…except when it doesn’t.

Tl;dr: some problems in life follow a similar pattern of “stuff piles up and we get frustrated about it”. This post looks at some such problems, and some typical solutions. 

A while ago I noticed that a lot of the persistent frustrations in my life were all due to the same type of effect: some thing keeps accumulating and I don’t manage to keep it in check. There are many such things in life, and feeling overwhelmed by these ever-growing piles can affect one’s well being quite significantly. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things of that type:

• Disorder in one’s home tends to grow by default, and needs to be kept in check by some deliberate action or habit
• Todo lists tend to grow longer and longer, unless we remove more items from our backlog than we add
• The same applies to Reading lists, e.g. when using Pocket
• Browser tabs tend to multiply, unless we manage to close more than we open, or frequently just dismiss all open tabs
• Email inboxes fill themselves up by default, and it takes effort to avoid that
• “Unread message” markers in platforms like Slack or Discord get more and more unless you put in the time to read/dismiss them
• Starting projects and commitments is much easier than completing them, particularly if you’re exposed to many interesting opportunities
   

Seeing all these piles of things isn’t great, particularly if your realistic expectation is for these piles to grow larger rather than smaller. Personally, I’d like my email inbox to be close to empty with everything neatly sorted away, my browser tabs to not require excessive horizontal scrolling, my todo list to always seem manageable, my flat to be always in order, and my commitments to be few enough for me to actually get them done while still having some room to breathe. But that’s not how things tend to be. I’m constantly reminded by these various “piles” that I’m not on top of things and that all these areas of my life tend, by default, to go in a direction that reduces my satisfaction and productivity.

That’s not a great situation to be in. So I thought a while ago: let’s collect all the typical ways in which problems of this type can be solved. And maybe I’ll notice some decent solutions I can apply to such a degree that I manage to actually “downpile”. With all that, below are some of the antidotes to uncontrollable seeming piles.

Pile Up Less

One of the more obvious solutions may be the commitment example: just say “no” more often. Easier said than done, of course. What I found helpful here is 1) never committing to anything impulsively and making a rule of always leaving at least a day to think things through when I’m confronted with some opportunity, and 2), based on the advice from the book 4000 Weeks, always having a list of at most three active projects at any given time, and not starting any other project before finishing one of them.

In the domain of emails, the “piling up less” strategy can e.g. be applied by unsubscribing from newsletters that don’t provide much value to you and you keep ignoring.

Pile Down Immediately

Sometimes you may not be able to entirely avoid the pile-up, but can still react to it immediately. An example of this is to always clean up the kitchen while cooking, and thereby trying to ensure that the kitchen is at least as clean after cooking as it was before. This is a particularly neat heuristic, because cooking tends to come with many short waiting times that are ideal to immediately reverse the entropy created in the moments before.

Pile Down Routinely

One approach I found surprisingly effective is to make an (e.g. daily) habit of reducing one of these piles. I realized that spending 5 minutes a day cleaning up my flat or decluttering my browser tabs is sufficient to keep both of these piles in an acceptable state fairly consistently, with only few exceptions. This was pretty mindblowing for me, as I would have expected this would take much more time than that.

I’m now using a very similar strategy for my Pocket reading list, and decided to read one thing from that list every morning. I’m not sure if this will ever get me close to an almost empty list, but at least that way I know that every time I add something to it, there’s a serious chance I’m actually going to read it at some point.
 

One Fell Swoop

I am in many Slack workspaces. With some of them I ran into the problem that I didn’t check them super frequently, which quickly led to a situation where basically all the channels were marked as unread, which made it difficult at that point to stay up to date. This also gave me the impression that there’s very much going on in these workspaces, and I probably couldn’t stay on top of things even if I tried. 

Turns out this impression was wrong though, at least for one of these workspaces: I decided to just one time spend 10 minutes to skim all the channels and ensure everything was marked as read afterwards. Only in the days after did I notice that, despite its >700 members, there was limited enough activity in that workspace that it was quite easy from then on to stay in the loop even with just two brief checks per week.

