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Over the very narrow time increment, the observation will reveal close to nothing. Yet the dentist's heart will not tell him that. Being emotional, he feels a pang with every loss, as it shows in red on his screen. He feels some pleasure when the performance is positive, but not in equivalent amount as the pain experienced when the performance is negative. At the end of every day the dentist will be emotionally drained. A minute-by-minute examination of his performance means that each day (assuming eight hours per day) he will have 241 pleasurable minutes against 239 unpleasurable ones. These amount to 60,688 and 60,271, respectively, per year. Now realize that if the unpleasurable minute is worse in reverse pleasure than the pleasurable minute is in pleasure terms, then the dentist incurs a large deficit when examining his performance at a high frequency.

One of the big rules in not losing things is the rule of the designated place. A tray or shelf that is designated for a smartphone encourages you to put your phone there and not somewhere else.

When organized people find themselves running between the kitchen and the home office all the time to get a pair of scissors, they buy an extra pair. It might seem like cluttering rather than organizing, but buying duplicates of things that you use frequently and in different locations helps to prevent you from losing them.

you have letters to mail, put them near your car keys or house keys so that when you leave the house, they're right there. The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.

What matters isn't what a person has or doesn't have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.

The key to creating useful categories in our homes is to limit the number of types of things they contain to one or at most four types of things (respecting the capacity limitations of working memory). This is usually easy to do. If you've got a kitchen drawer that contains cocktail napkins, shish kebab skewers, matches, candles, and coasters, you can conceptualize it as "things for a party." Conceptualizing it that way ties together all these disparate objects at a higher level.