Listener Question: Doom Boxes
“Hi, William. I want to say thank you very much for the Hacking Your ADHD podcast. It’s really helped me with a lot of things. It’s given me a lot of thoughts that I wouldn’t have had on my own. And that’s giving me some ways forward that have really helped me. I wondered if you had any advice for tackling doom boxes, those wonderful things where you end up with containers full of things you don’t want to get rid of, but they don’t have a place they’re all mixed up. There’s no order. I always find them very difficult to, uh, even begin to tackle, and very rarely do I get to the end of a doomed box and actually have nothing left or less belongings quite often.
I also had a thought that a topic that might be interesting might be, the difference between sorting stuff, tidying stuff, like putting organization systems in place and then also cleaning. I realized recently that a lot of what I’ve been doing has just been the surface level tidying up after a previous activity and it very rarely got down into deeper layers. So I never really got around to putting organization systems in place that helped the next time and not often got to all the way down to the bottom and actually got to cleaning stuff just to thought for you again, thank you very much. And I hope you have good luck with the podcast and things in the future.”
This is a great question and is definitely something I often have to work with on my own - even now I can look over to the corner of my office and there is just a pile of these doom boxes... it’s my doom corner.
So this listener does a fairly good job summing up what doom boxes are - at their most basic they’re just a collection of random junk - it's the stuff that accumulates in boxes and never gets put away. And as I just mentioned a doom box doesn't have to be a box. They’re often also drawers but they can also be a closet, an old backpack, even an entire room... although in those cases it's usually a collection doom boxes, although not always.
Let’s start by addressing why doom boxes form in the first place. And there are a few ways that this often happens. For me it often occurs as a desire to clean up my current environment. I want to clear off my desk. I want to pick up my room. I want to have stuff off the counter. And the easiest solution is usually just to get a box and shove everything in there.
Or maybe I’m moving spaces - I recently relocated my office and now I have a number of boxes that are just collections of things from my last office. Also I have a number of doom boxes that are left over from when I moved to my current house... you know when I moved in... 2018...
So why tell you about my doom boxes before we jump into how we can deal with them? Well I want to start with the understanding that doom boxes are not a moralistic failing. And as we’ve seen them come from a fairly good intention to clean up our space, but they can absolutely feel like we’re failing. That even though we have our visible space organized, we know that underneath we’re a disaster.
Now if you haven’t heard of doom boxes before I’m not surprised, it’s a term that only really became popular last year - but I’m sure that it’s something that most of us can relate to. Because even though I didn’t have a word for more collections of junk this is an issue that I’ve had to deal with for... hmm... probably since I started having to clean my own room.
So what’s the deal with doom boxes?
They come from our executive dysfunction
Regardless of how our doom boxes form what’s usually going on is that we didn't have anywhere else to put the thing so into the box it went. And that's really the key behind a lot of the doom box, we didn't have a home for its contents.
And that’s also a key of why it can be so hard to deal with doom boxes. We don’t have another place to put all of that stuff.
This can make going through our doom boxes tough because it can quickly become overwhelming. I'll dive into a box and suddenly I have to find homes for all of these things!? Well this can go in here and this here... and then over the course of an hour I put away 3 things thrown away another 5 and have divided the rest of the doom box into 2-3 smaller doom boxes. Now, to be sure, at the time I didn't think I was making new doom boxes, but in 3 weeks once I've forgotten the intention of those boxes they'll start accumulating new crap once again.
Doom boxes are also frustrating because it isn't just the unimportant that gets delegated to them, it's anything. And this stops us from going with the most obvious of solutions, which is to just get rid of the doom box. As I mentioned earlier have doom boxes that have clearly existed from at least 4 years ago, while it’s clear that I didn’t need anything from any of those boxes in the last 4 years. Sure, I might not have needed any of that stuff, but since I don’t know what’s in the box I can’t address if it’s importance at all.
So what we’re left with here is that we have boxes full of junk that we don’t want to go through because they’re overwhelming and that we don’t want to go through because they might have something important in them.
The key here is that too often we have more stuff than our space can easily hold and so many things don't develop real homes.
We’ve already hit on the first thing that needs to happen, which is removing our moral judgment about the existence of these doom boxes. Shame thrives in the dark and what we want to do now is bring these doom boxes out into the light. Accountability is going to be your friend here because going through these boxes is usually something that we don’t want to do.
