Holding Stations

One of the continuing themes of my mini-articles here will no doubt be, “Stuff I have figured out that other people may have picked up on long ago.” Thus it is with this pearl I discovered (thanks to Sarah) in Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts, a treasure-trove of housekeeping wisdom. Phil, I hear some of you say, we’ve seen your house, and you don’t keep it. Yes, but I am eternally hopeful. So,

From Chapter 3, Neatening:

…You have to establish temporary holding stations for miscellaneous designated goods. These are places where it is permissible to leave things before they are put away.

Mendelson fleshes this out over the next page and a half, but she could have stopped with those above two sentences and bowled me over. More:

The toys and the receipts, while they are not in their places, are in the right place to be dealt with. If they accumulate there for a couple of days, still they do not get lost and they do not create a disorderly home. We know where to look for them.

Well, call me slapjack. She has answered my main questions about where to put incoming stuff and when to deal with it. In trying to adhere to the well-known “deal with each item only once” philosophy, I used to think that bills fresh from the mailbox needed to be opened (and at least scheduled in Quicken) right away, before I took off my wingtips, before I put away the man-bag, before I did the after-work pee, and was that before or after I checked the answering machine? Aigh. Too… much… to… process. Now an old tarnished brass six-inch-wide pot sits on top of my stereo. When I come home, I deposit the new mail there and move about the apartment more like a sane person, returning to deal with the bills in a batch, when it’s time. Whoa! And there’s no guilt, because of that key, key word, “permissible.”

We read on to find that we already have holding stations in our laundry hampers, recycling bins and kitchen trashcans. This is somehow a new concept to me, though I’ve always littered the palmpilot with virtual holding stations. When my mind races at work, homing in on something non-work-related that I think I just have to Google before I forget, I don’t need to succumb to the urge anymore. Those pending searches — would-be thieves of time and attention — can go in the “www” memo pad entry, for when I get time at home to thoroughly scour to my guilt-free heart’s content. Same for mp3s I know are out there (”Limewire” memo pad entry), movies to add to the queue (”Netflix” memo pad entry) or ideas to put on this site (”Twelvety” memo pad). You get 99% of the closure you need by doing this and you do it in less than one percent of the time it would have taken to give in to your baser urges. I love this.