This is a good idea, as is the idea in the article. The basic requisite however is a desire to not lose stuff. My wife always loses track of her EarPods. My oldest kid always loses his pocket knife.
I could have 20 holding pens in the house and they'd still lose their stuff, since the idea that you have to exert even a minor amount of effort <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.
I do not even get annoyed about it anymore - just like I do not get annoyed that it turns dark at night. My stuff is always in its place, and before we leave the house they will spend 10 minutes finding theirs.
I really do not like the assumption people don’t do something because they don’t want to it.
I really want to make the system work reliably but I can’t. I’ve spent 30+ years trying to make things work. They just don’t.
It works when I have planned to do things ahead of time, but I can’t get my brain to remember to do it when interrupted, the attention shift doesn’t trigger “callbacks” or “publish events”. This is a fundamental prerequisite to make this work.
People’s who can do this will have difficulty not understanding people who can’t.
This same problem applies to “thinking before I speak”. I can’t do that. People think I can because I don’t make the same mistakes by rote learning what not to say in specific situations. I can’t anticipate new mistakes or generalize previous ones.
It is easy to say to do this, but in reality what happens is I am deep in my thoughts and all of it happens on autopilot. I consciously understand it would save me time to put them correctly away, but there is just nothing triggering me to do it. If I had a very intelligent watch that dinged me every time I'm supposed to do it, I would do it. The tech is not there yet though.
I think it's the multiple processes going on in the brain, where there's a process that will scan for danger, and this same track is able to break out of the deep thought process. I have to assume this same process just doesn't see those points as something that should interrupt the deep thought process.
The same process with any novel activity will be much more sensitive, but as I do more of the same activity it will consider it a safe activity. The more I do something, the more I would be on autopilot allowing the deep thought process to go on.
For example when I am in a new place, after moving or whatever reason, it is easier in the beginning for me to stay organized because the process is still sensitive and is more careful, but the more I get complacent the less I will be thinking about where to put the things and the deep thought track will be fully prioritised.
It is a skill that you can develop to maintain a basic awareness of what you are doing that you can break yourself out of autopilot to do the small things that you need to do.
Should I schedule time to put myself consciously in this situation where I do it every day for 30 minutes?
Because otherwise it's a paradox. For me to be able to train it, I would have to be able to come out of autopilot at that specific time in the first place.
I came here to say the same thing. It's something I have been actively working on lately. It's quite an effort to pay attention to the small things, something as simple as making sure I put the mouse into my backpack along with my laptop. But the pay off is enormous ... I get a really strong sense of relief when I do find things more often where they are supposed to be.
A tip that's helped me: when you finally find the thing you misplaced, and are done with it, don't put it back where you found it, put it in the place where you first looked.
This reminds me of a rule I have for naming things in code (functions, variables, etc).
Say you add a function, and then the first time you call that function, you call it by a different name. Don't fix the function call to match the original name, but instead go back and change the name to match how you tried to call it. The state of mind you are in when you called the function is a better guide to naming than the state of mind you were in when you implemented it.
My wife and I are very similar to you and your wife. I will note that on the rare occasion when I misplace something, I've found that it's efficient to just enlist her help finding it immediately. She is much better practiced than I am at finding things where they don't belong.
The problem I find is that, other than my iPhone, the reason I often can't find an iDevice is that I haven't used it recently and have no idea where I left it. Unless it was attached to a charging cable it probably isn't in a position to ding or otherwise be found.
> I could have 20 holding pens in the house and they'd still lose their stuff, since the idea that you have to exert even a minor amount of effort <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.
That doesn't give enough credit to the original idea. I know it's an exaggeration, but 20 holding pens will totally defeat the purpose. The idea is to have one place in every room where you can put anything. This saves the mental effort of trying to recall what is the place for thing-at-point. There is a place, for all of them, don't think about it. Just dwim it into the holding pen.
This is not an effort or desire-mediated performance, it is a focus-mediated performance. Some people find that cognitively more difficult than others.
If you are the type of person to intensively multitask, to occupy your short-term memory with different trains of thought in a holding pattern, you will tend to sacrifice command skills - if your memory is already busy reading and writing on all available channels, it isn't going to pop up "You have something in the oven" or "You were holding a pen a minute ago and you set it down on the second tier of the brown bookshelf" or "You need to get the kid from school". The internet & smartphone era has unlocked a degree of hyperstimulus that can veer into the pathological for those of us with our brains wired a certain way.
This is also a thing if you're doing things at a 'normal' degree of focus but your memory is impaired (number of operational channels reduced) in some other fashion, through age-related cognitive decline or some types of medication or chronic sleep deprivation or a TBI.
This is the ADD trait. We are chronically late to important events, we lose things all the time, we frequently accumulate a thousand browser tabs, we jump from thing to thing as they come up. Forming subconscious routines is difficult, and when we do it, we often allocate them only the barest muscle memory - I lock my car regardless of whether it's already locked or should be locked (bringing in groceries) because my macro for leaving the car is to lock it. There are pros and there are cons to this cognitive style. But it's certainly not a matter of DESIRE to do things or CARELESSNESS.
What helps? I find:
* Writing things down, especially notes.txt
* Snapping pictures of things as easier form of notes
* Scheduled phone reminders
* Getting sufficient sleep
* Getting more than sufficient sleep - leaving an extra hour in bed to think about things, plan your day
I'm not the person you're asking, but do the same thing, and for me I can usually find it visually by scrolling through "all photos" if it's recent, and sometimes using search in the photos app.
I lose my shit all the time (everything that doesn’t have a fixed location anyway), which is why everything that regularly comes with me is now in it’s own specialized bags. There’s a work bag, a ‘going out with kids’ bag, etc.
I still remember the last time I lost my keys, which is like 26 years ago, when I was 10. But I still identify as that kid that always lost their keys xD
I am consciously trying to whittle down my keychain to reduce the chance of temporary losing access to things. I have a keypad door lock so I’be been able to get rid of my front door key.
However, I found that decreasing the use of something can increase the chance of losing it, because you’re not “touching” it all the time and not aware of its location.
I have an Airtag, but wish that it could be integrated into the car keyfob to whittle down the size even more.
Only one of my cars has a key fob, and I finally took that fob off my keychain once I realized that I can use the 5 digit keypad on the door to lock and unlock it. It's very freeing only having a few small keys in your pocket and not a bunch of giant fobs.
This reason is precisely why I got an implanted RFID chip. When I lived in apartments, I would _constantly_ lose my door fob. It's much more difficult to lose the chip if it is part of you ;)
(I wouldn't recommend embedding an Airtag though, ha)
Probably I'm just old but I'm very aware of an electronic device being a single point of failure. (I realize the car's keyfob is that--and have been meaning to investigate the practicality of keeping a spare key in the car in a faraday bag.) I do keep a physical door key on my keyring even with a keypad door lock and have one somewhere on my property as well.
Most cars have a physical key tucked in the fob, and will do some form of passive RFID “auth” when the fob is brought close to the start button or equivalent. It is not too different from engine immobilizer keys.
I'm aware of the key in the fob. I Wasn't aware that there were other capabilities if the fob itself wasn't working. Was just experimenting the other day about the capabilities and limitations of the keyfob under different conditions.
It seems as if you can't lock the key in the car but I'm not sure how much I trust that experiment.
I could have 20 holding pens in the house and they'd still lose their stuff, since the idea that you have to exert even a minor amount of effort <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.
I do not even get annoyed about it anymore - just like I do not get annoyed that it turns dark at night. My stuff is always in its place, and before we leave the house they will spend 10 minutes finding theirs.