Abstract of the book. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Junk drawers for miscellaneous items are incredibly effective – use them every day.

We’ve seen how creating categories is a great way to organize our thoughts and our lives. But what should we do with objects and ideas that don’t seem to belong in any pigeonhole? Well, these miscellaneous items can form their own category.

The categorizing tendencies of the brain can be seen in the way that we organize our living spaces. In our homes, there’s usually at least one place where random objects like single light bulbs, paper clips or car-cleaning products go. Why? Because it wouldn’t make sense to have a special drawer for light bulbs if you only had a few – combining them with other spare objects is much more space efficient.

You could even use one of these junk drawers at work. A miscellaneous folder, perhaps, containing documents that don’t fit into other folders but are also too important to dispose of. However, junk drawers will only be effective if we perform a little bit of maintenance from time to time.

The first way to do this is to keep checking their content regularly. This stops us losing track of what’s in there, which would reduce its organizational advantage. Some items can be eliminated from a junk drawer – if you’re sorting through objects that you haven’t yet felt the need to use, it’s unlikely that you’ll need them in the future. These can be thrown out.

You may also find that items in junk drawers can be moved to other places for more specific types of objects later. For example, perhaps you’ve recently developed an interest in scrapbooking. If you go through your junk drawer, you’ll almost certainly discover objects that could find a new home in the scrapbooking drawer – that extra pair of scissors, maybe, or the double-sided sticky tape.