Starting to transfer to a spreadsheet instead of my usual paper notebook I list all my electronics in to get a grasp on all my parts (towers, laptops, memory, motherboards, videocards, etc). Lately I’ve been on a kick of labeling all my shelves (medicine, linen, kitchenware) and trying to sort things into random plastic bins I’ve had laying around waiting for a purpose.
I realize I could dive into deep rabbit holes for every category. With electronics I’m thinking of documenting every chip, board, and component along with compatibilities. Pantries and personal goods could be inventoried and auto-reordered, better tracking of my tools and materials with service reminders for equipment, etc etc.
I’ve gone through years where I throw everything away and get rid of anything not used recently and years where I horde everything and anything. Seems moderation in both is key and why keeping it all in mind and documented seems like the right thing to do if you have the time to kill.
tldr, what tips or tricks do you use to keep up with all your shit?
I’ve been getting around to giving a Grocy a try.
It’s a pretty much an ERP system for the household (Even their tagline is “ERP beyond the fridge”)
It supports a whole bunch of things, the least of which is household inventory tracking and it even has the ability to integrate with a barcode scanner. So you can tie it into like a product API to scan the retailer barcodes or tie it into your own DB for lookup for your own custom barcodes
It’s a bit involved if you’re not into self hosting and servers and such though
I tried Grocy for a while, but eventually stopped. Data entry was a huge pain.
Using the iOS companion app to scan grocery items into the app resulted in data issues that prevented me updating the item in the web app later. The only recourse was to add the items by hand in the web app, but then go in to each one separately with the mobile app to register the barcode. This also resulted in losing the additional metadata about the products that the mobile app would automatically configure if you onboarded the items through the mobile app, as it was able to look up additional data online and prefill a lot of stuff.
At the end of the day, it was too much of a hassle. I do like the idea, and may come back to Grocy again, but for now I have to pass.
Grocy looks really good; thanks for the recommendation. Do you know if it can generate meal plans based on what you have in stock and tell you what you need to get to make particular meals? It looks like they have a ‘desktop’ version for those who don’t want to host it on their server too.