Creatrope

I made this connection from an unexpected place, and thought process it started was surprising, so I thought I’d share it on a ‘technical decluttering’ blog. Skip reading now if this seems painfully obvious!

The second law of thermodynamics states the the universe tends toward ‘mixed-up-edness’. This (unrelated) article on creationism, beautifully written by Richard Dawkins from the in The Guardian had a particularly nice summary, from which I’ll excerpt a section:

The Second Law states that, in a closed system without external energy fed in from outside, entropy always increases. Entropy is often said to mean disorder, but in some ways the word “mixed-upness” (Willard Gibbs’s coining) fits better. A familiar metaphor is that of a library. If the readers in a library always leave books lying around on the tables, or shove them back on the shelves at random, the library will become increasingly disordered. To remain in a state of order, it needs an energetic librarian, constantly working to put books back on their proper shelves, and constantly checking the shelves for misplaced volumes. It is not that libraries have a magnetic attraction or an urgent drive towards a particular goal state called disorder. It is simply that the number of states of a library that we would call disordered is much greater than the tiny minority of states that we would recognise as ordered. There are many more ways of being disordered than of being ordered. No work needs to be done to drive a library toward one of the many states that we call disordered. It will just happen, willy nilly, unless energetic work is done to prevent the otherwise inevitable slide downhill into disorder.

So what does this have to do with clutter?

Simple. Like the library example, the more stuff you have, the more ‘disorganized’ states that it can be in. It’s not that you or your housemates are inherently sloppy (they may well be), it’s just that the more stuff you have the more energy you need to put ‘into the system’ to keep it organized. It’s not clear whether it’s a little or lot more - but it’s more! So getting rid of clutter, even a little at a time, has multiple virtues. Not only are you organizing or cleaning up an area at the time you are actually doing the initial work, you are investing in minimizing that energy, now and forever!.

It’s very zen and logically follows right to the end - an completely empty house takes no time to organize! So clearly there’s a middle ground wherein you maximize enjoyment and usefulness of your possessions, yet have removed the most onerous clutter.

It’s like ‘compound-interest’ for decluttering.

Once I saw this, it was obvious in retrospect. For example by reducing my game collection by 2/3, it’s made organizing, shelving, and finding the remainder quicker and more pleasant. I found myself taking better care of the remainder, and not dreading organizing them, and therefore rediscovering favorites and actually playing more games, from a ‘better’ subset remaining. Same with books.

It’s spring and it’s time for stuff to leave the house en-masse. After years of garage sales and general accumulation, I’ve decided that it’s time to make some extra space. I think my house is generally ok, it’s not cluttered by any typical standard, but as they say, less is more.

I’ve chosen a path that uses the materials from many popular books on decluttering, plus a few off-beat ones. That material is all over the web and in print, so I’m adding a liberal dose of flavor to it by including special methods of decluttering that will appeal to geeks as well as addressing their special considerations.

With that, let’s start getting rid of stuff!