What to ask when organising anything

FORGET all the complicated tips and tricks you’ve heard for organising your life, a Perth writer says there’s just one question you need to ask yourself. And that is: “When did you use this item last?”

Tom Griffiths, co-author of Algorithms To Live By with Brian Christian, says approaching life as if you were a computer can make everything far more simple.

“If you’ve ever had to tidy your wardrobe, you’ve run into the agonising decision, should I keep this or throw it away?

“Martha Stewart says you should ask yourself four questions – how long have I had it? Is it functional? Is it a duplicate of something else? And when did you last wear it?

“But other experts who design the memory systems of computers thought longer and harder, and said one question is more important than the others. When did you use it last?”

Griffiths, speaking at TedxSydney, revealed that organising things in order of when you last used them is the “most effective” strategy for accessing what you need quickly.

He said the hack could work for anything from the papers on your desk, the equipment in your kitchen and the bottles in your bathroom cabinet. And it’s far simpler than Marie Kondo’s cult tidying system.

Japanese economist Noguchi Yukio invented an incredibly simple, self-organising method for filing documents. Don’t try to classify or or sort your papers. Instead, whenever you take a document off the shelf, put it back on the far left. Over time, your most frequently used items will be on the left, things you need occasionally will be in the middle, and things you rarely or never use will be on the right, so you can consider archiving or throwing them out.

While he admits that “organising your wardrobe or desk is not the most pressing problem we have”, the author believes we can simplify our lives and still achieve an optimal result.

“The best algorithms are about doing what makes the most sense at the time,” he says.