Four Oyster Knives
Downsizing, one tub at a time.
Four oyster knives. I live in the Texas Hill Country, and I found four oyster knives in one tub last night. We don’t even have oysters here.
That’s what disorganization costs you. Over the last decade I’ve char-broiled oysters in the wood-fired oven at Morris Ranch, and every time I went looking for the small oyster knife and couldn’t find it, I bought another one. Four times. It’s funny now. It wasn’t funny when it was happening, because it was invisible – just a small, unnamed tax on not knowing what you own.
That’s the whole story of where I am right now.
I’m thinking seriously about the move, and thinking about the move has forced a new level of organization. The last ten years have been a series of collapses. I went from three addresses – a near-5,000 square foot family home in Corsicana where our kids grew up, a weekend place in Fredericksburg, and a small condo in Dallas where I was working – down to two, then down to one. Each time I downsized, I thought I’d simplified. And I had. But stuff has its own math. The more you consolidate, the more clearly you see what’s left.
The clothes tell it better than anything. I went from scrubs every day as a physician, to a suit (almost always blue) as an executive, to now: a golf shirt, maybe a t-shirt, sitting at a Zoom screen or working in the shop. Three different careers, three different wardrobes, still sharing the same closet space. In the last three years I’ve worn a tie exactly three times: two funerals and a wedding. The closet doesn’t know that yet.
Facing a move like this can be stressful. But if you decide to embrace the chapter change instead of resist it, the organization becomes something else entirely. It’s freeing. I know myself well enough to know I have a touch of OCD, which means a good system doesn’t just help me find things – it lowers my actual stress level. That’s not a productivity pitch. That’s just knowing how your brain works.
So I’m building the system I’d build for anything else. Eight clear tubs lined up in the shop, each one with a large number on the front and a QR code. The QR code means I can scan any tub from across the room and pull up the contents on my phone. The number means I can photograph a whole shelf, hand the image to Claude, and get an instant inventory. I’m dictating what’s in each box by voice and organizing it all in Notion.
It sounds nerdy. It is nerdy. It’s also working faster than I expected.
What I didn’t anticipate was how the structure would change my behavior. When you have a labeled tub in front of you, you stop and actually decide what to keep. Things get evaluated instead of just packed. The tubs are pretty full right now. I suspect I’ll get less precious about some of it as time goes on, and I’ll keep calling it out here as I go.
The oyster knives, for the record: I’m keeping one.