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Not being able to find my keys, phone, handbag, …isn’t really a threat to my happiness in itself; but it’s one of those little things that can drive me crazy sometimes.
But little adjustments to my habits make me sometimes a whole lot happier.
Tip(s) for today
Use the tips to find (or not to lose) lost things faster.
Tips:
- Don’t search right away. Wait until you have an idea where it might be. Relive and visualise your actions in the reverse order. Your memory knows what happened, it just needs you to activate the memory.
- Look where you expect it to be. This sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how often I overlook something.
- Repeat the name of the object as you search for it.
- Look carefully and systematically – keep your focus and don’t just rummage.
- Stop imagining the awful things that will happen if you don’t find it. That distracts your mind and stresses your brain, decreasing your memory. Remind yourself in a friendly, optimistic way that you will find it soon.
- Put things away in an exact, rather than an approximate place, like “on the third shelf of the coat closet” rather than “in the closet.”
- Everything has a place and everything on its place is Koen’s motto and it works.
- If you see something that’s obviously out of place, don’t absent-mindedly think, “Hmm, I wonder why someone put a cell phone in the bathroom cabinet?” but move it. Preferably to where it belongs, or at least to a place where it’s obvious. So many times I’ve told myself, “I saw that thing somewhere….but where was it?”
- Sometimes the search becomes too irritating. Then it is better to stop and turn your attention to something completely different. Sleep on it. Next morning, rested and with a fresh perspective, start your search again.
Once you find the item, note the logic of where it was and recognise the assumptions you were making that stopped you from finding it sooner
Can you find yourself in these statistics?
- When asked which items they misplace at least one a week, the most common lost items (in order) is revealed as – TV remotes (45%), phones (33%), car & keys (28%), glasses (27%), shoes (24%) and wallets/purses (20%)
- The average person loses up to nine objects every day and spends on average 10 minutes a day searching.
- Millennials are TWICE as likely as babyboomers to lose their stuff
- Multitasking is the most cited cause for misplacing items
- Around the house or in the car are the most common places for people to lose items.
- The first place people look when searching for lost items is their purse or bag (21%), followed by the couch (18%), pockets of the previous day’s clothing (14%) and around their beds (11%).
- An upside to hunting for a missing item is that two out of three adults (69%) shared that they have found another missing item while hunting for something else.
- 29% of people have had a lost wallet or purse returned to them by astranger and 27% have been reunited with lost phones.
