll never get around to finding someone who really wants it. No, that weird cable won't actually ever be used for anything, because it hasn't been used in the past five years. No, you'll never get around to taking it to the charity shop. No, it may be a shame to throw out something so obviously useful, but it's a curse. No, you never did any of these things in the past so there's no reason to assume you will in the future. No. No. Stop making bullshit excuses. JUST NO.
Get a big roll of garbage bags. Delight in having so many full bags of discards that your bin overflows.
You have to be utterly uncompromising. Set the "when did I last use this?" to one year. Anything unused in longer than that better have a REALLY EXCELLENT justification.
If you swear you're going to eBay it, give yourself one week to do the listing. If it's not done, throw it out.
A very helpful method is to have someone else to help you be uncompromising. (Particularly with kicking your backside when you make one of the excuses.)
Paul Graham's essay Stuff talks about the problem. He lists books as an exception. THEY ARE NOT AN EXCEPTION. Be as ruthless with your book pile.
(I have been doing a huge clearout of STUFF for the last couple of months - saga in my journal - and kept linking that Paul Graham essay like the holy writ it is. NO DAMN ATOMS. EVERYTHING MADE OF ATOMS IS A WHITE ELEPHANT UNLESS IT CAN PROVE IT CAN PAY ITS BLOODY RENT. AAAAAAAA)
Sounds like the "outside view" approach to cleaning. It seems to me the “really excellent justification” heuristic could be generalized into expected value, with some danger of overfitting—something with infrequent but important use like a fire extinguisher might earn its place just as easily as a bic pen you use twenty times a day.
I think it's more generally the phenomenon Paul Graham talks about: stuff used to be valuable and people didn't have much of it; these days, it's actually not of value and most people have too much of it. That is: we're all rich now, and we don't know how to cope with the fact.
It's moving up to a better class of problem. Like how Britain has a major health problem in 2011 with poor people being too fat, whereas in 1950 food was rationed. It's a great problem to have. Though it's still a problem.
Yes, it really helps to get in an outside view - the friend to help and berate you - until you get the proper visceral loathing of stuff.
I think this explains a lot of it. Another part is that people don't think about the costs of owning stuff: it occupies your space, you have to keep it organized, and you have to move it around whenever you move.
These costs are easy to ignore, because they aren't in mind when you're thinking about buying a specific thing. The mentally-available facts are "what will I get by using this?" versus "how much money does this cost?" Similarly, when you're looking for stuff to get rid of, it's hard to bring those costs back into light, because they're so general to everything you own
I don't have lots of stuff, and I'm pretty willing to get rid of stuff or give stuff away. I think this is largely because I highly value my space, my attention, and my time, and I've practiced being sensitive to those values when I'm making decisions about stuff.
"you have to move it around whenever you move."
Usually I'm adverse to reducing clutter, due to the cost of going through, organizing it, and throwing away most of it. Every time I move I end up losing a huge chunk of my stuff because suddenly it's much cheaper to throw it out instead of moving it :)
Good point. My heuristic is to say: My house cost $100/ft^2. A $2 knickknack with a square foot footprint really costs $102.
But could you really have saved $100 by having decided to buy that same exact house except without that extra square foot?
Probably not. But, if you had rather less stuff, you could have probably bought a pretty similar house with one fewer closet for a few thousand less.
This. My housemates and I needed a three-bedroom apartment instead of a cheaper two-bedroom because some of them have so much stuff. Especially large furniture.
Yup, also, the incremental cost of space in a self-store unit is of the order of $1/month-ft^2, say $240/ft^2 capital cost at a 5% annual rate - and that is a true incremental cost. The more severe approximation is ignoring which items stack well and which don't, and ignoring the additional costs of maintaining the items, keeping track of them and so on.
Better yet, get a Kindle.
I'd love a Kindle if it wasn't a hideously locked-down proprietary money funnel. I'm waiting for something with an eInk screen that just opens documents if I put them on it, in whatever format. I've wanted something like that to read PDFs with approximately forever.
