Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Half-Assed Isn’t the Same as Efficient
It’s human nature to look for a way to do the work we must do in the quickest, most efficient way possible. The instinct has led to great breakthroughs—tools, wheels, assembly lines. But sometimes the desire to find a shortcut backfires. There’s a difference between efficient and half-assed.
Efficiency is elegant. It cuts out the excess and boils a task down to its essence. Half-assed is lazy and poorly thought out. And, usually, it comes back to bite you… well, you know where.
A few weeks ago I was working with a client to bring order to a closet. We needed to store her new suitcase. She travels a lot, so it had to be close at hand and easy to reach.
The closet has an upper shelf, home to boxes of photos, and two clothing rods, with a shelf between them holding an open box of framed prints. The vacuum cleaner is stashed on the floor below the shelf.
The upper shelf is too high to make access easy. The middle shelf is perfect: There’s enough room to put it on top of the box of prints, and the suitcase would be easy to reach without a ladder. This slap-dash approach would work until the first time she tries to haul out the suitcase and pulls the box of prints down with it, which would be bad.
Maybe it could go on the floor of the closet, with the vacuum cleaner? While it seems like an easy solution, inevitably the item she needs will be behind the item she doesn’t, resulting in repeated shifting and wrangling.
So what’s the elegant solution? To save time and labor in the long run, you have to put in a little more effort in the short run. Since the suitcase fit exactly where the boxes of framed prints were, we decided it was time to reassess the prints, which she had never hung up anyway. She found she was ready to part with half of them, and decided to hang several. That meant the remaining few could slide next to the box of photos on the upper shelf.
To be efficient sometimes you have to ask a different question. Instead of Where can I fit this? ask Where would this ideally go? or Where would be the most efficient place? Then, work backwards to make the right space available. Sometimes, you don’t realize you can get rid of something that’s taking up space, until you have a vision of a better use for that space. Another elegant solution for the suitcase might have been to consider if there was a better place to store the vacuum cleaner, freeing up the floor.
So remember, if you really want to save time and effort, don’t settle for the lazy way, put in some thought and come up with the most elegant solution.