What I Cannot See Does Not Exist: Keeping Things in View

For years I thought of myself as messy. Then I noticed that I am not messy; I just do not believe anything behind a closed door exists.

The day I put the vitamin bottle in the cupboard, I stop taking vitamins. As long as the bottle stands on the counter, I take them every day. What decides the difference is not my willpower but my field of view.

It took me a long time to understand this, because the question I was asking myself was wrong. I was asking “why do I forget.” The right question was: what have I left remembering to?

Let's name it, but name it honestly

The everyday name of this experience is object permanence. The ability that is weak in everyone in infancy and later settles into place. In ADHD circles it is described as “it stays weak in us,” and it catches the feeling it describes very well.

I want to put a note on record here, because this is what I promised myself when building this site: this is a borrowed analogy. I do not know of a literature showing that object permanence, in its infancy sense, is impaired in adults with ADHD, and I could not find one.

What is described in the research is more this: carrying an intention forward, that is, prospective memory, struggles, working memory struggles, attention goes to whatever is catching interest in that moment (Faraone et al., 2021). The result ends up in the same place. Food that goes into a cupboard really does vanish; but the reason is not “forgetting the object's existence.” The chain that would bring that object to mind at the right moment breaks.

I use the concept because I could not find a word that describes what I live through better than this. But I do not present it as a scientific finding.

The arrangement I built

I split the home into three.

The visible layer. Everything I use daily is in the open. On the counter, hanging on the wall, on an open shelf. Visually far from the ideal, but it works. Only what I really use every day goes here, otherwise it becomes visual noise and everything turns invisible.

The semi-visible layer. Transparent boxes and open shelves. What I use a few times a week. If I can see inside, I count it as existing.

The closed layer. What is needed rarely. I have accepted that I will forget what I put here, so I write on the outside of the lid what it is.

That label on the third layer seemed unnecessary at first. Then I understood: a closed box without a label is, for me, the same thing as an empty box.

There is a theory behind this

What I thought I had found on my own actually has a name. When Barkley describes ADHD as a disorder of self-regulation, he puts one of the treatment principles like this: carry outside the information that cannot be held inside. Place remembering, time and motivation in the physical world (Barkley, 1997).

In the glossary this is called external scaffolding. My kitchen is a rather unrefined application of that principle.

The same logic has a second half too: making the thing visible is not enough; you need to have decided in advance what you will do with it. “I will take the vitamin every day” is an intention. “After I start the coffee machine, I will take the vitamin” is a plan. The rate at which the second turns into behavior is markedly higher; this is called an implementation intention (Gollwitzer, 1999). Putting the bottle on the counter solved visibility; tying it to the coffee solved the trigger.

The critical detail: the limit of seven

The visible layer has an upper limit. For me it is around seven. When more than seven things stand in the open, they all blend into the background and the system collapses.

This number is my observation, not a measured threshold; your number may be different. But I am sure the limit exists, because I live the moment it is passed the same way every time: one morning I walk into the kitchen and see nothing.

This too has a name: habituation. A repeated stimulus stops being noticed. The paper stays on the wall but is no longer seen. This is why visible systems lose their function over time.

If I am going to add something new, I have to take something out. A forcing but useful forcing: I have to think about what is really daily.

Against habituation I do a second thing too: I move it. When the same reminder stays in the same place for a month it becomes invisible; when I move it ten centimeters to the right it is visible for a few more weeks. It does not count as a permanent solution; it is a trick that buys time.

What the system arranges is not the objects but my attention.

Two extra rules

The entry point. The moment I come into the house, keys, wallet and card go to one place. A bowl next to the door. This single rule on its own cut the time I spend searching in half. The details are in the glossary under entry point.

There is only one condition for the bowl to work, and learning it cost me losing my keys a few times: the bowl will serve no other purpose. If one day you put the mail in it, next week that bowl becomes the mail bowl and the keys go somewhere else.

Double copies. Of the things I constantly lose, I deliberately buy two. Scissors, charger, nail clippers. Instead of trying to find one, I buy the second. It sounds wasteful; when you count the time spent searching, it comes out cheap.

When it does not hold

It blew up in my hands in three places.

In shared spaces. My visible layer is the mess of the person you live with. Here the matter leaves design and turns into negotiation. In a shared space you cannot build the system alone.

In temporary piles. The temporariness of a pile that starts as “let me put it here for now” never happens. Every horizontal surface fills up. The only thing I found against this is giving the pile a place: a box, and emptying it once a week. Banning the pile does not work; giving it a place does.

In bad weeks. The system has no habit of tidying itself. In weeks when I am sick or interrupted one after another, the visible layer goes up to fifteen pieces and collapses. Then it needs to be built from scratch, which is a separate job and is needed exactly when I am weak.

For this third one, the only thing I found is to include the collapse in the system: once a month, a twenty-minute tidy. I do not do it on a day I feel good; it stands as a fixed day in the calendar.

Choose a single item first. Do not try to split the whole home into layers; that job alone eats a weekend and is usually left half done. Choose one thing you forget every day, bring it to eye level and tie it behind something you already do. A month later you add the second.

The rule and the trade

The rule is this: what I do not see does not exist, so put what I need to see at eye level.

I did not write this as tidying advice. I wrote it as an explanation of why a home that looks messy from outside works from inside. The same logic applied to tasks is in the article on the two-minute rule; losing things itself I took up in the article on losing things in ADHD, and the invisible workload of the home in the article on housework in ADHD.

A guest comes and says “how crowded.” I used to be ashamed. Now I think: my kitchen is a little crowded but I take my vitamin, I pay my bills, I do not lose my keys. The trade is not bad.