I don't let my car get like this, but like many I have a spouse who tends more that way. Unfortunately the people who most need these ideas, unless they are clients who pay me for strategies, aren't looking for my advice. I've been trying to lure my wife into checking out some of the GTD and related hacks for sometime now. As I already know from my parenting coaching clients though, it is just tough to hear a new idea from your spouse. Anyway, I like the idea for the folks whose cards look like a rummage sale inside.

HamiltonG

I should look at cleaning my car out, but so much of the stuff in there is actually useful. OK, the transmission chain isn't that useful (unless I have to rumble) and the fiber transceivers aren't really great (because they are 10baseT, they still work though). The toolkit, network switch, Cat5, and full set of Hellboy compilations need to stay in there. I mean what if I have to bodge together a wired 10/100 network in an emergency?

ninjasuperspy

People actually let their cars accumulate trash like this? I don't know a single person who hauls their garbage around with them. Personally, my cars get washed, at minimum, every other week, and I never leave anything in them - when I get out, so does my "stuff".

CallieCeyx

According to this person I'm one of the few. I detail my car at least 2-3 times a week. There is never anything left anywhere on the inside and I have 1 bag in the trunk that I keep miscellaneous items along with a small tool box.

wrestlingnrj

i hate getting in someone's car with trash all over. i'm pretty anal about my truck, i even keep the change holders in order and filled. if there's even a smudge of dirt on my floor mat i'm off to the car wash. thats another thing, theres a new drive thru car wash down the street. i think i've put someones kid through college by now from going there so much. and no smoking! i quit smoking and i can't stand the smell of that anymore

0zSpitt

Hmmm, this article makes me think it might be a good idea to strap my kids' carseats in even when they aren't in them. I think at high velocity, they could knock me the f**k out. Or worse.

jaxun

Good idea, but not everyone has had a point where they've been pigs ;)

After 12 years of driving through two cars, i've had one spilled drink (apparently drive-thru personnel have a hard time securing lids) and no other incidents to speak of, and never keep trash in it. Keeping your car clean really isn't that difficult if you can operate a vacuum once every few months and know where to find a working hose.

Puck

oh this touches me deep, I've never been so messy before but lately I'm leaving behind lots of stuff in the car. From dirty coffee mugs to corrections of my last story draft. I'll try this methods, but three bags does not sound like declutter to me.

congras paqman :)

anagrama

Man, some people are lazy pigs! If my car looked like that I'd drive it into a lake.

And then you wonder why you don't get a good trade-in value on your used car, when the thing stinks of grease and there's salt in all the shut-lines on the dashboard?

Eating in the car is for losers.

virgilstar

ah, i guess not. yay! Ok, i'm done spamming this post.

paqman

crap, maybe i thought I was first, cause I can't see any of the comments for some reason. Crap, i'm gonna look dumb.

paqman

Or just keep it clean one piece of trash at a time?

Ok, I wouldn't normally do this, but..
FIRST

Sorry, never been first on ANYTHING.

paqman

At some point nearly everyone has had a collection of empty bottles and fast food containers riding shotgun with them.

No, just the messy people. Some people never accumulate crap. Organization is a systemic condition for these people, not a localized phenomenon.

People with messy cars usually have messy houses, offices, and computers so the three-bag approach could be easily applied to their entire lives.

And working out of your vehicle is not justification to be a slob. I've seen construction workers' pickups that were loaded with tools, but everything in order and spotless.

Deprong Mori

C'mon, where's all the folks with trashed cars? I'll represent-- my car is a trash heap because, well, I don't really care. I'm not concerned about resale value, it's on its last year of semi-reliable service, and I'm the one only single and solitary person who ever travels in it. I accumulate garage-sale flotsam on the weekends, and the week usually ends with a few morning-cup-o'-cereal cups strewn about the passenger well.

The passenger seat has about a half-pound of Gummi-worm goo permanently fused into it after an unfortunate accident with a 2-pound bag in a hot car. (That has a buffer and a seat cover, though, so no sticky butts.) My dashboard has a huge piece of faux-leather-cover missing from some [expletive] who stole my stuck-on CB radio. I've got a mysteriously empty canned ham, a headless child mannequin, and a slowly-melting DVD-ROM drive in the back seat, God only knows what in the trunk!

It gets me A to B, and I just try and ignore the persistent "Check Engine" light that likely tells of a minor problem with a major price tag.

