Anti-Goblin Mode: The Game I Play Every Day to Reprogram My Disorganized Brain

It’s finally time to talk about Anti-Goblin Mode: my secret holy grail technique for conquering executive dysfunction in my home, my work, and my life in general.

I’ve never written about it before. It seemed too personal and too silly to share. But since I discovered it, I’ve used it nearly every day of my life—and the transformation has been permanent and incredible. And as our patrons demanded an article on becoming organized, its time has come!

One of the best pieces of general life advice I’ve ever received is this: never ask a natural talent to be your teacher. If they came out of the womb composing piano sonatas, don’t ask them to teach you piano! They literally don’t understand the experience of not knowing what they know! This holds true in organization, too. I find that most “organizational systems” were written by people with a natural talent for organization. Y’know—monsters who can keep a white rug clean. Their advice shouldn’t be trusted. Instead, the best teachers are people who struggled and persevered in the face of mediocrity.

On this point, I’m happy to attest that neither nature nor nurture set me up to be an organized person. I grew up the undiagnosed ADHD child of an undiagnosed ADHD parent who was also a hoarder! That means I’ve earned my organized life valiantly, on the battlefield.

So how? How did I become an organized person? I’m happy to tell you it’s not rigid, or complicated, or super philosophical, or time-consuming. I developed a game to help me do it. It’s very simple, but it’s transformed my life for the better. And I hope it might help you too.

Organization feels harder than ever before

There are many nuances to being an organized person. It’s strongly influenced by a lot of factors: brain chemistry, living arrangements, general life stability, what behaviors were modeled to you in your formative years…

Many people have executive function disorders. If you’re among them, you’ll find disorganization easier to fall into, and feel the sting of its indemnity more often. “Paying the ADHD tax” is a common phrase that captures the waste, fines, punishments, scoldings, and setbacks we endure because we goofed. In fact, this article was inspired by a longtime Patreon donor with ADHD who wrote to us in despair after being fired for making inattentive mistakes.

But neurotypical people absolutely get overwhelmed and disorganized too! In my observation, few people flawlessly cope with the staggering task of normal adulting. Our lives are bursting at the seams with tasks and responsibilities.

• We own more stuff than ever before.
• We face more distractions than ever before.
• Our lives are full of an unprecedented number of commitments.
• Income inequality and wage stagnation have made the average person’s finances so perilous that the consequences of “missing something” are higher than ever.

I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was 32 years old. Which means I spent three decades of my life viewing my disorganization the same way most people do: as a personal failure.

And ultimately, it functionally is. Our world holds people accountable for their lapses. (Unless you’re rich—then you can make oopsies!) Taxes are due when they’re due; bills are due when they’re due; grace is a rare commodity for everyone. We’re all under incredible pressure to stay unnaturally organized.

Why disorganization feels uniquely shameful and awful

I don’t think I’ve talked much on the blog about my mother’s hoarding disorder. Probably because it’s one of the most unpleasant topics for me to dwell on. It’s enough to say that her disorganization was a wellspring of sadness in my family. It created a lot of dysfunctional crossed wires in my brain between organization and shame.

When I was asked to clean as a child, what it really meant was “panic-hide as many things out of sight as you can, so people don’t find out how we really live.” I wasn’t tidying—I was hiding. And since I hate hiding and feeling ashamed, I thought I hated cleaning and organizing too.

As a new adult, I panic-cleaned whenever I knew someone was coming to my home. If someone dropped by unannounced and saw my messes, I felt caught off-guard and humiliated. I dreaded tasks that required diligence and follow-up. Because I lacked the tools to improve in those areas, I instead developed a robust system of lies and excuses to cover my forgetfulness and inattentiveness.

Although my experiences are unique, I don’t think they’re uncommon. A lot of people feel shame for their disorganization. Messiness has enormous symbolic power.

Leaving that mindset behind feels intensely liberating for me. From my own experience, I know that change can happen. You just have to create the right conditions for it.

The one question all organized people can answer

What makes an organized person organized?

Examples of answers I reject include: they’re more virtuous, more respectful of others, they work harder, or they “just want it more.” I know too many kind, loving, hardworking, ambitious people with organization struggles to believe that.

I have a theory that organized people are really good at answering one simple question:

“Where does this go?”

Organized people answer this question readily, whether you present them with physical objects or information (such as emails, texts, appointments, reminders, and requests).

Sounds like an oversimplification, right? But it makes sense when you consider cognitive load theory. Putting it simply, our brains have a limit on how much information they can process at once. New information lands in our working memories for evaluation. If it’s deemed important, we’re supposed to move it into storage in our long-term memories. If it’s not, we forget it.

But when our working memories get overwhelmed, the system breaks down.

