Thursday: Optimizing

One of the projects I've undertaken while being at home for at least the next ten days is to reorganize our basement. I would say clean out our basement but with the number of services that are closed and the limited amount of garbage I can dispose of each week, it's not going to be clean at the end of this process. Instead what I hope is that everything down there has a purpose. The purpose of some of those things will be to be thrown away, but at least it will all have its appropriate place instead of right now where all of the things down there live in some kind of limbo where they are neither useful or junk and instead await my judgement on whether they will be useful or not.

I can only put in about an hour or two of basement sorting in per day. We live in an older house and I can only stand up straight in a few parts of the basement so if I'm down there for long enough it starts to strain my neck which isn't really good for me right now. In the rest of the day I fill time with video games, attempts at reading, and bouts of optimization. What do I mean by optimization?

Think about the place where you live. Imagine yourself walking through it. Is there one part of your house that you know is sort of left a certain way because you don't have the time to go back and fix it? Are there a million coats in your front closet? Does your kitchen sink have three dozen cleaners that you'll never use underneath it? Is there a junk drawer somewhere in your house that's been accumulating contents for years? These are parts of your living-space that are sub-optimal. And you know what? 99% of the time that is totally fine. It's really not worth the effort to resolve these issues as these things work fine enough or don't impede our normal progress in life with the way they are.

But here we are in the 1% of time where I happen to have a lot of free time and only so much attention and effort to fill it with. So that means that all of those spaces in my life that have been functioning poorly up until now are suddenly ripe for optimization. Since taking catastrophe leave I have reorganized our living room, sorted out the landscaping in our backyard, and today I reconnected all the cables behind my desk so that I'd stop kicking off the power bar when I stretch out my legs. I didn't really need to do any of these things. On a regular day there would be no point. But in this moment when I can't really leave the house and I don't always have an abundance of attention, optimizing bits of the house that need some work is something that's been happening a lot.