My Mother's Kitchen Has No System
Nothing is where it should be, she can find all of it in the dark, and I have started to think she is right.
The tins are in three different cupboards. The good knife lives in a drawer with the batteries. There is no logic that I have ever been able to find, and she has never once opened the wrong door.
I tried to fix it
Years ago I reorganised it for her while she was out, because I was the kind of twenty three year old who thought that would be welcome.
She was polite about it for about a week and then everything drifted back, one item at a time, until it was exactly as it had been.
Why she was right
A system you designed is faster than a system someone else designed, even when theirs is better on paper, because you are not looking things up, you are just remembering.
Her kitchen is not disorganised. It is organised around thirty years of what she actually reaches for, which is a better dataset than any of my labelled jars.
The bit I have stolen
I have stopped tidying things into where they look correct and started leaving them where I keep reaching for them.
My flat is slightly worse looking and considerably easier to live in, which I suspect is the trade she made decades ago without needing to write a blog post about it.
['She still cannot find anything in my kitchen, and says so, every time.']
Nora