I love packing: it's so easy to see what still needs to be done, it's easy to make progress on without much actual thought having to go into it (10 pick up nearest stuff, 20 put it into nearest box, 30 goto 10) and it's very satisfying to see the number of filled boxes mounting up.
I hate unpacking: you have to apply intellectual and emotional effort along the lines of "where should this go, and in fact do I even still want it at all?" and so each box takes aaages and you end up with a never-diminishing pile of boxes, each of which probably has less stuff in it than it did when you started but loads of other random stuff that you are less sure about still in the bottom. It gets exponentially harder as you go along, because you leave the stuff that's too hard to think about until later until eventually all you've got is stuff that's too hard to think about.
It sounds like you and I apply the emotional and intellectual effort at opposite ends of the process; I think your way sounds better.
I think the reason it takes me a long time to pack things is because my packing program goes something more like this:
10 pick_up(item) 11 ans eq ' ' 20 print, 'do I need this stuff?' 21 read, ans 30 if ans eq 'no' then freecycle,item,resultf 31 if resultf='fail' then oxfam,item 32 endif 40 endif else box(item) 50 endelse 60 goto 10
except with steps to ask on LJ whether anybody wants it and see if it is a computer and then give it to Reboot or if it is a broken electrical object and then bribe somebody to take it to Milton HWRC. Some of which will of course fail due to unreliability of people who say they will do or take away things and my own inability to collate things that need to go to the tip in time.
(that was an ugly mixture of IDL and random not-quite-fortran, and would probably fail to compile anyway, sorry) anyway that is very processor efficient especially when car eq 'n'.
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I hate unpacking: you have to apply intellectual and emotional effort along the lines of "where should this go, and in fact do I even still want it at all?" and so each box takes aaages and you end up with a never-diminishing pile of boxes, each of which probably has less stuff in it than it did when you started but loads of other random stuff that you are less sure about still in the bottom. It gets exponentially harder as you go along, because you leave the stuff that's too hard to think about until later until eventually all you've got is stuff that's too hard to think about.
It sounds like you and I apply the emotional and intellectual effort at opposite ends of the process; I think your way sounds better.
10 pick_up(item)
11 ans eq ' '
20 print, 'do I need this stuff?'
21 read, ans
30 if ans eq 'no' then freecycle,item,resultf
31 if resultf='fail' then oxfam,item
32 endif
40 endif else box(item)
50 endelse
60 goto 10
except with steps to ask on LJ whether anybody wants it and see if it is a computer and then give it to Reboot or if it is a broken electrical object and then bribe somebody to take it to Milton HWRC. Some of which will of course fail due to unreliability of people who say they will do or take away things and my own inability to collate things that need to go to the tip in time.
(that was an ugly mixture of IDL and random not-quite-fortran, and would probably fail to compile anyway, sorry) anyway that is very processor efficient especially when car eq 'n'.