Piling and Organisation

I enjoy doing jigsaws once a year, over the Christmas period.

It has sort of become a tradition to use some of the Christmas/New Year holiday to do a jigsaw. They tend to be about 1000 pieces so they take a while to complete.

My daughter gave me a jigsaw as a present this year so I have just started it (a little later than normal). The classic approach seems to be to sort out the edges and do those first. This time I did that but also added some extra piles as I sorted through the pieces. One pile was for anything with trees on them, another was for sky, one for one section that is very vividly coloured and another for a set of red London buses that was quite distinctive.

The use of these piles should speed up the solving of the puzzle as it should allow for more focused solving of areas and also less repetition in looking at pieces.

There is also a theory that piles can be used as a way to speed up decluttering. By putting everything that needs sorting in one pile and then splitting that into smaller piles it can make the job much more manageable.

I have used a very similar technique for my filing. I collect all my stuff to be filed in one pile over a number of months. When the pile gets annoyingly high I then go through it, sorting the paper into sections - utilities, mobile, bank, etc. I have found that using this approach gets me over the hump of procrastination of putting off a task I really don't like.

In some ways, you could also view folders on computers as just piles of files - or maybe it is taking things too far.

Links

I Tried the “Pile Method” and decluttered in 12 Minutes | Apartment Therapy