“People ask me about the positive side of clutter and I say, ‘There isn’t any positive side.’”
This is incorrect, of course.
I dislike clutter and I personally maintain a relatively clutter-free existence but of course there is a trade-off to be made between short term expediency and lack of clutter.
Understanding this trade-off has been helpful to me - especially in designing and acquiring living spaces.
Here is an example:
My current office space requires two rooms. However, I went out of my way to find a suite with three rooms - the third of which was not, and continues to not, be necessary. What this "buffer space" allows me to do is stage, or cache, incoming items and/or projects while allowing me to make full (clutter-free) use of the necessary two rooms without interruption.
Running my office without a third room would be like running a CPU without a cache - it is perfectly workable and there's no reason it can't be done - but it requires immediate, real-time interruption of work to maintain the empty (clutter-free) pipeline (really stretching the CPU analogy here, but you get the idea).
If an item has a reason to be sitting there; and then you actually do engage with it the way you were planning to; and then when the reason goes away, the item goes away; then it's not clutter. It's just prep.
"Clutter" is the result of a broken mental model of physical "cache eviction": it's stuff that you have in the way of projects you're doing now, even though the stuff that's in the way is for a project you're planning for later (and might never even get to.) It's stuff whose presence slows down your life, rather than speeding it up, when measured over the long term.
Reason can come and go. That's the problematic part with clutter. Something may have lost it's purpose for now, but someday in the future a new purpose can appear and then it's not clutter anymore. Instead of comparing that 3rd room with a cache, I would call it an archive, a bank for items or just your "uselater"-room, where you collect items similar to how people collect bookmarks which they plan to readlater.
The relevant part is that clutter should not stand in your way, hinder you in your progress. Thus it must stored away and trimmed down from time to time if space is raching it's capacity. But besides that? If you have the space, who cares. As long as it's out of the way it's not a hindrace.
I did something similar on a smaller scale -- on my jamie hyneman-style wall of boxes, I added a few "inbox" boxes. When cleaning up, if I don't know where something goes, it goes into an inbox. Turning this mental roadblock into a non-decision makes cleaning up much, much faster. And because you only have a small number of inboxes, finding a "where did I put that?" item is quick.
I used to be a messy sort, and my flatmate got a bit sick of it. We had two fairly deep drawers in the kitchen that we didn’t use for anything else, so they each became our “where stuff is” drawer.
I had the right to put any of his loose possessions in his drawer, and he mine. So, of course, that’s where ALL of my stuff ended up. His was mostly empty. :-/ Either way, I knew where my stuff was!
This is a wonderful analogy and a great idea. We just did a bunch of cleaning and organizing for a holiday party. A place for everything and everything in it's place kind of thing. I've never thought of dedicated space to serve as a cache to prevent the clutter from affecting the rest of the space.
I think you are confusing what the article means by clutter. You don't keep things in the third room that are unnecessary. It is just that spending time organizing them in a system that would appear visually de-cluttered would be a waste of time. Your third room might eventually need to be cleaned out once your cache gets full of things that, for one reason or another, you don't need anymore.
Every couple months I stop keeping my home spic and span and simply let it go: newspapers, empty cans, Amazon boxes, sunflower seed shells, unwanted mail, etc. all over the place, clothes strewn everywhere, cords/connectors/cables/chargers both plugged and unplugged festooning every available surface.... I like living amongst the chaos for about a week, before it starts to annoy me and I spiff the place up. Both the fall into disorder and its anti-entropic counterpart are soothing, in their place.
You can think of clutter as a ratio of stuff to space... adding space is one way to deal with it. Just not one that’s practical for most people without major life upheavals like moving house.
This is incorrect, of course.
I dislike clutter and I personally maintain a relatively clutter-free existence but of course there is a trade-off to be made between short term expediency and lack of clutter.
Understanding this trade-off has been helpful to me - especially in designing and acquiring living spaces.
Here is an example:
My current office space requires two rooms. However, I went out of my way to find a suite with three rooms - the third of which was not, and continues to not, be necessary. What this "buffer space" allows me to do is stage, or cache, incoming items and/or projects while allowing me to make full (clutter-free) use of the necessary two rooms without interruption.
Running my office without a third room would be like running a CPU without a cache - it is perfectly workable and there's no reason it can't be done - but it requires immediate, real-time interruption of work to maintain the empty (clutter-free) pipeline (really stretching the CPU analogy here, but you get the idea).