[gamman]

Having grown up in an environment where a lot of things were stored "just in case" around me, I've arrived at a similar approach, albeit more on a "general principle" than a process level.

Work surfaces are empty, unless work is in progress. Storage areas are for storage, don't mix. Consider access frequency and where you would look for it first, when choosing where to store items. When seeing something out of place while everything else is put away, it's a nice trigger and motivation for cleaning / fixing / organising. Otherwise I turn passive.

This applies to both starting projects, physical items / surfaces, digital spaces, inboxes and de-facto task lists of various types.

However, it sometimes feels almost like a compulsion, a way to procrastinate. "I cannot start unless all of is clean". Just looking for a sense control to manage the stress I may feel about a task or a situation.

For me it is hard to not think of an object (physical or virtual) when it is in front of you, so I need to keep my line of sight empty and only "see" the items I need to work on, or are otherwise immediately relevant. Depending on stress level this "need" may go deeper and I "want" to empty the other spaces as well, even the previous steps of the current project that I'm working on.

Is this making me less effective in messy environments or does the general stress reduction and focus help compensate for this?

Also, this approach doesn't seem to be as universally good as the article seems to express. Knowing a few people with diagnosed ADHD, I've understood that they also may have a different sense of object permanence.

For them, it may be hard to think of an object / item unless it is in front of them, so keeping all the "relevant" items at hand and in the line of sight is useful. Otherwise they may have trouble getting into the space mentally. Like people who tend to buy too much of a same item because they've forgotten they have a bunch in the cupboard.

In the same vein, at work I've also have had trouble getting other people to agree with having focused lists in our task system. For example, showing only the new items when we need to triage new things, or having a way to isolate (a specific status step) for items that got pushed back from the development to analysis and will need to be clarified.

Instead, they seem to prefer having longer lists to maintain a "full view" of what's going on. At the same time I see that some then do predictably get distracted and / or need to scan through the same items each time because they are in the same list. Not sure how to best deal with that so I've opted for isolation for now. I have my own filtered views and during the relevant meetings I bring them up so they can find them in their bigger lists manually. Perhaps they have a lot better mental filters than I do.

The balance could be to somehow start empty, but allow for the "mess" of relevant items during the project and periodically prune the old stuff without thinking too much how to deal with the in-progress things as they are volatile anyway.