Sort—but not too much!
A while ago, I heard a woman on a podcast describe her plan for organizing her five-year-old’s Lego blocks: sorting them into bins by color. She was going to buy a bunch of new bins to make her system work. She found the process of sorting meditative, she said, and thought it would be easier for her son to find what he needed if the blocks were organized by color. I don’t know how it worked for her, but I wouldn’t recommend this kind of plan to my clients or friends. Why not? For one thing, that mother’s system emphasized making it easy to retrieve items. In general, I think it’s more important to make putting stuff away easier. I wonder what happened after multiple sessions of dividing all those little pieces by color. Did the process start to feel less meditative, and more tiresome? How long did her child continue that detailed sorting? For most people—and especially for most kids—sorting to that degree is just too much trouble. The solution? Don’t oversort. Make it …