I already don't read my paper books. I'd rather download a PDF than read the book that's on the shelf just over there. This appears to be unusual amongst my friends.
I got my hands on a Kindle a year back, and it just opened PDFs and text documents I put on it using it as an USB drive. Amazon even provided an app for rolling your own Kindle-format ebooks from hypertext files, which you could again just plop on the Kindle over USB.
My main problem was that the regular Kindle was too small for viewing technical article PDFs full screen. I can already use my smartphone for reading stuff that's easily reflowable, like most fiction. The Kindle DX should be better for this, but I haven't had a chance to try that.
The Kindle 3G has native PDF support. It also supports .mobi ebooks from any non-DRM'd source. (And most other formats can be converted to .mobi using a program like Calibre.)
There are other e-readers that have far less stringent requirements for getting books. The Nook and Kobo are an example (as are the Sony E-Readers). I have a Nook and have yet to purchase any books from the Barnes and Noble store. I constantly put DRM free books from Project Gutenberg on it and just placed the Less Wrong sequences on it as well. There are also FLOSS programs for editing PDFs to make them easier to read on an e-reader. A little research goes a long way!
I use my thinkpad tablet--my main computer--for reading anything I can manage to get in .pdf, but I do really envy the Kindle screen. And battery life. I keep checking back to the PixelQi site hopefully...
I read paper books because 1) I can get them really cheap used (cheaper than the library fines I always get from borrowing them...), 2) they require no batteries, 3) dropping them or stepping on them will not damage them irreparably, and 4) they are not likely to attract unwelcome attention on the buses through the rougher parts of town.
The first batch of Notion Ink Adam tablets have shipped, they have a PixelQi screen and run Android. Can't yet buy one unless you caught the pre-order, but to me that means they've moved out of 'vapourware'.
If you know that your dislike of paper is weird, you shouldn't be giving general advice about it. (you said we should throw out books)
Your dislike of the Kindle sounds like status quo bias to me. Maybe the proprietary format means that the books will only last a few years, but is that so bad? In return, you get a searchable format and no physical clutter. And if you switch to another format and lose everything, you're purged of electronic clutter!
Yes, you should definitely throw out your books. For everyone else it was obvious hyperbole for literary effect, but for you I mean it literally. What on earth?
Yes, that is so bad. I'm not paying paper prices for bits that evaporate, and I'm not giving Amazon a hundred quid's encouragement to pull that sort of stunt. That's an even more direct incentive to piracy than trying to watch a commercial DVD. In return, I get a searchable format and no physical clutter!
Although purging my life of digital clutter is actually an attractive idea. Hence the notion of "inbox zero". Like not really appreciating minimalism until you've been subjected to horrible aesthetic noise for a long time.
I liked that cartoon, but it's not completely accurate. I can skip over all of those things on my computer with software DVD players, whether the DVD was commercially authorized or not. This is a problem with some DVD players, not really a "piracy" issue.
Enforcement in software players is lax for whatever reason, but makers of DVD players need to agree to honor the Prohibited User Operations flags in order to get a patent license to use the DVD video format. So the general point stands that if you're skipping previews, someone is either in breach of contract or breaking the law.
and DJVUs. So there isn't anything like this yet. Thanks for saving me some research time.
Books can be valuable even if you never read them again, in several ways. If you have kids, you never know what they might read, or just what attitudes they might pick up from the presence of books. If your books are in a public part of your house, guests may see them and either start a conversation or be impressed. If they are behind where the guests sit, you may see a book a guest will like and give it to them. Also, of course, there's the potential for bathroom reading, a page of an old favorite.
That said, when you're moving house, you should be more ruthless than usual with books.
Oh boy. I also have books I do not agree with at all. And a hole section on my shelf for »stupid s*it«. It can be weird if your books lead people to form mistaken opinions about you.
I own more books than would fit on a kindle.
Also I really like them and don't want to get rid of them... but that's a totally different pathology ;)