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I always liked Anthony Bourdain's take on "Meez" from Kitchen Confidential:
Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not fuck with a line cook’s ‘meez’ — meaning his setup, his carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, backups, and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system... The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook’s station in the middle of a rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He’d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, bread crumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side towel. “You see this?” he’d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef’s palm. “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now.”
I imagine most developers will recognize the obvious parallels with our craft.
The full passage:
https://books.google.com/books?id=XAsRYpsX9dEC&lpg=PA65&ots=...
There is a book called "Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind" that discusses this philosophy further and how someone can integrate these principles into their work life. It was a pretty interesting read.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Work-Clean-life-changing-mise-en-plac...
This puts me in mind of Knolling.
https://makezine.com/2016/12/07/zen-and-the-art-of-knolling/
This is an awesome passage, it does resonate with me, and thank you for introducing me to it!
Side question- Why does the Google Book for this have handwritten notes all over it?
I'm just reading Kitchen Confidential now and I loved this bit as well!
Totally OT but: Of course I can see this chef's point but why does it look like they are psychopaths on loose in the kitchen ? When I talk with chefs or people running cuisine they are very aggressive and ready to burst out at any thing with a confrontational and "I am always right" attitude.
Going through Marie Kondo's process was amazing for me. I've tried so many times to get organized, and her book seemed to address the exact reasons why each of my previous attempts has failed. And it really, really, worked.
I would encourage anyone trying it to actually give the stupid sounding stuff in it a try. For instance, I found with items I was having a hard time letting go of, verbally thanking them for their service and saying goodbye, as she suggests, actually worked. Somehow it seems to satisfy whatever part of your brain is reticent to part with a particular thing.
In the show, she explains that she suggests thanking items because it reduces the guilt people feel about throwing a "good" item away.
I find that taking a picture of something also makes it much easier to let go of.
“People ask me about the positive side of clutter and I say, ‘There isn’t any positive side.’”
This is incorrect, of course.
I dislike clutter and I personally maintain a relatively clutter-free existence but of course there is a trade-off to be made between short term expediency and lack of clutter.
Understanding this trade-off has been helpful to me - especially in designing and acquiring living spaces.
Here is an example:
My current office space requires two rooms. However, I went out of my way to find a suite with three rooms - the third of which was not, and continues to not, be necessary. What this "buffer space" allows me to do is stage, or cache, incoming items and/or projects while allowing me to make full (clutter-free) use of the necessary two rooms without interruption.
Running my office without a third room would be like running a CPU without a cache - it is perfectly workable and there's no reason it can't be done - but it requires immediate, real-time interruption of work to maintain the empty (clutter-free) pipeline (really stretching the CPU analogy here, but you get the idea).
If an item has a reason to be sitting there; and then you actually do engage with it the way you were planning to; and then when the reason goes away, the item goes away; then it's not clutter. It's just prep.
"Clutter" is the result of a broken mental model of physical "cache eviction": it's stuff that you have in the way of projects you're doing now, even though the stuff that's in the way is for a project you're planning for later (and might never even get to.) It's stuff whose presence slows down your life, rather than speeding it up, when measured over the long term.
I did something similar on a smaller scale -- on my jamie hyneman-style wall of boxes, I added a few "inbox" boxes. When cleaning up, if I don't know where something goes, it goes into an inbox. Turning this mental roadblock into a non-decision makes cleaning up much, much faster. And because you only have a small number of inboxes, finding a "where did I put that?" item is quick.
This is a wonderful analogy and a great idea. We just did a bunch of cleaning and organizing for a holiday party. A place for everything and everything in it's place kind of thing. I've never thought of dedicated space to serve as a cache to prevent the clutter from affecting the rest of the space.
I think you are confusing what the article means by clutter. You don't keep things in the third room that are unnecessary. It is just that spending time organizing them in a system that would appear visually de-cluttered would be a waste of time. Your third room might eventually need to be cleaned out once your cache gets full of things that, for one reason or another, you don't need anymore.
A staging area where you sort things isn't clutter.
Every couple months I stop keeping my home spic and span and simply let it go: newspapers, empty cans, Amazon boxes, sunflower seed shells, unwanted mail, etc. all over the place, clothes strewn everywhere, cords/connectors/cables/chargers both plugged and unplugged festooning every available surface.... I like living amongst the chaos for about a week, before it starts to annoy me and I spiff the place up. Both the fall into disorder and its anti-entropic counterpart are soothing, in their place.
It's not incorrect, it's an opinion.
You can think of clutter as a ratio of stuff to space... adding space is one way to deal with it. Just not one that’s practical for most people without major life upheavals like moving house.
Throwing stuff out is hard to do if you are poor or were raised poor. Everything you save now does not have to be bought later. There is a potential use for anything and everything, so you might as well keep it. Granted, at a certain point the cost of the storage facility exceeds the amount saved, but the mindset is still there.