FLEB

Funny, I need one bag: the litter bag. If it doesn't belong in the trunk, and it doesn't belong in the glove box, and it's not being transported somewhere, it's trash. It goes in the litter bag - which is a virtual bag, and gets emptied every time I get out of the car.

I suppose if you're a slovenly pig who throws all her trash on the floor of the car, you might need to sort through it.

Deadhacker

My car is pretty clean, a lot nicer than my room is currently. It could use a window-washing, but there's little clutter on the inside and seats. A lot of people my age trash their cars and the back seats are filled with garbage and random items. A friend came to pick a few people up including myself, but the back was loaded with junk and we basically had to sit on top of it :-/

A trunk cleaning is in order. Really, who needs three whiffle ball bats?

mikesty

The best suggestion I've seen for keeping your car clean is to go through it while you are pumping gas. You have nothing to do anyway, and there is a big trash container there for you. Works great, my car always looks tidy. (Comes from Cilley's Sink Reflections book.)

BoydNuggler

In a minor traffic collision, an empty coke bottle is a "Flying sledgehammer"??? Do you know how heavy a sledgehammer is? Have you ever used one? I'm sorry, but even if the bottle of coke is filled, it weighs no more than a pound or so (assuming it's a plastic bottle, but a glass one wouldn't be all that much more). A sledgehammer weighs 15 lbs or more. A "flying sledgehammer" is probably moving at 30 mph. A bottle of coke in a minor traffic collision, even a larger than minor one, is moving at maybe 40mph. Calculate the momentum of each instance, 15lbs X 30mph = 450 lbs-miles per second for the sledge hammer, 1 X 40 = 40 lbs-miles per second for the coke bottle. A whole order of magnitude difference. The "flying sledgehammer" will do considerably more damage than the "flying coke bottle." Sorry to be a stickler for this stuff, but shoddy understanding of physics in writing and conversation is a pet peeve of mine. It's a crummy analogy.

ShabanaHizee

I've always been a total troll when it comes to car tidyness, but justified it internally by always having extremely sh*tty cars, I thought I was developing a kind of reverse panache.. Last year I got for the first time a new car, the Bavarian kind.. I now realise that all that went before was total self-serving bullsh*t, this became undeniable when I found myself having a near nervous breakdown when my lovely daughter thought it would be nice to allow a packet of jelly sweeties to melt on the back seat..
Eventually this experience allowed me to arrive at a middle ground where I try not to let the car get too cluttered - after all I'm in a petrol station every couple of days, loads of handy bins..
But I don't get all messed up if the car's not in 'just out of the hands of German craftsmen' condition anymore..
After all, the back seat's already fu*ked
(-:

Badenoch

@jaxun: Definitely secure that seat. About four years ago I was driving 30mph and a kid nailed the front driver side of the car trying to skip across the street in an illegal parking lot to parking lot maneuver. The combined force of the two cars was enough to take nearly every single thing in my back seat and slam it into the windshield. A car seat probably would have yielded a head injury.

Jason Fitzpatrick

I could never let my car get into this atrocious state, and don't understand the people who do.

It's not a good look.

L.Rawlins

@BoydNuggler:

The best suggestion I've seen for keeping your car clean is to go through it while you are pumping gas. You have nothing to do anyway, and there is a big trash container there for you. Works great, my car always looks tidy.

The organized folks won't wait that long. Leaving your car? Leave it clean. And by the way, I wash my windows while I'm pumping gas. :)

Deprong Mori

@ShabanaHizee: "The "flying sledgehammer" will do considerably more damage than the "flying coke bottle." ... shoddy understanding of physics in writing and conversation is a pet peeve of mine."

Wow. That is perhaps the single most specific pet peeve I have ever heard of.

Thanks for the physics lesson, Captain Obvious.

jaxun

I prefer the one bag approach, the bin bag, then straight in the trash. works a treat. aninconvenientblog.co.uk

theoeeman

Three bags and you're done! This would also work for a desk, closet or dresser drawers.

billso

@virgilstar:
No eating in the car? Smells of grease? Damn, you must be eating alot of Macca's for that to happen!

fireblayde

I much prefer keeping the car clean on a regular basis. That means not leaving anything in the car once I get out.

simplis

I never had a problem with this until I had kids. When you're getting home at 8 at night and have a purse, diaper bag, and baby to carry in and it's 20 degrees or 95 degrees out, and you have the baby to change, feed, and put to bed before you can even think about doing the same for yourself, stuff tends to get left in the car. Or later, you have two-year-old who's thrown Cheerios and small toys around (you have to have books and toys in the car to have a peaceful trip with preschoolers), as well as a new baby. Or even later, when your 6-year-old insists on taking every single Polly Pocket she owns everywhere with her, and you STILL have a new baby. And the six year old refuses to throw her snack package into the litter bag, but drops it, and several uneaten Teddy Grahams, on the floor.

