containers

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about home work flow and tailoring the environment to support it.

When I look around my house on a typical day, there are idle projects lying around waiting for the next step. These projects occupy space. Our house only kinda provides good staging areas for many ordinary household tasks. Things tend to pile up in certain areas, where the staging processes are confused or a source of conflict.

Sifting through these areas, I find empty containers and create them through reorganization or consumption of the contents. I then have to store the containers somehow.

We have a lot of containers stored around the house, the basement, the cat house where we do laundry. (There is no cat resident there now, although the resident Cat Whisperer is trying to lure one.)

There are the myriad containers we use to store other things, including our cupboards and closets and much of our furniture. (This desk has 11 drawers and 2 large cubbies, but that’s not enough, and so I have a little 3-drawer unit. My working stuff (notebooks that I keep on various subjects, drawing pencils, my glasses, a landline, a saucer of knitting notions, a jar of pencils, my glasses case, computer peripherals, notepads, odd bits of paper that I need for some reason, a clothespin, scissors, the wifi receiver for my weather station, a huge pair of googly eyes, an unopened box of shortbread) is scattered loosely around.)

Then there are all the containers that are empty and waiting to be used: dishes, canning jars, boxes, baskets, tubs, bags. Some of these have pretty good storage systems, but others (like the canning jars) do not.

I have given home organization some attention over the years, so it’s not horrible or unlivable, but there are more swamps than I would like. I’m trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have as well as creating better workflows for myself.

I recently realized that I do more housework when I use tools I enjoy. I have these silicon sponges that fascinate me. I always wanted a feather duster (but viewed it as a frippery). I bought one and found that wafting through the house dusting to music a few times a week does real work.

(It’s pretty dusty here, dustier than it used to be. Last year’s flash flood piled 2′ of silt against our uphill neighbor’s house. It’s been dry and windy a lot, and I can see as well as taste the silt in the air. It’s hazy.)

There’s a reason that containers of various sorts are data primitives. Where would we be without them? There are whole industries that just provide or manage containers.