In my day job as a software engineer, the concept of “technical debt” is used to identify programmatic shortcuts, bad habits, and poor practices that impede further development and make projects more difficult to maintain. Left unchecked, these debts compound, often leading to bigger problems over time.

Maintaining any semblance of order in the real world is just as challenging. Even as a tidy person with few belongings who lives alone and has the best intentions to keep my apartment feeling light and airy, chaos inevitably seeps into my structures and systems. The scientific concept of entropy dictates that all systems gradually and continuously devolve into a state of disorder. Experience has all but confirmed this to me. Throughout years of my Sisyphean battle with thermodynamics, I’ve developed some personal systems to help me minimize its influence on my living space—they’re documented here for your benefit as well as mine.

The primary tenet in my strategy to oppose disorder is that every time I find myself helping the entropy, I do at least twice as much to combat it.

The secondary principle is that surfaces should always remain clear, or must return to their clear or default state as soon as possible.

Applying this to the kitchen (which is where I typically have the most trouble), I’ve found myself with rules like this:

• The sink must always be bare. You can’t use a sink with junk in it.¹
• If anything is added to the sink, two things are washed and removed for every one item that goes in. (Even with the previous rule, you’d be surprised how much this still applies).
• For every item that gets added to a drying rack, at least two are removed from the drying rack and put away. If little effort is required to move more than two, do so (e.g., if moving two spoons to a cutlery drawer, and a fork and two knives are also in the drying rack, move the entire lot).
• If you have more than a moment, empty the entire sink and clear the drying rack, towel-drying anything just washed.
• Every time your hand touches something to move it out of your way, return that item to its proper place.²
• Don’t pass any area or leave any room empty-handed. Always have something in-hand to move to its proper place. Even if it’s a tiny, marginal gain, these little efficiencies always help pay down the entropy debt. Even just a little.
• Before winding down for the night, “reset” all rooms to their ordered states—These two-for-one systems help, but aren’t foolproof.
• When overwhelmed, see how far you can get with a 15-minute cleaning timer.
  Leverage the allure of a podcast, audiobook, phone call, or record to make the task easier (but avoid calls when you’re running water out of consideration for your conversation partner; this is not pleasant audio).
• Or, skip the above suggestion and allow the cleaning process to be an exercise in mindfulness. Let cleaning be your meditation.
• Think in parallel. If you need to fetch something from the fridge, do you have other things you can return there (or to a cabinet that’s on your way there)? If you need to fill a water pitcher at the sink, can you leave the water running while wiping down your counter?
• Allow exactly one active working space at a time. After your contribution to an activity ends, clean up all the tools you got out to work on it. You’re allowed to take a break, but if you don’t intend to pick up the task immediately, or decide to switch to a new task after, reset.

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are little policies that have benefited me.

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Footnotes

1. This was and is perhaps the hardest part for me when sharing a space with other people, and probably my favorite unsung benefit of living alone. If I need to fill a pot or drain some pasta or wash a dish, and there’s a pile of water-logged food floating in oily, tepid water, I stifle an almost-irrepressible urge to scream and cry. ↩

2. I practically hear a buzzer in my head every time my hand touches a spice jar or condiment bottle to move it out of the way of my cutting board, and think, “Ahh—ya got me!” ↩