Alfred Lord Tennyson once said: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Maybe, he was right. But for me, the quote needs to be slightly adjusted: “It is better not to have lost in the first place than to have lost and found.”
I have my own reason for the change. I was a committed loser of things. In my daily life, I used to misplace my car keys or cell phones, then spend hours looking for them. During travel, I have left behind pieces of important items. At work, I used to slap my forehead, wailing, “I can’t believe it. I don’t remember where I kept that paper.”
Now it’s no more. I have found my way out of this miserable situation. Just some simple adjustments were needed. In this piece, I will share with you how I did it.
The problem for most of us is that we mindlessly go about our day’s activities, often preoccupied with several concerns at the same time. Modern management gurus call it multi-tasking.
As a result, you park the car, thinking not about which row you left it in, but instead thinking about how you can finish marketing and collect your son in time. Or you pick up your cell phone while walking around the house, stop to wash your hands, and then never realize that you put the phone down near the sink, behind the detergent.
With luck, you’ve left the sound on, so you can call it.Unfortunately, many objects that we misplace don’t have ringers at all, so the search for the misplaced item can be far longer and less fruitful.
Options
Fortunately, we don’t have to be losers anymore.
1. Designated space
Every item should have its own territory. Of course, it’s your job to create it and stick to it.
Keep your everyday essentials – keys, wallet, watches and jewellery – together in one place. Something like a trinket or the top drawer of your nightstand will do. The important thing is that nothing else goes into the mix – only those items. The more “populated” an area gets, the greater the chances of losing stuff.
This trick is effective – yet, not the easiest to follow through with. We come home after a long day at work and tend to dump these items somewhere without thinking. It could even be a different location each time.
One of my nieces routinely tosses her car keys into a bowl on a table near the door. This bowl is their “place to live.” One day, the phone rang just as she arrived home.
It was a long call. Later, when she planned to go out again, she couldn’t find her keys. She lost a full hour before discovering them beside the phone. Dropping the keys into the bowl had not quite become a habit.
But, those items deserve more respect! Find the right “home” for each one… and train yourself so it becomes second nature to put them in their proper places.
Here are some questions to help you figure out the best space for each of your things: How often do I use it? Where do I use it the most? Can similar items go together with it?
Be extra careful with storing keys – especially, the keys to your front door! The last thing you want is to get locked out of your house or apartment because you forgot to take them with you!
A good idea would be to have a basket or set of key hooks by the entrance so you can always grab your keys before leaving, and put them back once you arrive.
2. Associate
Usually, your car lives snugly in a garage or parking space. But, when you park it outside an airport or at a shopping mall, it may get lost in a sea of automobiles.
How to cope? Experts recommend an effective mnemonic device: association. Before you leave the car, look around and visualize it in relation to an immovable feature: a crosswalk, a lamppost, a billboard. Pay attention to features directly between the car and the exit you’ll later use. These will point you right toward your car.
Mental associations are far more effective if you make them memorably ridiculous. If you leave your glasses beside the TV set, for example, picture Superman coming out of the screen grabbing your glasses and flying out of window. Hours later you’ll remember where they are.
But you’ve got to create the association the moment you put them down, and it must be absurd. Otherwise, either you’ll get distracted and never formulate the reminder, or it’ll be so logical (“Glasses are for watching TV”) that it won’t stick in your memory.
3. Retrace or meditate
Mentally retracing your steps can sometimes lead you to a lost item. Early in my career, an irritated boss stomped into my office to ask why I hadn’t answered a memo of his. I didn’t remember seeing it. So, I retraced my steps and checked my files for other matters I had handled around the date he had sent the memo, and found it stuck to the back of another file, caught in a paper clip.
If retracing your steps doesn’t work, you may try meditation: during that mental twilight, just before sleep, tell your mind what you’re looking for and ask for a clue by morning. Consciously, you may not know where you lost something, but your subconscious does know. It has worked for me.
4. Duplicate
At times, of course, the lost simply won’t be found. For crucial things, including keys and glasses, keep duplicates. Valuable documents should also be duplicated. Keep them in a secured place. For those lost items that can’t be duplicated, the only solution is to put them out of your mind until they turn up - because, usually if you wait long enough, they will.
Also, be a little philosophical. As the Roman writer syrus wrote in the first century B.C: “Whatever you can lose, you should reckon of no account.” It’s still good advice.