• We make mistakes in our evaluations of important vs. unimportant information.
• We forget stuff we didn’t intend to forget.
• We learn much less effectively, because we can’t easily push the good stuff into long-term storage.
• We lose the ability to think with fresh mindsets.
 Under stress, we fall back on “schema”—our most familiar ways of thinking. This leads to making stereotypical, lazy decisions. For example, a habitual people-pleaser might want to develop the skill of saying no. But if they’re overwhelmed, they walk their brain’s most familiar pathway and say “sure, I’ll do it.” Which only makes them more overwhelmed.

Organized people don’t, in fact, have superpowers

I think the cognitive load theory does a lot to explain why organized people seem superpowered. Organized people aren’t getting their batteries drained by distractions in the form of physical and informational clutter. If they know where everything goes, it means they also know where everything is. They don’t waste time and energy running around, looking for stuff. That leaves them with the mental capacity to evaluate priorities correctly, actually learn new information, maintain an openminded perspective, and make fewer mistakes.

… And yes, clutter of any kind is extraordinarily distracting! This is the entire concept of Where’s Waldo and I Spy books. The thing you want to find is hard to see if it’s surrounded by things you don’t want to find.

How to get good at handling this question

I’m with the Ape Tribe in Princess Mononoke. Do we really have to change ourselves? Can’t we just eat the organized person’s flesh to gain their powers for our own?! Alas, I’ve been informed that this may not work, and is also legally frowned upon.

Nay, if you want to become organized, you have to become good at handling the question “where does this go?” And there’s really only two ways to accomplish this.

1. Get good at answering this question.
2. Get good at avoiding this question.

Ideally, you’ll get good at both of them in time! But one may feel easier, so start wherever you can. I’ll talk you through strategies to strengthen both skills.

How to get good at answering the question

Lemme talk a little more about Goblin Mode.

I define Goblin Mode as a temporary, reactionary rejection of external expectations and future consequences. Goblin Mode is about living in the present. You embrace unrefined hedonism, and willfully choose to ignore what you “should” be doing.

Goblins don’t have an answer to the question “Where does this go?” They drop that shit on the floor!

Done right, it’s animalistic, rebellious, and relaxing af. I love rejecting unwanted responsibilities, dropping all pretense of cleanliness and civility, and thumbing my nose at social norms. It’s one of many reasons I worked so tirelessly towards the goal of retiring early. I hated putting on my mask and cosplaying as an effortlessly competent person who cares about her work (99 times out of 100, I absolutely did not). I wanted to build a life where I never had to do this shit again.


To get there, I needed to enable my future self. In order to gob-out to her heart’s content, she needed me to support her with complementary periods of future-oriented productive accountability. And my dopamine-starved brain LOVES games. So I developed a game to put me into Anti-Goblin Mode.

Learn to enter Anti-Goblin Mode

This game, no joke, has completely transformed my life for the better. Here are the rules:

Every day, put 50 things where they go.

… That’s literally it.

• You start putting things away, and when you hit 50 things, you stop.
• If you feel good and want to keep going, you can.
• Do something that feels diverting and rewarding, like playing music or a podcast, so that it’s not pure drudgery.
• Do this every day, unless you want to have a Goblin Mode day, as I frequently do on the weekend.
• How you define “a thing” and how you define “putting it away” is up to you.
• 50 is not a holy number. You’ll know the right number for yourself when the first ~80% is easy and automatic, and the last ~20% requires more time and thought.

“But Kittyyyyy,” you’re probably saying, “you promised me the stars with this technique! This is laaaaame! It’s just cleaning my room with extra steps!”

To which I say: hush, my pretty pet! Let me explain the psychology of what you’re doing, and how it can transform your brain.

Why Anti-Goblin Mode works

When I’m putting my 50 things away, I always start with the easiest stuff: dishes. Where does this big plate go? Stacked on top of the other big plates! Where do forks go? With all the other forks! I’m not draining my batteries making decisions—it’s automatic. I can knock out the first 20-25 things in under 5 minutes.

But if there’s something in my house that doesn’t have an obvious home, I might spend the same 5-minute interval aimlessly wandering around, trying to decide where it goes.

For me, this used to happen with sunglasses. Should they be in the car? With my normal glasses and contacts? With my hats and gloves? Near my clothes? Next to my jewelry? In my purse? I never had an answer!

In time, the exasperation of wandering around with sunglasses in my hand got to me. I picked a drawer in a side table in my dining room. Is a dining room the optimal place for sunglasses? No, but it doesn’t matter! Now, when I’m cleaning my house, I know where to put the sunglasses. Even better, if I need sunglasses, I know exactly where to find them. Which means I get back three kinds of energy: the energy I would’ve spent being distracted by their presence as clutter; the energy I would’ve spent fruitlessly looking for them when I needed them; and the energy I spent agonizing over how to clean them up.

