Things we decide to hang on to “for now” tend to have no clear potential use. Where we have a specific function in mind there’s a danger of allotting things a “temporary” or “provisional” home. And the problem then is that “temporary” often ends up permanent.
Anything that we feel should be retained and organized—books, CDs, videos, documents; things that are stored, but at the same time used regularly—food, clothes, stationery, and other everyday items.
It may be simplest to take some examples from the workplace.
Imagine a desk. You’ve allocated the side drawers as follows: top drawer—stationery; second drawer—PC equipment; bottom drawer—documents for retention. The wide drawer above your knees is for notebooks and work in progress.
But things defy this classification and start encroaching into areas they shouldn’t.
On your desk there’s a pile of stuff you regard as current: documents relating to a plan in progress; journals you have to read; a weekly news magazine you bought yesterday. You’ve put them there together “temporarily.” You’ve just finished a meeting and decide to put the papers from that on the same pile—you may want them next week, so you think they might as well go there temporarily too. If you were to put them away, you might forget where you’ve put them.
Recently, you’ve been working on a plan. You’ve done similar work in the past and so you took papers out of the old file and kept them on your project desk. Now it’s complete and responsibility is passing to someone else, so you think you’ll get rid of unnecessary papers. But the current documents are mixed up with old ones. If you throw the old report away, there’ll be no copy left. You don’t have time to sort through every single piece of paper, so as a “temporary” measure you put everything together in the old file.
You’ve just printed out some presentation documents when something more urgent comes up. You slip the documents into a drawer “temporarily.” They’re not worth filing away yet, and you’re about to copy them anyway. Besides, you’ve kept them on the computer.
You have a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into your drawers’ allocations: a guarantee, a catalogue, some photographs, some cookies somebody gave you, a lighter, etc. You’re not sure where to put them, but there’s some space in the wide drawer above your knees so you shove them in there.
The number of documents you have to keep is increasing fast, so you decide to store them “temporarily” in a cardboard box at your feet. You can just drop everything in there. It makes life easy. The box has plenty of capacity. You’ll get around to sorting the documents out properly in due course.
You may intend to put something in a place “temporarily,” but once it’s there, the chances are you’ll never move it. Even if the place is unsuitable, it’s very unlikely you’ll change it. If there’s a box in a corridor, people tend to just walk past it—nobody thinks to move it. If there’s a pile of papers occupying your limited desk space, you’ll probably just push it to one side. It’s a pain to do anything else. The number of “temporary” items grows and the situation gets out of control. Here are some of the things that happen:
i. You forget they exist (Situation 1).
ii. You don’t know where you’ve put them (Situations 3, 4).
iii. You put them away and you never see them again (Situations 2, 4, 5).
iv. Important things get mixed up with unimportant things (Situations 1, 2, 5).
v. You keep putting things in the same place because it’s easy (Situations 1, 2, 5).
You obviously won’t be able to take advantage of things if you’ve forgotten they exist (i). If you can’t remember where they are, you won’t be able to find them (ii). If you store them away without much thought, you probably won’t use them again (iii). If you’ve mixed necessary and unnecessary things together, it will be difficult to move items or throw items away (iv). If you start putting things in a particular place because it’s easy to do so, that place will end up as a kind of trash dump (v).
Of course, this doesn’t just happen in the workplace—it happens at home too: in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms. In fact, there are very few things that don’t get this “temporary” treatment. Keeping things “for now” or putting them somewhere “temporarily” is very natural human behavior.
It reminds me of squirrels in the forest. They bury nuts as stock, but sometimes forget about them. When spring comes the forgotten nuts germinate and saplings start to grow. It’s a kind of cooperative relationship between squirrels and trees, based on food and reproduction. But is there any benefit in our own tendency to store things “temporarily”?
When we’re surrounded by so much stuff, this kind of careless “temporary” storage is just dangerous. It makes it more difficult both to get rid of things, and to find important things when necessary.
We have to be firm—make decisions now. If you feel like putting documents on the top of a pile, stop. If you’re about to put some cans of soup in the tableware cupboard, stop. If you’ve been given a freebie hand towel, don’t just shove it into an empty space in the wardrobe. Think: “Is this really the place for it?”
Half the documents can probably be thrown away; the rest can be put in a file. If you’re thinking of putting cans of soup in the tableware cupboard, then your shelf for cans must be full. Some of the cans already there are probably out of date. Or perhaps space is taken up with old bento boxes or packs of tissues. As for the hand towel, why not put it straight in the trunk of the car as a cleaning cloth? Or if you’ve got plenty of car cloths already, you could use it to wipe the floor and throw it away.
You’ll often find that avoiding “temporary” storage for one thing will reveal other things that should be thrown away.