A dot a day keeps the clutter away

Walk into my lab and the first thing you'll notice is the dots. The walls are lined with clear boxes, each one labeled, dated, and covered in dot stickers. Some boxes are buried in dots of every color. Others have a few. Others are bare. You don't know what they mean yet, but you can see the pattern. That's the system. It costs three dollars, has no software, and I've been using it for four years.

The Parts Problem

I've been collecting electronic components since university in 2011. Resistors, capacitors, microcontrollers, motors, drivers, DC-DC converters, displays, amplifiers, servos, LEDs, connectors. The usual trajectory of someone who keeps finding new projects. At first, my collection was small. A few toolboxes held everything. Then I graduated, kicked it into high gear, and by 2017 the collection had outgrown every container I owned.

I was stuck in an awkward middle ground. Too many parts for no system at all, but I was still one person. I didn't have the problems that DigiKey or Mouser have, where they need barcodes on everything and a vast computerized inventory. I was looking for something simple. Something right-sized for my scale.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The first thing I did was get rid of every opaque container I owned. Every toolbox, every parts organizer with little pockets, anything I couldn't see through. I replaced everything with standardized 4L clear boxes from Superstore.

I learned this lesson early and it stuck: if I can't see what's in a box, I forget it exists. Clear boxes fixed that. I started sorting parts into categories that emerged naturally over time. A box for capacitors, a box for resistors, a box for motors, a box for LEDs.

The parts organizers with individual pockets were the first to go. They seem like a good idea when your collection is small, but as you keep adding parts, the fixed compartments become a problem. Components outgrow their pockets. You run out of slots. The whole organizer becomes a constraint instead of a tool. Clear boxes don't have this problem. They scale.

This system worked for a couple of years. Then I noticed something new.

The Intuition Gap

As I worked on projects over months and years, I started to build an intuition about which boxes I was reaching for and which ones were collecting dust. My box of batteries was always on my desk. My box of fuses hadn't been opened in my entire memory. But it was just a feeling. I couldn't quantify it. I couldn't tell you whether I opened my LED box twenty times last year or five. My memory is not good enough to track usage patterns across years of different projects.

And meanwhile, I had a constant influx of new parts. I'd work on an LED project, then move on to something that needed pneumatic components, so I'd order pumps and fittings. Then I'd get interested in piezoelectrics and order a bunch of piezos. Parts kept flowing in. Space did not increase.

As Kirchhoff's current law states, the current into a node must equal the current out. If I kept acquiring parts at this pace without getting rid of anything, I would eventually drown. I needed a way to figure out what was worth keeping and what should go.

I considered RFID tags, barcode scanners, a spreadsheet. All of them felt like too much. Then I found the simplest possible solution on AliExpress for a few dollars.

One Dot Per Box Per Day

I ordered sheets of colored dot stickers. Six millimeters in diameter. Hundreds of them for almost nothing.

Every box already had a label on the front with its category and the date I created the box. The new rule was simple: every time I open a box, I place one colored dot sticker near the label. That's it. Use the box, add a dot.

I quickly realized that on days when I'm deep in a project, I might open the same box five or ten times. Tracking every single opening would be noise. So I refined the rule: one dot per box per day. If I open my LED box ten times on a Tuesday, it still gets one dot. What I actually care about is how many days per year I use a box.

Then, because I had all of these different colors, I decided to assign one color per year. I have over ten colors, so the system works for at least a decade. A piece of paper on my fridge maps each color to its year so I never forget.

That's the entire system. Sticker sheets cost a few dollars. The habit takes seconds. No database. No server. No app. The system that works is the one simple enough to do every day for four years.

Sticking With Stickers

I wondered at first whether I'd actually keep up with it. Would I forget? Would it be annoying to find a sticker sheet every time I opened a box?

Both problems solved themselves. I keep sheets of stickers in multiple locations around the lab, so I'm always within arm's reach of one. Applying a dot is muscle memory at this point. And forgetting turns out to be hard, because the dots are their own reminder. Even if the box I just opened has no dots, the neighboring boxes are covered in them. The visual prompt is everywhere.

Visitors always ask about the dots. They're impossible to miss. When I explain the system and show how I add a dot whenever I use a box, there's usually a pause, and then it clicks. A single dotted box doesn't mean much on its own. It's seeing a whole shelf of them, some covered and some bare, that makes it obvious this is a system.

What the Dots Revealed

After four years, the data is hard to argue with. Walk into my lab and you can read the shelves like a dashboard. Some boxes are covered in dots of every color, used year after year, project after project. Others have a cluster of one color from a single project and nothing since. Others are completely bare.

The biggest surprise was which parts turned out to be essential. It wasn't the specialized components. It wasn't the sensors I had so many of. The most-dotted boxes are:

Glue. Tape. Stickers. General-purpose connectors. Batteries. Magnets. LEDs. DC-DC power converters. USB-C to barrel jack cables. Capacitors. Resistors. Mechanical tools like files, drill bits, and cutters. Calipers. SD cards and USB drives. Rubber feet. Fasteners.

Look at that list. These are cross-cutting concerns. Power components like batteries, DC-DC converters, and USB-C cables appear in nearly every project. Connection components like glue, tape, magnets, fasteners, and general-purpose connectors bridge different systems together. Rubber feet show up whenever anything needs to sit on a desk. These aren't the exciting parts. They're the infrastructure that every project shares.

Even within a category, the dots reveal patterns. My metric fastener boxes tell a clear story: M3 is by far the most used, with two boxes dedicated to it. M6 is next because I use it for optical breadboards. M2.5 barely gets dotted because it's specialized for things like Raspberry Pi mounting holes.

Meanwhile, sensors barely got dotted. Fuses, piezoelectric modules, specialized connectors: too application-specific to be core. Discrete LCD modules went unused after I started buying microcontrollers with integrated displays and buttons. I use capacitors and resistors constantly, but inductors got used maybe twice in four years.

And then there were the tools I thought were essential. My oscilloscope, function generator, and logic analyzer are commonly recommended as must-have tools for any electronics lab. Five dots on the oscilloscope in four years. I was genuinely surprised. I know for some people, in fields like RF, these tools are indispensable. But in my work, they're not. I wouldn't have had the confidence to say that without the data. I wrote more about which tools actually earned their dots.