This is how you begin to transform into an organized person who can easily answer the question “where does this go?”

How long it takes to see results

My attitude about cleaning started to shift pretty much immediately. I could take my time and sip coffee as I went, or sprint around racking up easy wins on busy days. It always fit into my day.

Initially, 50 items only made a modest dent in my household’s general messiness. But as the weeks went on, I had to search further and deeper into the house for things to put away. Seeing a semi-full laundry basket, I thought: why not! Proactive laundry wasn’t on my bingo card, but there’s a first time for everything! Dreaded piles of mending and unsorted tax forms melted away like dirty snow in spring. In 20 minute chunks each day, my life was shifting toward orderliness.

This may sound like it wouldn’t impact life outside your home’s tidiness—but I swear it does. When you get a feeling of satisfaction from Anti-Goblin Mode, you’ll start to seek it out without even thinking about it. As you develop more easy, automatic answers to the “Where does this go?” question, you free up more of your cognitive load to answer harder questions accurately. Even my mood greatly improved, just by feeling proud of myself and my surroundings. The impact ripples surprisingly far outward.

… All that said, avoiding responsibilities for random stuff is pretty cool too!

How to get good at avoiding the question

I know I just finished saying that avoidance is never a winning strategy, buuuuut…

These strategies are about self-protection. If your executive function well tends to run dry, you need to deter random passersby from helping themselves to your, uh… brain water.

There are many ways to avoid answering the “where does this go” question. I’ll give you my top five. Even if they don’t work for you exactly as written, they’ll teach you how to see opportunities to preserve yourself. Basically, don’t drain your batteries on stuff you don’t care about. Save your best efforts for yourself and your loved ones.

Avoidance strategy #1: Own less stuff

When you assume custody of an object, you’re accepting its utility, but also its responsibility. You’ve got to add it to your mental household inventory, find a home for it, retrieve it, put it away, maintain it, clean it… The more items you own, the more you’ll be asked the mentally taxing question: “Where do I go?”

You don’t have to be a monkish minimalist about everything. But I think it’s smart to set a high standard of utility for the things you own, so that the trade-off for caring for them is worth it.

Our consumption-driven economy will test your commitment to this practice every dang day. It has trained us to assume the first solution to most problems is to buy something.

I’ve noticed that ADHD people in particular can get suckered into this way of thinking, especially in these areas:

• Duplicate items create duplicate work. When you constantly run out of clean plates, it’s tempting to buy a second set. But when it’s time to wash dishes, you now have twice as many to clean, making the dreaded task even harder.
• Storage hurts as often as it helps. When you have a hard time keeping track of your belongings, it feels great to put them in a box and put that box on a shelf in the basement. It feels great because you’ve visually thrown them away, without the hemming and hawing of actually deciding what to do with them.
• Easy solutions hide hard work. If you lose your keys often, a Tile keychain may help. But you must spend $30, remember to attach it, download an app, update said app periodically, remember your login credentials, and replace its battery whenever it expires. “Seamless” products still require work.

Avoidance strategy #2: Insulate yourself from unwanted communications

This is me at my most Old Man Yells At Cloud.

If someone wants your attention, they should have to work hard to get it. Ideally, I think a phone exists so that you can be reachable by your friends, your family, and people who are willing to put in the work to track you down because they have something important to say to you. Instead, everyone in the world has access to you via text and email… all the time!

The retailer you bought leggings from ONCE has been sending you coupons every 9 minutes since 2014. Each one is yet another thing you have to read, process, and evaluate: “Where does this go?” Into my to-do list? Into the trash? You have to choose!

Because you can’t just not participate. Hidden amongst those useless communications is an invitation to your friend’s baby shower.

Filtering through unwanted communications is like panning for gold. It’s mind-numbing work, and the cost of making a mistake is quite high. So the less you have to filter, the better. Unsubscribe from EVERYTHING. Don’t give your real email address or phone number out to anyone. There are tons of ways to avoid it. We have a whole article on this subject…

• How to COMPLETELY Insulate Yourself From Advertisements

Avoidance strategy #3: Don’t be too helpful

There’s a proverb that goes: “If you want a task done, give it to a busy person.” And I hate this proverb because it’s so damn accurate!

In my first corporate job, our team had two copywriters. Larry worked very slowly and Cindy worked very quickly. Clients figured out that work sent to Larry took three times longer to come back—so they stopped asking Larry to do anything! Cindy was working late, racing to finish an unhinged number of projects, while Larry kicked off at 3 p.m. most days.

