A Good Way To Stop Losing Your Stuff

None of us are perfect. We get stuff, and then we lose it. At times it can feel like an infantile unforced error. No one took it from you. It didn't go flying out of your hands into an unending void. You just left it somewhere and completely forgot about it.

Whether it's the first or fiftieth time you've lost your phone, there are real steps you can take to stop it from happening again. Here, a guide to being good at owning things and keeping them forever.

​Why We Lose Things

The first step to not losing stuff is to first realize why things go missing in the first place. While, yes, the simple answer to that is that you're just being forgetful, the mechanics of losing something goes a little deeper than that.

"The reason why things get lost is because we fall out of our every day habits," says Cris Sgrott-Wheedleton, a productivity consultant and Certified Professional Organizer at Organizing Maniacs. "I've noticed that, even with people who are normally not forgetful, it's just the overwhelm of everything coming at us."

In other words, it's not you, per se, it's the distractions. Maybe most days you get home and you put your phone on your nightstand. One day, you get home, you answer a text and then you put your phone in your bag. You wake up the next morning, and, shockingly, you can't find your phone. It's as simple as that. 

If you're easily distracted, or you just kinda leave stuff willy nilly, then yeah, you're going to misplace things more often that others. Still, it happens to everyone.

Find A Home For Everything

The good news is that it's just as easy to prevent losing things as it is to lose them. Sgrott-Wheedleton has one simple trick: "My number one tool is to just have the same location for where you put certain things." Yup, that's it. Just make an effort to put things in the same place. Every time. " "You create these long-term habits that you can rely on, and it all becomes a bit more automatic," she says.

A good place to start is the Big Three of stuff that's extremely annoying to lose: Phone, keys, wallet. When you leave in the morning, put them on your person in same exact place — whether that's in a bag or pocket or purse. And when you get home and take them off your person, put them in the same exact place.

This even works for things you don't use that often, like batteries or grout cleaner. If you make a conscious decision to make a certain drawer The Place Where I Put All Batteries, or a cabinet The Place Where I Put All Cleaning Supplies, then it just makes it easier to find that stuff when you need it, explains Sgrott-Wheedleton.

And it doesn't need to happen all at once. "Implementing these habits, even if it's like one per month, is making progress," she says. "You'll stop losing your stuff regularly just by developing good daily habits around it."

Lost Something? Take A Breath

It's easy to be proactive about not losing things, but less so when you've actually gone and misplaced something. You're probably mad at yourself, mad at the thing for not just appearing before you and now also mad at your friends because you're going to be late for their thing and they always make fun of you for being late and forgetting stuff and honestly who even likes going to parties anyway?

You can probably see how getting upset is counter-productive. "The more frustrated you get, the more your body is reacting to it, the more you become blind to finding whatever it is you're looking for," says Sgrott-Wheedleton.

Once you've calmed yourself, the trick to finding what is lost is to remember the last time you remember seeing the thing you lost and remembering as much as you can about that specific moment. What you're trying to do here is not remember what you did with the specific item, but identify what else was going on then. That might help you identify that one distraction, or that one deviation from your usual habits that'll jog your memory. Hopefully you'll realize that, oh wait you didn't put your phone on your nightstand, you answered that text and just put your phone in your bag, it's probably in my bag still.

Or you could just have a friend call it or activate whatever Lost Phone Mode it has and listen as it calls out for you. But then you'll then probably end up buying a lot of GPS trackers for your stuff and that's not exactly the most reasonable or economical way to go about things.

FAQ

Am I going to have to go to the Container Store or what?

Heck no. While what Sgrott-Wheedleton is suggesting is just basic organizing strategy, she's quick to stress that you don't need a slew of bins to be organized. You just need to devise a system of places to put things, and be diligent about putting stuff back. "Developing a home for everything is Organizing 101," she says. "If you have a good home for whatever category of stuff is, you'll be much more likely to find it." 

What about just, like, general forgetfulness?

Facebook might have made forgetting birthdays nigh-impossible, but remembering do to stuff like pay bills or go to a kickball can be more elusive. Again, just having a home for either of these things can help. Maybe you'll need to diligently need to add everything and anything into a calendar. Maybe all it takes is to just ask yourself on Sunday night, "Okay, what do we have going on this week?" The thing is, if you start some kind of system, you can find ways to error-correct when you mess up.

Help I think I've lost… myself?

Oh whoa. Well, first of all, take a deep breath. If we're talking about being physically lost, maybe read this thing on getting lost in the woods? If you mean more, uh, existentially lost, there's this guide on finding a therapist that might be helpful? Alternatively, you could watch crystal rose candies get made.