The situation:
My husband presented me with a need for a quick fix: the hose on our ancient canister vacuum cleaner had developed a crack. Could I mend it? This is the perfect job for duct tape . . . except I couldn't find my duct tape.
Three thoughts on the situation:
1. Psychologists tell us that we spend an inordinate amount of our lives searching for lost or misplaced items. I know this. I still feel, though when this happens to me, that it is some kind of a personal/moral/cognitive failing, because I like to be the kind of person who structures my life and my surroundings in such a way that nothing ever gets lost. It is a horrible blow to my ego that (a) I know I have duct tape in the house and (b) I couldn't find it. Immediately.
2. Although I've reconciled to the idea that I'm not really a minimalist, I'm also not a clutter-er. And the absence of clutter makes it easier to find things (often). In the case of my duct tape, it made it easier for me to not-find it. That is, I searched my tool bench, and then I searched the office supplies drawer. And then I searched the tool bench again because that is where the duct tape should be, darn it and then I searched the office supplies drawer again because that was the only reasonable alternative, dang it. But neither of these searches, even when doubled, took more than 15 seconds, and I knew the duct tape was AWOL within minutes. At least I didn't waste scads of time.
3. Organizational schemes are incredibly valuable assets to finding things quickly. I think that's why people so often buy stuff they already have -- because it's easier to find, say, a can of celery soup in the grocery store than in their own cupboard. Duct tape at the hardware store is going to be in some logical place -- the aisle of sticky things, or the aisle of gray shiny things, or the aisle of round hollow objects, whatever scheme it is that particular store uses, and maybe you have to find a clerk to figure out the scheme for the aisles, but the clerk is going to know. The clerk isn't going to say "maybe I put it on the tool bench . . . or did I leave it in the office supplies drawer?". No, the clerk is going to say "aisle 7, halfway down, just past the craft supplies."
As for me, I tend to use Julia Morganstern's "organizing from the Inside Out" strategy, which means keeping things where I'm most likely to use them. For example, the last time I was actually using the duct tape, I was making this awesome R2D2 trash can, and sure enough, a few days later, I remembered this and found the duct tape hunkering down in my crafts box with the glue gun and other similar paraphernalia. The crafts box is the Wrong Place for the duct tape to be, but it's not insanely wrong. I've transported the duct tape back to its rightful place at the tool bench, and now I feel like I need to give it a proper hook to rest on so it has its very own home and is happy to stay where it belongs.
Bonus thought.
Social capital doesn't get enough airplay in economics or home organization, is what I say. After a few minutes of fruitless (or tapeless) searching, I pinged my daughter to borrow her duct tape. She happened to be heading out of her house, and even more fortuitously headed past ours, and within a jiffy I had the vacuum cleaner properly bandaged and back on the job. No driving to a store; no wandering through a hardware store during a pandemic; no forking over money for yet another roll of duct tape when I was sure (correctly) that I had a roll hunkered down in its own mysterious hidey-hole.
It sure is nice to have friends and family to help with situations small and large, and who can stick together. So to speak.
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