In our culture, the reward for doing work quickly and well is usually more work. You are the only person who can protect yourself from landing in Cindy’s situation. Don’t be too available. Don’t raise your hand and volunteer first unless it’s something you actually want to do. Never work at top speed. Take a day to respond to emails, half a day to respond to texts—not to be difficult, but to protect yourself and discourage unnecessary requests on your time.

You were not put on this planet to Google things for other people.

Avoidance strategy #4: Cross-train the people around you

As my story about Larry and Cindy highlights, the division of labor in workplaces is often unfair. That’s true in families and households, too.

It’s perfectly normal for partners within teams, families, and couples to develop specializations (I cook dinner, you wash dishes). But sometimes, a group becomes so reliant on one person that they’re incapable of functioning without them. That person is constantly getting derailed, drained, and pestered with variations of the “Where does this go?” question—because they’re the only one who knows!

As much as possible, you don’t want to get into that situation. The solution is to cross-train. Teach the people around you how to do the things you do. Training other people is kinda frustrating, because at first, it will actually take more of your time and energy. Keep at it anyway! Delegation is an essential skill within every kind of equitable partnership.

Avoidance strategy #5: Streamline your systems

Before I retired, I was a graphic designer supporting a large pool of clients. We had a weird hodgepodge of ways they might ask me for help.

• Many emailed me.
• A few swung by my desk and asked in person.
• Some would wait to ask in a meeting.
• Some pinged me directly via our office’s instant messenger.
• Others reached out via a Teams direct message or tagged me in project-based Teams pages.
• Three people only texted my personal phone. (Sales. IYKYK.)
• Some opened a ticket in an intake tool, which required a cumbersome two-factor authentication app that only worked when I was physically in the office.
• Others opened a ticket in a completely different intake tool, cuz corporate’s gonna corporate.

Given this, is it any fucking wonder that I started dropping the ball? The task could be as simple as fixing a single typo, but my time and energy were eaten up answering questions like “where does this request go, where do these changes go, where is the attachment that I need?”

I decided “in my inbox” was the only acceptable answer. I logged out of our company’s instant messenger permanently, deleted Teams, stopped responding to texts, and deflected all in-person requests. There was some friction. But after a month or two of sticking to those boundaries, I was able to get the same amount of work done without feeling nearly so drained, or missing important details. And it paved the way for other people on my team to make similar accommodations.

Your mileage may vary

Everybody’s jobs are different. I can’t give you a personalized roadmap for how to adapt these principals. But I’ll observe that inattentive mistakes are way more likely to happen to employees who are being asked to do too many tasks, by too many different people, with inconsistent feedback, and not enough support or grace. If your workplace doesn’t enable you to be successful, advocate for a system that works for you. Good bosses won’t argue with your methods if the results speak for themselves.

Bad bosses will argue with you. Because they’re bad leaders who don’t understand that their core job function is to enable their team and they think their Six Sigma certification gives them the power to squeeze blood from stones. Convincing them to give you this kind of autonomy is possible, but we’ll have to save that for another day.

Don’t worry—I still love you, Goblin Mode

Despite a few notable exceptions, I think the world is a much easier place for naturally organized people. Staying on top of commitments and responsibilities can help you be a better friend, roommate, coworker, student, lover, parent, pet owner, and car owner. I’d love to be the person who shows up on-time and remembers birthdays! I’m improving, but I’ll always be a work in progress.

Often the obligatory administrative aspects of modern life feel overwhelming. Doing the right thing doesn’t always bring the rewards it should. Sometimes extra effort is worth it—and sometimes, you just have to say “fuck it!” There are times that drive a grown woman to eat parmesan Goldfish in bed, goddamn it! Jess and I are definitely living through one such time right now.

The quest for financial freedom brings many great things: physical security, material comfort, vocational attainment, peace of mind, community support. But it also brings the ability to cave to your baser desires for solitude, ease, and pleasure. We live in a disorganized world, so sometimes disorganization feels like the correct emotional response.

• “I worked all day, and I’m tired. Fuck it—we’re ordering takeout.”
• “My job would be lost without my expertise. Fuck it—I’m calling in sick today.”
• “My parents keep steamrolling over my boundaries. Fuck it—we’re leaving to stay in a hotel.”
• “I’ve lived with this asshole for long enough. Fuck it—I’m breaking my lease.”

Sometimes, you’ve gotta gob-out. When you do, make it count.

Thanks to our Patreon donors for choosing today’s topic. I really love you guys, and the way you guys influence what we talk about. In particular, I want to thank the Patron who inspired me to talk more about my own faltering, failure-filled journey to becoming an organized person. You know who you are. I hope today’s talk was helpful. I really appreciate you, and I’m rooting for you!

We’ll be back soon with some, uh, topical content. Please contribute to our Parmesan Goldfish fund on Patreon. We’re gonna need a lot.