Don’t give yourself the option to lose something
Or at least try
Have you ever lost something? If you’ve answered yes, read on.
What I’m about to share in this article is not revolutionary. In fact, it’s so simple that someone calling this stupid wouldn’t surprise me. Still, I do this all the time, and I hope it’s something you start adopting. Here’s the trick.
If you don’t want to lose something, don’t even give yourself the option to lose it. How? By preventing yourself from needing to remember where you last placed the thing.
3 examples
Example: Say you are wearing a ring (something that MIT alumni like myself likely do daily) but need to wash your hands. If you take your ring off and place it on the counter, you’d be giving yourself the option to lose that ring. To prevent that, you could possibly keep it on, but that will leave you with that annoying wet ring finger feeling. What I do, instead, is to take it off and leave it in my pocket.
You can use the “put it in your pocket” (or bag) trick for any number of things that you need to temporarily take off. E.g., a dead phone battery, which often is how people end up losing their phones, or car keys.
Example: A bagpack—say at an event you went to after work. You may need to leave drop off your bag somewhere at the event’s space. Then, when you actually leave, there’s a small chance you might forget to take it (this has happened to me). So, what I do in this case is that I leave something very valuable inside of my backpack. Something I can’t live without. Something like… my phone, and it works wonders!
You can use the “leave your phone with it” trick for any number of items that you are forced to leave in some other place. E.g., a jacket.
Example: There’s something in your apartment that you just lost. Maybe you lost the remote to the TV or something. This, I assert, likely happens when you leave stuff around in random places. Many people do. What I do, for these cases, is that I have a place (or a few key places) for every items in my spaces. My remote always stays on top of the TV cabinet.
The “always have a place for it” trick works for any number of items that can be easily moved around—usually in your living spaces. The trick is to always respect this rule. Have a place for evreything, and never make an exception to return items to their “homes” when you’re done with them,.
The general rule
I’m not quite sure yet what the general rule is. There are an infinite number of ways you can end up losing something.
But, let’s get nerdy and computer scienc-y for a second. I’m reading the book A Philosophy of Software Design, and it talks about a concept that’s really core and—I promise—is relevant to this topic.
John Ousterhout claims that the one thing that makes software harder to work with is complexity, and complexity has two main causes:
- Dependencies (the need for other things)
- Obscurities (an “unknown unknown”—something you don’t know that you don’t know, which comes to bite you in the ass later because you didn’t know about it)
As a general principle, Ousterhout recommends to remove these sources of complexity, and provides various general principles to do that.
How this relates to not giving yourself the option to lose something is that you’re creating a dependency whenever you “give yourself the option” to lose something.
- When you take your ring out and place it on the counter, you now have to remember to pick it back up
- When you leave your backpack or jacket somewhere, you now have to remember to take it back before you leave
- When you place your items all over the place, you will need to remember the last place you left it when you want to use it again
This can become an obscurity—once you’ve forgotten about your backpack altogether, you won’t remember to pick it up, which will come to bite you in the ass later.
So, overall, it’s this need to remember where something was that needs to be eliminated. You must avoid creating new dependencies as you move around in the world that way, you eliminate the need to remember things.
