Before I started, I assumed my home held maybe sixty or seventy things. Once everything was logged, the number was 128.

The extras are the interesting part. They are not prominent, they take up almost no space, and they quietly drain money and attention. Here are the three things I found after going through the whole house — and a way to start that takes twenty minutes.

1. If you cannot remember it, you buy it twice

Three categories were wildly off:

Category	What I assumed	What was actually there
Medicine and supplements	Five or six kinds	19, four of them expired
Cables and chargers	Four or five	11, of which 3 get used
Stockpiles like shampoo and body wash	“We have some”	3 identical bottles, 2 still unopened

Those three bottles of shampoo I could not even explain to myself at first. Then it became obvious: every time I was in a shop, I could not remember whether we already had one, so I bought another.

This is not a memory problem. Nobody can hold the inventory of several hundred household objects in their head. The mistake was assigning the job of remembering to my brain, which is plainly not built for it.

Duplicate buying is the least visible kind of waste in a home. It never stings the way throwing something away does, so it never gets corrected.

2. Location matters far more than category

I tried several organising systems, and nearly all of them started with categories: by purpose, by material, by how often you use it.

Every one of them stalled at the third level. Because categories are for other people to look at — they photograph beautifully. But when you are actually looking for something, your mind is not thinking in categories at all:

“That tape is in the box under the TV stand, I’m pretty sure.”

You are recalling a location, not a category. So what you need to build is a spatial order, not a taxonomy.

Once I inverted the order, it came together immediately: fix the location first, sort out categories later. Categories can be filled in over time. Locations have to be decided up front.

And use exactly three levels. No deeper:

1. Room — kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom
2. Furniture — wall cabinet, bookshelf, TV stand, bedside table
3. Container — storage box, suitcase, drawer divider

Three levels answer “where is it” completely. Add a fourth and you will not remember the path yourself.

3. The hard part was never the tidying

Tidying is something you can finish. One weekend, everything put away neatly, a photo taken, done.

What actually grinds you down is the steady drip of small questions afterwards:

• When does the milk in the fridge expire
• How much shampoo is left upstairs, and do we need more
• The coffee machine bought two years ago — is it still under warranty

All three share one property: they require you to be reminded at a moment when you are not thinking about them. And human memory for this kind of thing is essentially zero.

I tried sticky notes on the fridge. That lasted two weeks. I tried a list in the notes app, which became a block of text nobody ever opened.

Eventually I accepted something: remembering has to be outsourced. It cannot be run on diligence. Diligence is unreliable. A tool is reliable.

How to start: three steps, twenty minutes

Do not start with the whole house. The whole house will have you quitting by tomorrow.

1. Pick one fridge shelf, or one drawer Choose somewhere you open every day, with few things in it and clear boundaries. The bottom shelf of the fridge, or the top drawer of the bedside table. Small enough to finish today.

2. Create three locations One room, one piece of furniture, one container. Three levels, that is all. Do not build out every room in the house up front — create them as you need them.

3. Go one item at a time. A photo is enough The name, category, expiry date and price are filled in for you. Twenty minutes later that drawer is listed on your phone.

9:41

Wednesday · 10 September

Good afternoon, Knight

K

Search items, places, lists

My collection6 places

128items

Current value

¥12,480

↑ 3.2%

📷 Scan to add

Needs attentionAll ›

01

Shelf life3 expired · 10 expiring within 30 days

13

02

Low stock3 used up · 5 below threshold

8

03

Unassigned19 items with no location

19

🏠 Home

📦 Items

🗺️ Places

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Tidying is not a one-off project

Nor is the goal to make your home look like a showroom.

The point is simply that “where is it” stops depending on luck. Starting from the smallest drawer is enough — once that one is logged you will feel the difference immediately, and the rest tends to follow on its own.

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This approach eventually became an iOS app: AllMyThings, named after the idea of all your things in one place.

If you are curious how someone who cannot code built it, I wrote a separate account of that.