Even now, as well off as I am, I tend to collect things (and by extension, clutter) because I can see the potential need for something in the future. I've been trying to overcome this mindset and slim down my possessions to the things I need and the few sentimental items I have, but it's not easy at all. If someone else came into my house and started trying to clean up, I'd probably lose my mind (admittedly for a few unrelated reasons as well, but largely because of this mindset)
Might be worth watching an episode of the show to better understand what Kondo's process is. She doesn't clean or work some one off magic. She teaches 5(?) core lessons to help maintain tidiness. She doesn't excavate their piles of stuff for them.
Yep.
When I have the urge to keep something, I ask myself if I have definite plans for it. If I do, great! And that helps decide where it will go.
Otherwise, it goes into the donation box, recycling, etc.
As an obsessive organizer at home, almost to the point of my family's dismay until they cackle at how easy it is to find things now, I feel like I need to binge watch the whole series and hone my skills.
As well as the initial discard phase, organizational part (loads of plastic boxes, label printer connected to a computer), the piece most people don't mention is how to keep it tidy afterwards. In my experience the key to this is making it absurdly easy to put something away - this means easy to access storage, clear, easy to read labels and perhaps most importantly, plenty of capacity to grow. It's no good putting all your widgets in a box that's only just big enough to hold them. Later on when you acquire more, there will be nowhere to put them so you'll likely leave them out or dump them in a different box. I've used this approach in my garage, my home-office and our medicine cupboard (closet) to great effect. Next up is the pantry..
> It's no good putting all your widgets in a box that's only just big enough to hold them.
One of my personal organizing rules is that if a box / container is over 80% full, it’s time to split it and get a second box.
I've always dismissed her stuff as one of those pseudo-spiritual neo-philosophies that mix a bit of Eastern wisdom with platitudes and sell it to affluent Westerners in search of meaning.
Talk about Baader-Meinhof effect: Just yesterday I spontaneously picked up the book on Kindle, and I'm blown away.
It is so much more. Yes, there is a lot of marketing behind it, of course. But I also sense an honesty in it that has already semi-convinced me to actually do it!
And just a second ago I peeked into the Google Talk video and saw that she doesn't speak English? If this was a marketing stunt, she would have learned English (or the publisher would have found another figurehead).
I actually admire Marie Kondo quite a bit.
I really liked how the book comes with no strings attached. Everything you need is in that one small book. No subscription, no rich dad poor dad XVII: buy a cheap house and flip it trash. Just one book to help simplify life.
Might come across as a Kondo shill, the type of which I have called out elsewhere on HN, so I accept any berating due. I do recommend getting it from a local Library, watching the show, or just find a recap online!
You should do it. It can sometimes be pain in the ass and it takes a long time. It took us several months to finish, during the process your house will be a huge mess. We donated bags and bags and bags of stuff. It is truly amazing how much crap you can unthinkingly acquire. In the end it was totally worth the trouble.
Get the book and make sure to give it a full read-through before starting. The order you do things matters quite a bit.
>But I also sense an honesty in it that has already semi-convinced me to actually do it!
This subtle honesty is incredibly persuasive
Yesterday I was thinking about how we only notice stuff relevant to our interests after we get into them, thanks for putting a name to it!
Odd that the article includes some weird non-Kondo advice about "don't touch it", probably contrary even, given that her approach is very intimate/fluffy.
I guess the overall idea is to think more objectively about something's value, using your own sense of "joy" as a proxy for that value function.
For a while now I've been thinking about writing a "Marie Kondo's approach distilled for engineers"...
From my reading it seems to be his objection to her method and whether "joy" is the right metric/method for determining if something stays.
While I know, from experience, what he says is true I still think that Kondo has a better system for most people. I'll do my best to explain what I've gotten from the show.
I think Kondo's approach is actually very simple and focused on a single thing: Keep your home tidy. Her job in a sense is convince people with a problem to take steps to solve that problem which often involves getting rid of things, but not always. It's actually building habits to keep things organized and realizing when something is no longer important and therefore doesn't justify the work needed to keep it in it's proper place.
She starts with clothing, which often is plentiful and easily to identify some vague person definition of "joy." Pure utilitarianism isn't right for everyone and this allows the person to determine that on their own. You can see this in the show as people go through their clothes it's hard at first but it provides a bunch of opportunities to find obvious "yes"/"no"s to the joy question. The genius I find is that she starts with clothing and leaves sentimental items for the end after you've gained experience determining what "joy" really means to you. As well as the act of "thanking" items which once practiced you can do at the harder steps more naturally and not feel guilty about getting rid of things which are meaningful, but not needed anymore.
Touching the items provides some safety by saving things which you might actually get rid of, but just can't. It makes the process much less risky. Later on, by continuing to use the method occasionally, you might realize that this actually doesn't bring you joy anymore, but now you're able to accept this and remove the item.
We're trying to be happy here, not perfect. The genius of the method is how many points of it are designed to gradually gain experience to keeping things tidy while minimizing the overwhelming feelings and riskiness that one can feel when getting rid of things. Which makes for a system that even those with the least willpower and discipline can gain something from.