Said 6-year-old is now a 9-year-old who is now fastidious about cleaning out the car, after putting us through around 7 years of trashing our car in various ways. She voluntarily cleaned it yesterday, and then trimmed our hedge and weeded the garden today--her own idea. I just want to know what fairy I need to petition to get this changeling swapped back.

WomanWithManyHats

Same 2 kids, my wife's car is a pig sty - my truck, while not pristine, stays clean. I dump the trash upon exiting the vehicle, while she only cleans out before taking 'people' somewhere or heading off on a trip.

Curious thing: hers gets washed pretty frequently, mine's only been washed once in the 2+ years I've had it.

CountSmackula

"At some point nearly everyone has had a collection of empty bottles and fast food containers riding shotgun with them."

Someone is making a big over generalization here, maybe they should go back to school and learn some good article writing techniques. What makes them think everyone is a slob like them?
I've lived in my truck for a week and it never looked like that. At worst case fast food trash stayed in until the next meal when I through the old stuff away before buying the new.

enine

@FLEB: I've got a cousin-in-law that can beat that. His car is a foot and a half deep in trash front and back. There is just a little area to get to the pedals. Also, the seats are always damp and they smell. The couple of miles I had to ride in that were a couple miles to many.

thecodingeye

"ShabanaHizee's sledgehammer", that should be an item in WoW or something :)

BTW, I don't own a car, but how hard can it be to clean one? Are we really so helpless that we need internet advice to pull it off?

nbcdnzr

@ShabanaHizee:

"Calculate the momentum of each instance, 15lbs X 30mph = 450 lbs-miles per second for the sledge hammer, 1 X 40 = 40 lbs-miles per second for the coke bottle."

The original poster may have been off by one order of magnitude in comparing the two items, but 15lbs x 30mph = 450 lbs-miles per hour, not 450 lbs-miles per second as you calculated. That's three orders of magnitude off.

Also, it could have been a 2L bottle of coke. That's about 30% the momentum of a flying sledgehammer of the same speed. Wouldn't want that in my car.

---------

Things that have about the same momentum as ShabanaHizee's sledgehammer:
* A golf ball traveling from LA to NY in under a second.
* Your vessel if you were to travel around the world in eighty days, provided that you decided to pilot the titanic...and tow an exact replica of the titanic behind you...with a fully loaded launch-ready space shuttle on each titanic.
* A typical garden snail moseying away from the dinner table at full speed. For supper, the snail would have had to eat a meal of more than 300 generously proportioned adult bull elephants washed down by 9 Olympic sized swimming pools worth of water.

nighttimestereo

@CountSmackula: Same wife.
@WomanWithManyHats: Same Kids.

I have the "what goes in the truck come out the truck" rule. That means if there are any kids' toys or wife items in it at the end of the day they go in the trash. That didn't go over too well for a while... a lot of upset people who lost their favorite toys, magazines, shoes, gym clothes, etc. A few toys &/or books are allowed to maintain peace during a commute, but even those need to be put away in a seat pocket. Now, they realize they better get their stuff out. I had to put down that rule after I found melted crayons in the back seat and a fuzzy green cheeseburger under the front seat.

Neither car has been washed year to date.

biggunks

My sister's car is knee-deep in trash. You open the passenger side door, and as likely as not, something will fall out. I've only been driving for 3 years (I'm a transplant from NYC), but I always swore I would never let that happen in my car, and it hasn't. I've got a young child, too. I've put him to work carrying things into the house since he could walk.

I don't *wash* the car, mind you.

zeldabee

AM I the only one this article really targets... or just the guy to admit it? Things slowly build; whatta ya gonna do?

Just got a new car and needed 3 boxes to carry everything.

I admire those that are persistent and neat and organized, but my deep down feeling is that it is just a THING. Lt my actions represent me, not GM or Toyota or V8 or Arbys or ....

pjarchrn

Another safety reason for keeping you car clean is so bottles/cans don't roll underneath the brake pedal while you are moving. That would be REALLY bad.

sideshowmel