[HN Gopher] A dot a day keeps the clutter away
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A dot a day keeps the clutter away
Author : scottlawson
Score : 44 points
Date : 2026-03-31 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottlawsonbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottlawsonbc.com)
| jmward01 wrote:
| First, great system. Second, I am going to pine for an electronic
| version and having read the post I get it. Feel free to laugh and
| read the next comment. That said there are two aspects to this
| system that come to mind immediately:
|
| - The value of the information: This is the purpose of the dots
| and, I think the stated reason for the dots.
|
| - The value of the process: If you did this and didn't have the
| final dot information, would it still be valuable in some way? I
| suspect there is value here in creating friction that helps you
| consider your environment more.
|
| - But clearly there is also a cost (so, three things came to
| mind. sue me!). The cost would be stickers on my junk. I
| generally don't like that.
|
| So call the cost and the value of the process a wash and you are
| left with 'can I get the value of the information without the
| cost or at a substantially lower cost?' That is, I think, an
| argument for AR. I'd love a version of this where I could tag a
| lot of things and gather my own usage data without putting
| stickers on my stuff. How often did I wear x, or use y? Did I
| actually eat 4k calories in fried chicken two weeks ago? Of
| course the privacy concerns here are the main stopper for me but
| when local compute is cheap enough AR tagging, like these dots,
| is something I definitely would try.
| scottlawson wrote:
| I definitely see the appeal of an electronic version. I think
| it really depends on what you care about tracking. Food? Maybe
| use the same barcodes already on the product. Clothes? maybe
| RFID patches that are unobtrusive.
|
| Things that are subject to a lot of wear and tear and handled a
| lot will not work well with dots as they will come off, but I
| don't find that to be a problem for the front of storage boxes
| so it works for me.
|
| While I don't have an electronic system for tracking parts
| bins, the one exception is parts I place on PBCs. This is a
| small subset of my total parts and to track them I have an
| electronic database that's much more rigorous, tracking part
| numbers, data sheets, footprints, symbols, and it is much
| closer to the kind of part database that a site like digikey
| would use than the dot system.
|
| I don't need dots to track parts I put on PCBs because I can do
| that all programmatically to scan the files and see what parts
| I place the most often.
|
| I don't quite know what you mean with your question about
| whether it would be useful if I didn't have dot totals but
| still tracked them. I do find the dot totals to be useful, and
| comparing across years also helps me identify things that were
| used a lot, but maybe only two years ago. Stuff like glue and
| magnets seem timeless and are used constantly every year
| though.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I'll give you an example of how the process could be valuable
| even without the information. A huge amount of doing
| something is just getting over the initiating energy to start
| doing something. A trick to help with that is to start with a
| really low cost task. The point isn't the task, it is that
| you started which gets you into 'keep doing things' mode. The
| dots may act as a low cost task and help to get passed the
| initiating energy. I think there are other things that this
| could help too. This is a task, although simple, that can
| help define the phases of projects which could help planning
| and execution success. This is all just guessing, I'm not a
| psychologist, but I think there are potentially ways that
| this is helpful beyond just the data it presents which is a
| good thing.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Interesting, but this seems to solve the wrong problem. I already
| know that the ice cream maker sitting on the shelf hasn't been
| used in 5 years. The problem is... what if I want to make ice
| cream?
| starvit35 wrote:
| towards the end he talks about this, dots determine how
| frequent it is used, therefore how close in proximity it should
| be to his work area. stuff which was dotted rarely or not at
| all was put into his shed outside, but even then he still had
| it and used it for a project later on.
|
| if you're not going to use your ice cream maker every week, why
| have it on your kitchen counter, or kitchen shelf, put it away
| in a cupboard
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