Hasta La Ideas

The simple rule for designing any organization system, whether for tools, clothes, the top of your desk, etc., is: Everything should have a place for it—and the more clearly delineated that space, the better. If your desk is messy right now, it’s probably because it’s covered in things that don’t have dedicated places. It’s easy to scoop pens up and throw them into your pen cup, but it’s the uncategorizable things—that catalog you think you might need later, a stack of documents that’s important but not urgent, some business cards you’ve been meaning to file—that create the mess. And then you spend time sifting through all of it to find the thing you’re looking for.

Delineating areas for objects is also important, and ideally it should be one-to-one. From a design perspective, I don’t find dresser drawers very efficient, because they hold stacks of clothes, and I’m invariably digging through three items to get to the fourth. Ditto with toolboxes, where you spend five seconds of rummaging for every one second of grabbing. Multiply that wasted time over millions of tool-wielding workers that get paid per hour or per job, and you’re looking at a lot of man-hours down the drain.

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