I have a cleaning technique I call ant mode. A colony of ants can accomplish a lot. They can move immense amounts of materials, and create well organized groupings of things.
In ant mode, I pick up one thing, and then I put it in a place it belongs.
If I don't know where it belongs, I put it down with something else of the same type. I'm only ever picking up one thing, I'm only ever putting it down in one spot. I envision myself becoming a colony of ants.
It's very helpful when moving lots of things from one spot to another, and I pretend that I am one of multiple ants making the same trip back and forth. It's surprising how effective it is because there's no thought required. No second guessing. There's no wondering what to do next, it's just pick up something out of place and move where it belongs.
The best thing about ant mode, is that I can stop anytime, and I've accomplished something. Things are better than I found them.
One problem that I encounter while doing this is that you get distracted when you get somewhere and forget to go back to the place you are supposed to be tidying. I solve this by leaving my glasses at the origin, and the need to read things will drag me back
This reminds me of the process of 'Knolling', popularized by artist Tom Sachs. By definition it is just the act of arranging objects, tools, materials etc into spaced, parallel or perpendicular alignment on a table. Tom calls this out as an organizational technique, summed up by 'Always be Knolling' [0] - constantly scan your environment for things that are not in use, and if they are not in use put them away. If you are not sure if you need them, group all like objects, and align them all to be square to each other and the workspace.
It's not like being aligned makes tools and materials really that much better organized, but it's the act of doing this that gets things put away and keeps clutter down and workspaces efficiently utilized.
It's similar in part to steps in the Toyota "5S" system. [1]
I am one of those people who feel there's a certain amount of meaningful and useful context embodied in the last position of things... the files on the Desktop, the junk on the table, the books out of the book shelf, the tabs in the browser.
As a consequence, I can shift context easily because all I have to do is scroll back to my prior workspace (physically or digitally). However, to remain effective, such a strategy requires a strict policy of no interference (nothing irritates me more than people reorganizing my stuff - which is why I insist on doing my own cleaning).
Sometimes it gets out of hand. This week I closed all my browser tabs and realised the left-most of them had been open for 3+ months. On the other hand, it means using mental powerups like RCS/VCS repositories, todo lists, and project documentation becomes second nature because they are all free stored-context extensions.
It's the mental antithesis of inbox zero - notbox infinite.
I call it "seeding." When a mess is bothering me but there's a barrier (internal or external) to dealing with it completely in the moment, I "seed" the cleaning process by doing just a little bit.
A few rounds of seeding can have a surprisingly big impact and every round is an opportunity for the momentum to kick in it that leads to the whole job getting done.
I often use something similar. I call it spontaneous incremental tidying and decluttering. I remind myself that tidying is a process, not a goal. One iteration of the algorithm is very quick and I can do as many as I like.
I often tell myself that I'm going to use it to clear this small area, and before I know I've made massive progress. But if I don't, then I've still made a dent and I can resume anytime.
This sounds remarkably like how I clean even though I mentally model it very differently. For me it’s “linear mode”: I start in one place and move til I’ve reached all targets, only moving when I’m done where I started or to put like things in their designated staging. It only trips me up when my staging categories don’t line up with reality, and then I just recategorize with a hard “snap decisions or no decisions” limit.
I'm gonna guess not autocorrect, but swype/swiftkey. y is next to t and d is adjacent to r. SwiftKey absolutely butchers me like this when I type slightly unfamiliar words, especially if I'm going fast. It would never let me type "ant" if I haven't already typed it once normally. And "more" being preferred over "mode" isn't that hard to believe too.
Yeah, just kind of crazy that so many people don't proof read their comments anymore. I swear the number of easily spotted and fixed typos is getting ridiculous. I typed this on my phone and if i didn't constantly fix mistakes in word prediction it would be an unreadable mess.
It's gotten so bad that I'm left either to assume that most people out here either don't know English very well or are roughly code bots. Read your own comments before you post, people!
I made a few of the off-by-one kind of typos with clients and coworkers really early on in my career, and learned to always always proofread before I ended up having a chat with HR for something completely unintentional.
Sometimes I'll type something correct, hit send, and it'll autocorrect the correct word to an incorrect word, e.g. "ant mode" to "any more", AFTER I've hit the send button
I think this happens because generally, autocorrect will do its thing after pressing space, or some other type of white space. At the end of a message, we usually press enter, which then serves both as the autocorrect trigger and the send trigger. You could notice that autocorrect has still selected the word (thus indicating its intention to correct), but really, that’s a bit subtle.
I would think that pressing enter should only send if no autocorrect was triggered by it (and sending requires hitting enter a second time), but maybe then you get the even bigger problem of constantly forgetting to actually send.
Most of my typos of this sort come from turning auto correct off, because I do not like it rewriting my language when it guesses a word completely wrong.
2 typos (ant -> any, mode -> more), with one of them repeated. Could arguably be called 2 or 3, depending on whether we're counting classes or instances.
I think I do the same, e.g. when I have to pack up for a vacation and at the same time need to bring my apartment in good shape: I basically just look around, see what looks wrong, fix it. Continue with the next.
I regularly amaze myself when at some point I take a small break or walk into another room and stuff looks really much better.
That’s a great description. On top of this, if I clean just one thing I feel a sense of accomplishment. Meaning I clean a second thing to feel that again. In no time, my house is in order.
In ant mode, I pick up one thing, and then I put it in a place it belongs.
If I don't know where it belongs, I put it down with something else of the same type. I'm only ever picking up one thing, I'm only ever putting it down in one spot. I envision myself becoming a colony of ants.
It's very helpful when moving lots of things from one spot to another, and I pretend that I am one of multiple ants making the same trip back and forth. It's surprising how effective it is because there's no thought required. No second guessing. There's no wondering what to do next, it's just pick up something out of place and move where it belongs.
The best thing about ant mode, is that I can stop anytime, and I've accomplished something. Things are better than I found them.