A dot a day keeps the clutter away
by scottlawson on 3/31/2026, 9:15:01 PM
https://scottlawsonbc.com/post/dot-system
Comments
by: jmward01
First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this system that come to mind immediately:<p>- The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots and, I think the stated reason for the dots.<p>- The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you consider your environment more.<p>- But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I generally don't like that.<p>So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are left with 'can I get the value of the information without the cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots, is something I definitely would try.
3/31/2026, 10:28:37 PM
by: hecanjog
I'm ready to reorganize, there are a lot of really good ideas here! Most of all I had a similar trajectory of starting with small component drawers and now it's a real pain to find appropriate places for everything. I didn't think to try larger boxes! Makes a lot of sense. I'm curious to try some variation of the dot system too, but I think I appreciated the somewhat mundane in-between details about your setup the most.<p>(I would have appreciated less AI-assistance in the prose though FWIW, I'm sorry if that's annoying to say!)
3/31/2026, 11:10:55 PM
by: dogscatstrees
Hmm, is there a useful analog here for my custom Claude Code persistent memory system?
4/1/2026, 12:25:46 AM
by: stickfigure
Interesting, but this seems to solve the wrong problem. I already know that the ice cream maker sitting on the shelf hasn't been used in 5 years. The problem is... what if I want to make ice cream?
3/31/2026, 10:44:51 PM
by: nighthawk454
Great system! I wonder what the overall usage distribution is like - presumably some kind of power law shape.
3/31/2026, 11:58:07 PM
by: shermantanktop
My low-tech solution to organizing electronic parts is to use shoeboxes, with written labels at the end, and plastic bags inside to organize the various groups of items.<p>They stack, and I am lazy, and so I put the one I just pulled out from the middle of the stack back on top. So the ones on top are the ones I use. If they are at the bottom they don't get used much.<p>On the other hand, I don't care which ones I use a lot as I am not trying find candidates for eviction. I just care about not having to pull items out of the bottom of a stack of five shoeboxes. It happens, because frequency != importance.
3/31/2026, 10:59:07 PM
by: jvanderbot
Oh look, cache invalidation, one of the two hard problems in CS, aside from naming things and off by one errors.
3/31/2026, 11:32:35 PM
by: comrade1234
Years ago I had a landlord that had been in the British military in some signal/ntelligence role. After, he made a living of stockpiling and selling obscure but simple chips from china to American military contractors.
3/31/2026, 11:40:36 PM
by: samlinnfer
I hope those are plastic stickers because I can't imagine the pain of removing each paper sticker and have it shred into various tiny bits and while leaving some sticky gum behind.
3/31/2026, 11:35:33 PM
by: ihaveajob
This is neat but my OCD brain is hurting. I suspect a location based sorting, where most-recently-used boxes are near the top, or closer to your workstation, solves the same problem without the visual clutter.
3/31/2026, 10:58:42 PM
by: samuelknight
This is a physical implementation of a tiered caching hierarchy.
3/31/2026, 11:00:15 PM
by: brandrick
messy, but there is something endearing about the approach
3/31/2026, 11:11:15 PM
by: shevy-java
Looks like a huge mess really.
3/31/2026, 10:59:41 PM
by: tayo42
I wouldn't want to clean up the dots when I'm done tracking lol<p>I feel like this adds a ton of visual noise. It would annoy me
3/31/2026, 11:26:22 PM