Making My Life Easier

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I hate to tidy. I like having a tidy house, but maintaining order always seems too difficult. My desk, for example, accrues piles of books and papers with no end. Every few weeks I rearrange things, filing a few papers and shelving a few books, but I always end up with more sorted piles.

I wish there were some filing system that could hide papers I hadn't touched in days, weeks, or months. It would be even better if it could discard securely papers I don't need. There are similar archival programs for computers; why is there no such invention for physical data?

In one sense, you could say that piles of papers have the same effect. Over time, you can expect the most useful papers to migrate to the tops of the heaps. Perhaps if I ceased even the minimal level of sorting and tidying I achieve I could throw out the bottom half of a pile once a year and feel disciplined.

In college, when I lived in the dorms, I had an easier time staying clean. I owned much less stuff, for example. Perhaps I also had more discipline. If I spent a little bit of time putting things away when I used them, when I have a free moment, and when I notice the mess, perhaps I would make progress both on tidying my house and on instilling in myself more discipline.

Strangely, dishes aren't as difficult to manage these days. Part of the ease there is in cooking for only one person. It is easy to put a plate, fork, and glass in the dishwasher knowing that those are the only dirty dishes anywhere in the house.

My most tiresome optional task is clipping comics from the newspaper. I enjoy the Mutts comic tremendously and chase down each new book collection as it comes out. There's a span of several months between the end of the year and the new book, however. To fill in that gap, I clip the comics out of the newspaper... on an infrequent basis.

I don't mean that I clip the comic sometimes. I eventually clip every one. I mean that infrequently I sit down with a stack of papers and a pair of scissors and clip several days' worth of comics. This means that I have an even larger stack awaiting the clipping.

A few months ago I realized that if I set a goal of clipping seven comics per weekday, I could go through a month of papers in under a week. The pile by my desk now represents under six months. That means that I could finish this pile and the papers that accrue between now and then in seven or eight weeks. From there, a simple session once a week would keep the stack manageable.

Of course, if I had a robot that could do the job for me... I wouldn't have the opportunity to read the other good comics from that day. Perhaps this task is better without automation.

Cooking also takes time. Even dishes such as baked chicken or roast beef have preparation time to take into account. (The crisp cheesy baked chicken, for example, takes almost half as long to prepare as it does to bake!) Preparing in advance for these meals would help. For example, I usually have to scrounge breadcrumbs for the chicken dish. It's worth the time and effort, though.

Sometimes I think about writing a small program to keep track of the recipies I know how to make, the ingredients they require, and my cooking schedule. In theory, this would allow me to plan a week in advance, print out a grocery list, and know what to prepare and when.

In practice, I may have spent longer planning this program than I would have spent on making a simple paper and pencil system.

Speaking of computer automation, one of the dullest pieces of my work is in writing contracts for articles. Within a page or so of legalese, there are a few fields that need to change for every article, specifically the author's contact information and the subject of the article.

I set up a template for the contract over a year ago. Even though I edited the document manually, the template helped keep track of things that change and things that stay the same. I knew, though, that one day I would write a program to manage my articles.

Strangely enough, I actually did that this summer. It's a small web page running on a local web server hooked up to a database of author and article information. Now I can fill in the information I'd have to type anyway (mostly just the article description) and generate the contract immediately. It saves between one and two minutes per contract, for a grand total of maybe ten minutes per week, but it saves ten of the most frustrating and dull minutes every week.

It's weird being a command-line power user sometimes. While working on the computer, I always look out for repetitive or difficult tasks to automate. That approach carries over into the physical world as well. Wouldn't it be nice to have a washing machine that fills with water, dissolves the soap gradually, and then lowers the clothes into the soapy water instead of having to do everything by hand? Why can't the same machine both wash and dry clothes? Why does my ice maker not shut off when it fills the ice tray?

Then there the problems I know I can solve but haven't yet done. neither remote garage door opener has worked for the past month. Every time I drive after parking my truck in the garage, I realize that I have to back out, park, and close the door with the external opener. Wouldn't it be easier to reset the controllers or replace the batteries?

Like automating computer tasks, though, taking control of my life is a process. If I can identify the most annoying or detailed or difficult problem and solve that, though other annoyances will take its place, I will have made real progress.