Everyone uses a deck of cards as the canonical example of real life sorting algorithms, but anyone can sort a deck of cards.
Hard ordered sorting with physical items involves such incredible volumes of material that automation or other planning is required, which isn't really applicable to the average person. At the scale people work, scanning a group of distinct objects is a free action compared to physically moving them, so computer algorithm heuristics don't make sense.
Every hard real life sort I've run into is bucket sort variants to split up groups of items with unclear categorization. You get stuck on where to put things, not how to sort them.
So here's my simple algorithm for separating groups of physical things. Laundry, spices, craft items, whatever.
Clear out a space for sorted items and spread the pile of unsorted things as much as possible. You should be able to see as many items as possible.
Start by picking out whatever group is the most obvious to you. The goal is to avoid shuffling around the pile without sorting by choosing the most distinct possible group. What that means is dependent on what you're sorting.
For physically distinct items, it should be easy to find because your eye gets stuck on them. For example, when sorting laundry I usually do pants first because they are large and have a unique shape. When sorting things with different colors, it's usually whatever has the brightest color.
If you're sorting something without clear physical attributes like identical bottles of similarly colored spices, skim the labels and decide on a single group based on what you found, then pick out the matching items.
Once you get the most obvious group mostly done, pick out the next most obvious group. They should be easier to spot now that the most obvious items are gone. Don't go trying to distinguish shades of blue when there's neon yellow ruining your color sensitivity.
When you stop finding obvious groups, it's usually because all that's left is weird items which don't categorize well. Take a moment to clump up all the piles and cleanup any mess you've made in the previous step. If you know you've finished most of the groups and the rest will make their own smaller groups, you can put away the finished ones.
For each of the remaining items, sort them one-by-one, no skips. First one you grab, don't try to pick it out carefully. The goal now is to avoid decision paralysis from all the items being difficult.
You've already established clear groups in the previous step, so it should be easy to determine if the one item you're looking at fits with any of them, or needs a new group.
Once you've gone through all of them, you're done.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Do people even think about sorting algorithms outside of computing? I've been in just enough situations of sorting comedically large piles of small objects that I needed a proper plan of approach to avoid being overwhelmed by paralysis.
If you liked this, you might like the book Algorithms to Live By. It explains how common algorithms apply to real life, such as prioritizing a schedule.
Writing-wise, I'm pretty happy with this one. It could definitely use another edit, but I think the ideas are clear.
See you next round,
- Rew