gloriouscowMar 20

the adhd organizing experience

  • buy plastic stacking organizers for your electronics stuff
  • realize you want to label said organizers
  • hand-write a few labels, realize it has been a long, long time since you took that drafting class in high school
  • try to find that label maker you bought back during the 2008 housing crisis
  • find it and realize it has a USB-B cable
  • steal the one from your printer
  • try to find the label maker software
  • won't install
  • dig back through the sedimentary layers of the backups of every computer you have ever owned on your NAS
  • find the original installer from 2008
Show thread🔏 Matthias WiesmannMar 20
@gloriouscow in my case I got the label printer as an extra with a printer, and when I tried using it, I could not because I mistakenly switched it to mass storage mode. The part about aliexpress labels is spot on.
Show threadgloriouscowMar 20

@thias

My ultimate solution was to just print "labels" on my laser printer, cut them out and secure them with packing tape. This actually is probably what i should have done from the start since i can make them much bigger and more readable than the label maker could.

I know they make adhesive label sheets for printers, but I have had the pleasure of tweezering bits of mangled label out of the roller guts of a laser printer before, so that's sort of a "never again" thing for me.

Show threadgloriouscowMar 20

@thias

Slowly getting there. Im going to need some larger bins to label 'abandoned projects'

Show threadLyksoMar 20

@gloriouscow @thias I personally just number my bins, give IDs to my things, and keep a TSV file of IDs, bins, and descriptions for grepping through (via a web interface now, because finding stuff via my phone is important).

I also write important contents on the bins so I don't have to refer to the spreadsheet for things I access often.

Has worked well enough the past few years. Things get messy sometimes, but cleaning up is dead simple.

Show thread🔏 Matthias WiesmannMar 20
@lykso @gloriouscow I use text labels, ideally with some icon / symbol. I really want to minimise the computer interruptions when I'm building stuff. I managed to get the label printer to work.
Show threadLykso
@thias @gloriouscow My trouble with category bins was finding categories that made sense to me. At one point I tried keeping "project boxes," but I have a lot of projects with overlapping tools and components that didn't fit cleanly into one or two boxes. Having a virtually mindless system seems to be what has worked for me.
Mar 20 at 7:01pmWeb