My partner made me watch a few episodes on Netflix. I was pretty sceptical about finding something innovative in the show but thought her approach made a lot of sense for physical things.
I was wondering about translating it into organising my digital life. What's equivalent to step 1: Clothes? Probably video downloads or other large media in the Downloads folder that take up a lot of space and carry little emotional attachment.
It gets harder to figure out how to organize important documents, though. But they should probably be united in one "heap" first, too, maybe with annotations.
Luckily we don't need to let go of many things in the digital realm, so organising things with emotional attachment is a lot easier.
Well, /I/ think her approach is very marketing-oriented. For example she asks whether an item sparks "joy". Joy is kind transient, very subjective, etc. But it fits within her "shtick" and it works. For me, I'd ask whether it provides utility, but that sounds very boring and isn't a term which would fit well in marketing.
> For a while now I've been thinking about writing a "Marie Kondo's approach distilled for engineers"...
Please do! I've been doing my fair bit of KonMari recently, but I have a fair bit of rationalising to do with regard to getting rid of things.
Yeah, from the netflix series it's more like you have to touch everything of the same category and then compare how you feel.
Fair warning for people with ADD/ADHD or otherwise struggle with organization: removing clutter is a different thing than hiding away everything so that the room is magazine-photograph ready. Being able to use your environment to give you visual reminders of various outstanding tasks and statuses is an incredibly important coping technique for people with executive function issues. Like, I have a bunch of open wire shelves for storing the bulk of my groceries - otherwise, I tend to literally forget that I have something, and I won't notice when I get low or run out of things. It's ugly as hell, but it's a functional ugly, and dropping functionality to make things pretty is not really a good idea IMO.
This also highlights why it's so helpful to eliminate clutter; the things you see are the things that matter.
When I open my fridge, I don't see amorphous 'stuff'; I've got leftovers one and two here, extra ingredients that need to be used there and there, and the rest is staples that remain there and get replaced as needed.
Anything that doesn't fit that gets tossed. If I can't pick it up and come up with a plan for it, it goes in the bin. If it's a longer-term plan, it gets noted on a list stuck to the door. ezpz
I waste less food now, and have less stress about meal planning. Pantry is similar; at this point I can just glance at a shelf and sense whether I'm low on something.
Given the housing prices in the Bay Area, comparing the joy you get from something with the cost to store it, can really help with decluttering. I live in a smallish apartment, and was tempted to rent some extra storage for stuff like holiday decorations and other stuff used seasonally. Then I realized at $100/month for the extra storage, it is cheaper for me to buy the seasonal stuff every year and then when I am done with it to throw away/recycle it.
I own an English version of her book and recently bought a German copy to give as a gift for Christmas. Strange as it may sound, even though I don't really like the "style of the method" it's very efficient. Thanking the items and the whole sparking of joy are a bit over the top for me and chapter 5 is by and large too spiritual for my taste. I toss the stuff away without any parting words and joy for me is more a "is it useful" or "do I really need this" (which is pretty much what she has in mind anyways).
What I consider pure gold is:
* Dumping everything on the floor and going through that mountain because it shows you very clearly how much stuff you have
* All the advice on folding. I actually enjoy the folding and storing now because I know it's more neat overall. I vastly prefer the vertical shirts to a stack now. I probably wouldn't have considered rethinking the old stack of stuff if it wasn't for the book
* Giving items a home of sorts is also a good overall concepts. I have caught myself thinking "this item is out of place, let me quickly return it to its home"
* Going by category instead of location...really helps me get started/keep tidying
On a related note, I found the Netflix series surprisingly underwhelming/repetitive. The most useful parts were the folding explanations.
tl;dr: MK's stuff is great, I'd recommend the book to everyone :)
(somewhat related) Still my favorite essay by Paul Graham:
I was taken with the main idea of this paragraph from the essay when I first encountered it a while back:
A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.
> Books are more like a fluid than individual objects.
Hm, this is an interesting idea.
Marie's process is basically Map, then Reduce - for your home.
Messiness is highly correlated with creativity. People greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/its-not-me...
Did you read the research paper?
> Three experiments tested the novel hypotheses that orderly environments lead people toward tradition and convention, whereas disorderly environments encourage breaking with tradition and convention—and that both settings can alter preferences, choice, and behavior
Drawing conclusions from a single research paper referenced from an _opinion_ piece correlating messiness to alterations in choice and behavior in no way discounts the benefits of a clutter-free environment.
On the flipside
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” – Albert Einstein
> Decisional procrastinators report that they have too much clutter, which interferes with their quality of life, and clutter, in turn, is the best predictor of procrastination.
Hmm... n=1 anecdote, but I hate clutter and lead a minimalist lifestyle yet procrastinate quite a bit.
Is the video not playing for anyone else?
got to love that intrusive fullpage ad that needs to be scrolled down to be closed. It was probably not worth reading anyway.
I think I'll just buy another flat and move. I'll bring stuff from the old one only after I need it.