How I Cleaned My Room

Actually, I didn't quite do nothing. I kept coming back to the problem—sitting down in my room, staring at all the stuff, messing around with it, and wondering what to do—and gradually, over the course of several years, I developed a process that I found satisfactory. Then I used that process to clean my room!

The process, of course, is what I want to tell you about here. I don't think you'll want to use it as it stands, it's a bit too specialized for that, but maybe you'll find some of the ideas useful. And if not, well, at least it's another example of how to work with your mind rather than against it (Don't Fight Your Mind).

As usual, I've organized the details into independent subessays. The structure isn't the best, since most of the real content is in the third subessay, but hey, it's better than nothing. Thus, you may wander through these topics as you please.

• The concept of separation of functions.
• The concept of multiple passes.
• The process of de-sentimentalization.
• Some other approaches to the original problem.

Well, I shouldn't have published the table of contents before the essays were done, because of course the structure changed. Here's one more subessay.

• The concept of disposing of things.

And here's one more, one that puts all the pieces together. When I talked about developing a process, this is the process I meant.

• The other process of de-sentimentalization.

The name collision is unfortunate, but I've been using the same name for two different things for many years now, so it's too late for me to change. Maybe you can do better.

On the other hand, maybe there's no need to do better. If you're writing a program, you might have one function to validate a single object and another to validate a list of objects by calling the first function for each object and maybe also doing other things. In that case it's reasonable or even useful for the two functions to have the same name. That's sort of the situation here.

Also, now that I've added that last subessay, I'm completely pleased with the essay structure, and I take back what I said about it not being the best.