Automate

Another worthwhile approach is automation. One rather obvious example is email filters, particularly for automatically generated emails you get on a frequent basis that you would still like to receive for later reference, but don’t necessarily need to look into.

For a reading list, it might be worthwhile involving something like a GPT model to automatically summarize things for you, in order to accelerate your decision process of whether to read a certain source or remove it from your list.

Care Less

The previous solutions all came with the implicit assumption that piles are bad and we must fight them. But this is not always the case, even if it feels like it – some piles are actually harmless, and it’s more our emotional reaction to the pile than the pile itself that’s the problem.

Many people probably lead a very happy and effective life even when thousands of emails are in their inbox. Email programs and web interfaces usually come with decent enough search features that you’ll still be able to find anything relatively quickly, even without having everything sorted and labeled. This approach would lead to a huge mess in the physical world, but digitally it can easily be reframed as just fine (at least as long as you responding to and acting on emails is not compromised by the messy inbox).

Long todo lists also are not inherently bad. If many of the tasks inside are neither urgent nor important, then it may be perfectly acceptable for them to just live in some list indefinitely. It’s certainly better to have them live in the list than in your head, distracting you every now and then.

Avoiding Obsession

One separate point that’s probably worth making in a post like this is that there can be a risk of getting obsessive. When getting overly systematic with e.g. avoiding disorder, there may be a fine line between a well working system and unhealthy obsession. Similar – and probably worse – risks apply to the particular topic of calorie intake, which could also be seen through the lens of pile-like problems. But when doing so, one should proceed very carefully to not end up on the unhealthy road of eating disorders.

Additionally, clinging too strongly to any particular solution could also introduce friction with other people, particularly in cases of “shared piles”. Communicating and coordinating pile management with others is a topic that would indeed deserve its own post.

Example: Clothes

Let’s finally look at another thing that tends to pile up for some people (looking innocently at my girlfriend who’s going through a declutter session at this very moment): clothes. And here I mean clothes in the “owning too many” sense, not the “laundry piles up on a chair” sense.

So let’s say a person experiences frustration due to owning too many clothes. The source of the frustration can differ greatly between people – for some it may be the cumulative cost of the purchases, for others it may be the difficulty of deciding what to wear, and yet others may simply have an aesthetic preference for a minimalist household with a small set of belongings. So we can consider the different types of solutions and see where they lead:

• Care less - maybe upon introspection the person realizes that they’re actually perfectly content with their clothing situation, and their frustration rather comes from, say, a feeling of being judged by others. In this case a better approach than changing their buying behavior may be to reflect more deeply about this feeling, and possibly communicate with the people they suspect are judging them.
• Pile up less - this could mean simply buying fewer clothes. Which of course for some people may be easier than for others.
• Pile down immediately - some people follow the rule of getting rid of an old piece of clothing whenever they buy a new one. Which could even cause the person to also buy fewer new things, as it adds a small inconvenience to that process.
• Pile down routinely - one way to habitualize the process would be to incorporate the “do I want to keep this piece?” question into doing laundry. Another option would be to look through the clothes of a given season when it ends, and get rid of those one rarely or never wore.
• One fell swoop - if the current situation is hard to bear, one could take some time to go through all one’s clothes and decide which to keep and which to give away, to quickly reach a state that’s less overwhelming.
• Automation - Here I’ve got nothing. Maybe some solution comes up once we all have robots roaming our homes.
   

Having all these options, the person could now decide which one sounds the most promising to them, and continue from there.

Obviously none of this is rocket science and I’m aware most people in most situations may get along just fine without this post. Nonetheless several people I know struggle with some of these pile-like problems, either because they avoided really thinking about an issue, or because they got stuck early on with one type of solution that happens to be ineffective, without ever taking a step back to reconsider. For such cases I hope that having a list of different approaches may spark some inspiration to try a new strategy, and help to ultimately beat (or accept) the pile.