Another me too. My system for pieces of paper that may need not to be lost is roughly:
- Know where a given thing might or might not legitimately be left (not necessarily just one place, but "it'll be in my rucksack, or on the dining table, or on my desk at work") to limit the search space.
- Use the visual recognition technique as the first way to find something - it's fast, and it usually works.
- But if it fails, don't just keep doing it! If something should (or may) be in a given pile, and I need to know for sure whether it is or not, I go through the pile one item at a time not just checking for whether the item is what I'm looking for, but actually identifying what each item *is*. (Usually I also do some throwing out of things that don't in fact need to be kept/general housekeeping on the pile as I go through in these circs.) This way, if I get to the end of the pile and haven't found what I was looking for it definitely isn't there (and I've lessened the pile's chaos a little on the way).
