This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All) by Hanne Blank Boyd.
Click here for the full table of contents.
Every home needs Temporary Crap Zones. These are the places where you can put things down for the moment, knowing that you’re going to do something with them in the near future.
An example is the “landing zone” by the door where you come and go from your home. These zones often take shape organically as that spot where you drop your keys, your bags, maybe take off your shoes or your jacket. It’s the place where you put the form you have to mail back to the government office so you’ll remember to put it in the mailbox. It’s where you put the birthday present for your favorite co-worker so you can grab it on your way to work. It’s the spot where you might put the grocery list once you’ve written it, and maybe even put your car keys on top of it so you won’t forget to take the grocery list with you when you leave to go do the shopping. (OK, that last one could be just me.)
The problem with Temporary Crap Zones is that they have a tendency to turn into not-so-temporary grand monuments to the accumulative and sedimentary powers of Random Crap. This tendency is so strong, and happens in so many different kinds of spaces and in so many different types of people’s households, that I have become halfway convinced that if some scientist looked into it they would find there’s a heightened gravitational pull between horizontal surfaces and random objects that we use in our living spaces, something that tugs at us to put things down on the horizontal surface “just for a moment,” then jacks up the gravity and makes them highly resistant to being moved again.
For the betterment of humankind, the mysterious heightened gravity of the Temporary Crap Zone must be fought. If we are not vigilant, any object that rests in a Temporary Crap Zone will continue to attract more and more objects to it until it has become an Untemporary Crap Monument. The next thing you know, your breakfast table is an archipelago of papers you need to deal with, magazines you want to finish reading, bottles of vitamins, that birthday card from your cousin, the wristwatch whose battery you keep meaning to get replaced, three or four dull pencils, an assortment of LEGOs, several ballpoint pens of which only one works, several half-finished to-do lists, a coupon for 20% off at some pizza place you can’t remember if you even like, eight flyers your kid’s summer camp sent home with them that you never really read and now it’s September again, and yet another postcard from your dentist’s office reminding you that you’re still overdue for a cleaning.
Temporary Crap Zones must be managed with a firm hand. This means rules.
The first rule of Temporary Crap Zones is that they remain temporary. This means that they must get emptied--and I do mean completely emptied--on a regular basis. You get to choose when that is, but it should be at a regular, known interval and not just on a “oh, I’ll do it when I think it needs it” basis. If you were going to do it when you thought it needed it, they wouldn’t still need it, Q.E.D.