Setting up some kind of accountability be it having a friend come over to help you or having something check on your progress is also going to give you a timeline to work with in. Often we’re not going through these boxes because we don’t have to. We can put off doing it because the only consequence of not doing it is the continued existence of the doom box, and while not what we want, also not so bad either.
Next, we need to decide how much we’re going to be tackling. And this is going to depend on a lot of factors here but mainly how much time you can dedicate to what you are doing and how much crap you have to sort through. And depending on how much stuff you’re going through it’s important to realize that this may take more than just a couple of hours. If you have a lot of stuff to go through you need to be able to block off that time. And don’t worry if it seems like a lot, you don’t have to do it all at once. Over the course of a month, you could simply block off every Friday afternoon to go through your doom boxes. This is also why accountability is a huge key here because while I might be able to motivate myself for the first two Friday afternoons, I might have trouble getting myself fired up for the next few.
Now with that in mind, we can start getting tactical about our approach to doom unboxing.
There are a number of reasons that things get put in doom boxes so there are going to be a number of ways that they are going to need to come out. So before we start we’re going to gather a few supplies.
We’re going to need:
a trashcan
a recycling bin
a box for giving things away
a then a number of other bins for sorting things into
plus have something for marking those bins and give away boxes - I like using blue painters tape and a sharpie.
So I think with that list it’s pretty clear what our next step is going to be - which is pulling the things out of those boxes and sorting them. We’re going to have things that go right into the trash or recycling but also things that we clearly don’t want anymore. Those boxes I had from 4 years ago, when I do go through those I imagine that I’m going to have a lot of stuff that I no longer need to keep and that stuff can go right into the donations box. Bonus points if you add when you’re dropping those donations off on your calendar so that you actually get that part done too.
But then there’s all the other stuff.
So a big key during this process is that what we’re doing now is triage. We’re not actually going to be putting stuff away. We’re going to plant our butt down among all the crap and keep it there until we’ve sorted all the stuff that we need to sort. So we’re going to be filling those bins with things that need to go into specific rooms. Stuff that needs to go into the kitchen, stuff that needs to go into the office and so on.
We have ADHD and if we get up to try and put that stuff away we’re more than likely to get distracted along the way. What we want to do is simply get these boxes sorted and know where everything is supposed to go.
At this point, we don’t have to get too specific with our sorting. We have bins like paper, pens, clothing, books... whatever piles you need to sort into.
And this is an incredibly important point here - label the bins that these things are going into, especially if you are breaking these sessions into a few days. It may feel like we’re going to remember what was supposed to go into each bin but I can guarantee you that we will forget and things will get mixed up and then we’re going to have a new doom box on our hands.
After we’ve sorted our boxes we can take a break - remember we’ve got things labeled now. And with things sorted into their appropriate bins, we can go about putting away those things. Books into a bookshelf, dirty plates and cups into the kitchen, dirty clothes into the laundry hamper.
And then the next step is finding homes for those things that never had a home in the first place. And honestly, I think this is the most important step because this is what is going to help us from forming new dooms boxes as quickly. And I also want to acknowledge here that I know even once I clear all my old doom boxes I’m probably going to form new doom boxes again and that’s okay - especially because now I have a system for dealing with those doom boxes.
The first step is playing catch up but cleaning is a cycle. We’re never going to be done cleaning because we’re always somewhere in that cycle. An easy way to envision this cycle is to just take your dishes, they always exist somewhere in that cleaning cycle - they can be clean and put away, they can be currently being used, they can be prepped for being cleaned - as in they’re just in the sink - they can be currently being cleaned and they can be cleaned but not put away yet. It’s a cycle not a single task and that means that it’s never completely done because again, it’s a cycle. And all our cleaning comes in these cycles, which means we’re never going to hit complete clean, because we’re still doing to be somewhere in that cycle if even it’s dishes put away and carpets vacuumed because again again again, it’s a cycle and it’s always just going to keep going.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Dooms boxes are the collects of odds and ends that all end up in a single location - usually a box or a drawer. Having a doom box isn’t a moral failing.
When tackling your doom boxes set a schedule for when you’re going to go through them and enlist some accountability to make sure that you actually do it.
The biggest key to going through your doom box is to sort everything into where those things need to go and to not get up while going through your box. We will get distracted. We will forget what we were supposed to be doing or at least find something else that we’d rather be doing instead.
