Losing stuff is always annoying. Especially when it’s not your fault. We’ve been shifting the blame and points fingers at other people since time immemorial, but sometimes it’s just plain bad luck. How about that time when:
- you put something down somewhere and someone put it somewhere else—or worse, threw it out, not knowing its value?
- you lent something to a friend and it’s been so long since it happened that you don’t remember who you’d lent it to
- you’re moving a bunch of stuff from one place to another, and in all the hubbub something gets misplaced (or misplaced FOR YOU)
It’s a perilous world out there for us and our possessions. It takes so much toil and trouble to get the money to get them in the first place, and sometimes they’re gone before you even have the chance to enjoy them!
So how about this—instead of screwing ourselves over, shooting ourselves in the foot by having more stuff than we know how to track, why not do ourselves a favour and figure out a way to keep tabs on all the stuff we’ve amassed?
How do we go about this? We could always look at using home inventory software to keep track of our stuff. Take Compartments or Home Inventory on the Mac, or My Stuff Deluxe on Windows, for example—you can easily and inexpensively use any of these programs to keep inventory of your possessions, with utilities like barcode scanning, scanning receipts by using your webcam, and scheduling when your warranties are due to expire. Some even pair themselves up with mobile apps to increase your flexibility!
Or you could do something even simpler and write up a spreadsheet that logs when someone’s borrowed something, with their contact details so you can get it back when you need it.
It’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll always be able to keep track of our possessions if we’ve got a lot on hand, so considering the options for the help that’s available out there is definitely a good idea.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll help add the “and found” to your “lost”!
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