I've squirreled something away and now I can't find it

Me: I'mma just put this right here so I know where to find it

(never sees it again)

I've had to make designated spaces for things and always put them there. Took some training, but has been working well.

This advice always gets downvoted, but it works for me. I'll offer it for what it is.

When I lose something I'll take a moment and politely ask the thieving house elves to give it back. Then I stop thinking or stressing about it. I usually find it within a day.

If you're like me, you'll eventually find it in a place that makes no sense whatsoever.
Like with a travel toothbrush, or in a utensil drawer, or with your last phone's USB cable, idk.
Bonus point if you buy a replacement and find the old one's hiding place when putting the new one in that "place you'll never forget for sure, but totally just did".

A few weeks ago I hid my backup drive behind a picture frame. "This is a great hiding place", I thought. Took me a week to find it.

Instead of trying to remember where you put it, imagine if you had it in your hand and you wanted to put it away where you would put it. Imagine you've never own one of these before (this is important so you don't pollute your thought process with all your previous search efforts).

You brought it home from the store, you used it and it rattled around for awhile until you decide to put it somewhere for future use. Where is that place? Would that place have existed when you put your actually owned needles away before? If not, where would the place that existed have been?

The fastest way to find a lost item is to buy a replacement. As soon as you get the replacement home, the old one will reveal itself.
Recently confirmed this technique also works for items borrowed by others but not returned.

I have a bunch of screws laying around somewhere, that I intentionally put in a "safe place," that I need to reassemble my weed whacker. It's been like 4 years.

The good news is that you'll probably find your crochet hooks long before then. Probably.

😒

Sit where you used it last, then get up and walk to each place you remembered seeing it, in the order you think it was there last. Mentally picture it in the next place while going there, and that you're carrying it to the next place When you get to the last place you remember, just go wherever.

It might not work the first time, and it helps if you do it randomly after thinking of something else for a while and "surprise" yourself with it.

But for most of human evolution being able to remember where something is, has been super important. So it's not really handled by the conscious mind. So you got to try and trigger the more basic parts of your brain into realizing that the goal is ending up with whatever you're looking for.

It's like trying to intentionally put yourself on n "highway hypnosis" where the brain just runs on autopilot and handles shit.

I once lost my car keys for like 2 weeks and had to use the replacement keys, dumb stick without a remote. The keys were inside a hiking backpack I stowed away in the basement. No idea when or why I put them there.

My steps are usually this:

1. Blame everyone else, someone MUST have stolen or maliciously misplaced your items.
2. Tear whole apartment apart (hence the name). Of course you cannot find it.
3. Grieve and move on. The thing you yearn for is irrecoverably lost.

What I do when I do this is go to the store to buy a replacement. When I get home I will then usually find the original item within a day, my record is in a few minutes.

Doesn't always work, but it's worth a try:

If you had the thing in your hand right now, and you had to put it away where would you put it?

Think of a few options and check those.

If you eventually find it and it wasn't in the first place you though of, put it there when you put it away next.

Where did you look first? "Don't put it down, put it away"

Think where you would logically look for the thing in your hand and put it there works really well.

Anyway all that advice is useless now since you put it somewhere really safe, you have two options, buy new object, old one will magically appear once money is spent or in the drawer you open to put away the new object.

Option two is invent time machine.

Good luck!

What were you thinking about or feeling at that exact time, can you trace back to it?

Bonus if you were listening to music or what was the ambient noise that was happening at the time?

I'd try looking on the floor, underneath and behind furniture, and between/behind seat cushions etc.

If you're like me and hate crawling around on the floor and can't always see behind the furniture, you can use your cellphone camera to look for you. If it ends up in a place that's hard to reach, like between the desk and the wall, you can try securing a magnet to a piece of string and "fishing" for it.

Like my keys and wallet.

I can be reasonably certain I didn't leave them somewhere smart.

Going off the memory of the cat wanted to destroy it. When I want to hide stuff from cats it goes up high, or it goes in cabniet, or in something they won't like or want. Could you have put it in a plain paper or plastic bag so the cats wouldn't have been drawn too it? Or the closet high up spot or cabniet to where the cats were attacking the wallet? Good luck finding it!

May not apply here, but something I learned helping people move is that many sofas have frame gaps stuff can disappear into, which isn’t obvious until someone is hauling it and you hear things tumbling around inside.

To check, you can usually just reach underneath and tap the batting fabric in a few places to see if anything is suspended on top of it in the subframe cavity.

How long does your frustration and self-loathing last before you get distracted?

I got a new cell phone right before a vacation a few months ago. I 'hid' the old cell phone so it wouldn't get moved or wander off while I was out of town because I still needed to transfer everything.

I'm sure I'll find it someday.

I hate when this happens to me, and it’s all the time. Usually I’ll finish a project and either leave the tools in the room I was working in (the project was done, so I moved on to other tasks, cleaning up is its own project of course) or they get piled my the basement door to eventually get put back in the tool chest. But then my lovely wife, whom I love more than anything, cleans up because either we have friends coming over, or because she’s stressed and cleaning is what she does. She’ll put away those tools, and the screws I left out, plus all those cords I need for that thing. To me all of those things are not gone forever. Even assuming I’d remember I left them out a month or three ago, they aren’t even there anymore anyways, they are where she thought they should go and I don’t know where that is.