Ever set something down and lose it not five seconds later?
I've lost my phone under a mattress, on high shelves, inside kitchen drawers. The default is anywhere that looks close and convenient for just a second. No matter how absurd.
You will need to set things down, so just designate specific places where that's fine.
This isn't the same as the home for that item. Everything should have one home, maybe two, but you can have as many landing zones as you want. You should have too many, if anything. It's better to have excess landing zones than to break the rule and set something down outside the landing zones because it was too far.
The point is to restrict the possible search space for later. A couple spots per area, instead of every possible location.
My phone does not live in the bathroom. But when I set it down in there, there's one spot on the counter it always goes in. Not the drawer. Never the drawer, even if I think I'll pick it up immediately.
I use phones as the example because most people, including myself, carry them everywhere, use them all the time, and really don't want to lose them.
Laundry chair is a landing zone, and a surprisingly effective one at that. It's also a sign that your laundry system is dysfunctional.
Where do you dump everything when you get home? That's a landing zone.
How often do you lose things because they weren't there?
I've forgotten my keys when leaving home because they weren't in the landing zone. Conversely, I basically never forget my keys.
I'd rather set rules on my instinct to put things down than need to check everything, every single time.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Nice, simple physical rules. Easy writing.
Ramping back into normalcy after the last few days.
I didn't realize it would show so obviously in the length of writing. I suppose that's the natural result of creating a new variable time habit.
One of half a dozen signals blaring alarms at me that I needed to change something. Is it better to have another?
One of the worst things about having constant background analysis and experimentation on life is that it can lead to self destructive places.
I saw alarms and I tried something absurd to narrow down and fix the cause. Apparently that attempt was enough to knock me off rhythm an extra day. Was it worth it to learn from the experiment?
I don't know.
- Rew