roughly every three months, without fail, I decide my game shelf needs a real system. alphabetical, I tell myself, clean, defensible, the kind of organization Deb would actually approve of at work. I pull every box down, stack them on the floor in a pile that immediately makes the apartment look worse than when I started, and begin.

it goes fine through the first several letters. then I hit a box that’s just slightly too tall for the shelf gap I’d planned for it, and instead of solving that problem properly, the way I would at work with an actual archival storage puzzle, I do the thing I do at home instead of the thing I know is correct: I give up on the letter system entirely and just start sorting by height. tallest boxes on the bottom shelf, shortest up top, alphabetical order abandoned somewhere around G every single time.

I want to be clear that I know how to solve this problem correctly. at the museum, when an object doesn’t fit the storage plan, we adjust the storage plan, we don’t just abandon the entire system because one box was awkward. that’s the actual professional discipline, and I have it, demonstrably, five days a week. it evaporates completely by the time I’m standing in my own living room with a stack of board games and limited patience on a Sunday afternoon.

I’ve tried to examine why this specific failure repeats so consistently and I think it’s just that the stakes are different in a way that matters more than I want to admit. at work, a wrong storage decision has real consequences, for an actual historical object, for the next person who has to find it. at home, the worst outcome of giving up on the alphabet halfway through is that I have to think for an extra four seconds when I’m looking for something. that’s a real difference in stakes, apparently large enough to completely change how much discipline I bring to what is, on paper, the exact same kind of task.

the shelf right now is sorted by height, with a rough, half-remembered sense of where things would be alphabetically layered loosely on top, which satisfies nobody, including me, but does let me find most things in under a minute.

I’ll try the real system again in a few months. I already know how it ends. I’m doing it anyway.