Inventory Maintenance: Mar’s 100 Items Challenge
Oh dear.
*sheepish grin*
Inventory creep. It happens to all of us, right?
I was just looking back through my Inventory Management summary page, and noticed the following on an early-ish post:
…the one where I had that initial panicked moment on realising my inventory was 30K and out of control…
*cough* Um…
Right! Well. Er… nice weather we’re having at the moment, huh?
*catcalls and yells of, “Get to the point, Mar, you slacker!”*
*le huge sigh* Okay, okay. Come on, you know as well as I do that inventory creep does indeed happen to all of us. Even those of us who are (supposedly!) inventory management, er, mavens?
I need a kick up the butt. Do you need one, too? OK, we can kick each other then (and if we wear clogs it’ll look like Riverdance or something). I hereby present…
Mar’s 100 Items Challenge!
Woah, that was big. Then again… so is Mar’s inventory…
Hop behind the cut!
Here’s how it works:
Every day that we’re logged on (multiple sessions for a single avatar in a single day will count as one big session, so don’t think I’m going to make you do this every time you crash or relog in a single day!) we’re going to clear 100 items from our inventories, for the next month.
Now, I realise that sounds like a lot, but to begin with it’ll be easy. Some tips:
- Set your inventory filters to show only landmarks and clear them all out. Keep a few that you always use, and buy (or make!) a landmark HUD to put them in.
- Then set the filters to show notecards only, and get rid of old group notices and ‘thank you for buying this item!’ notecards that don’t have instructions or other useful things in them. And, unless the items have a particularly wierd resizing HUD, do you really need instructions on how to resize scripted items anymore? Just append ‘RZ’ to the end of the folder name if you need to remember the item is script-resize.
- Next up, filter to scripts only and chuck all those hovering text and unpacker scripts.
- Finally, filter to animations and delete all those bag-holding animations (keep the best ones, if you like to use them for blog poses, etc).
- Reset filters to ‘everything’ and then search for ‘pose’, ‘posing’, and ‘adjust’ and get rid of all those pose stands. Make your own Pose HUD!
- Look through fatpacks of shoes and boots. If you have all of one design in every colour, make one big folder and put one shoebase and one alpha layer in it, then move across all the ‘colours’ folders into that big folder, and delete the extra alphas and shoebases. You only need one for each shoe design! Same thing goes for multiple colours of a single mesh clothing item.
- Start weeding out the mesh sizes you don’t wear. Most mesh clothing comes with at least five sizes, and we usually only wear one! Load them into boxes called ‘[item name] unworn sizes’ and put them in the relevant folder. An added bonus of this is: you’ll never need to try on several sizes until you remember which one you wear for that piece of clothing!
100 items per avatar that you log in, per day, people. If your avatar has a small, trim inventory, but you still want to keep it in check, adjust the number of items accordingly. Maybe 50 or 25. But let’s stick to it.
An important note: I’m not twisting your arm to log in each day! Mar certainly doesn’t; sometimes she only logs in once per week, but on those days she does log in, she’ll do the 100 Items thing. Also, if you really don’t have time – for instance, you’re just running in-world quickly to pay your rent – don’t sweat it! Save the 100 Items for when you actually have more than five minutes in-world!
Use this post as a check-in if you like, or link back to posts on your own blogs/Flickrs/Twitter/Plurk/etc. Post your starting amount and then come back to chart your progress. I might even run a league table or keep a spreadsheet ;)
Let’s get to it!
My starting total: a horrifying 57,839. Um, 57,897 (I just added some stuff. Oops!)
*cracks knuckles*
Addendum
Scripts and half my notecards (omg, I have so many!) deleted and I now have: 57,696. Total deleted: 201
Hey, let’s keep a tally of how many items we’ve deleted in total! Comment here with each day’s total and I’ll blog and tweet it at the end of each week :)
09.04.13 – 239 more items deleted from Mar’s inventory
9 thoughts on “Inventory Maintenance: Mar’s 100 Items Challenge”
Well, yesterday I had a load of free time, and I deleted about 1,000 items from getting rid of some of the outfits in the Outfits folder that I never wear anymore, and a few dresses and other things in my Clothing folder I never wear either.
So right now my inventory count is 43,713 items. I’ll be getting rid of more stuff through the day (and adding to it as well, probably) so I’ll come back later and tell you how much my inventory count is then.
The outfits folder is one I never think of checking, so thanks for that tip, Crissy! I’ll have to add that to my Inventory-Sorting list :)
Another thing I do with the Outfits folder is just take the folder with whatever clothes I’m going to be wearing and put it in there, and add the links for the skin, hair, and whatever else is necessary manually. It saves a little bit of space.
Also, inventory count is now 42,257, so I got rid of 1,456 items total. But I also did some hunting and added as well, so more than that. I got rid of a lot of landmarks, scripts, and animations, but I can’t remember what I did to really bring it down that much. I think it was just general sorting and tossing out though.
Adding more stuff as we go along is a given, I think ;) It’s keeping on top of it all that’s the problem. It’s so easy to just let things slide after a while, and before we know it we’re adding 100 extra things per day (all those LMs, scripts, animations etc) that we really don’t need, simply because we can’t be arsed to sort it there and then (which is one of my biggest problems!)
I know one thing I really need to tackle is textures. I have a weakness for texture freebies, because I like to pootle around making stuff sometimes, and – even though I’ve sorted a lot of them into a big texture organiser – there are still a lot of textures cluttering up my inventory.
I deleted all my landmarks not in my landmark folder, and all the notecards I didn’t need… 1500 items gone. :D
Awesome job, Savannah! It’s good to clean out old landmarks every now and then anyway; just keep the ones to places you visit all the time, quickly teleport to (and check if it’s still there!) the ones you visit sometimes, and ditch the ones you know you’ll probably never visit anyway. If you do need to go to those places, just checking the properties of an item you own from there, looking at the owner’s profile, and checking their picks will usually give you the current location of their store :)
I just got rid 226 items, the bad news , at least for me is that there are still things I have not unpacked yet. *Winces*
226 is great, Raphaela! Just keep an eye on yourself as you unpack that new stuff, and don’t slip into an, “Oh, I’ll sort that out later” habit. If it’s clothing, try it on (and archive any sizes you don’t wear, if it’s mesh). Chuck out landmarks, notecards, scripts, pose stands – all that unwanted stuff. And file it away so you know where it is, instead of having to scroll through endless folders (which is something I definitely need a kick up the bum about!)
Keep the additions to your inventory to a minumum by ensuring you only keep the bits you want. It’s when we ignore those extra LMs, scripts, notecards, pose stands, and extra sizes – that’s when our inventories expand needlessly!
Was busy celebrating a birthday over the past few days in RL, so I didn’t have much time to go on SL, and I kept forgetting to come here. But now my inventory count is 36,105 items. This is after organizing a lot of textures, sorting generally, and archiving a lot of stuff I didn’t want. This is from the combined effort of the past few days.
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