Untangling charging cords (again)

Applying First Principles in an unorthodox context.

Apr 17, 2026

We moved a couple months ago to a new house and new neighborhood in Portland. It’s been….a lot. As one can imagine. I’m finally coming up for air and sorting all my learnings into future newsletter topics.

Incidentally, there’s nothing more sobering for a supposed minimalist than seeing every item you own in one huge pile. I got through the trauma, and you’ll hear all about it in future (further) meditations along the surfeit of STUFF in our lives.

But first!

Charging cables. The rat’s nest that every home seems to spawn. Readers may recall the last time I tackled the rat’s nest. These things are never one and done, are they?

As context, our new house is a 1920s Craftsman with lots of built-ins. (The built-ins have been a double-edged sword, but that’s a topic for another time.) A cabinet in our dining room has an outlet inside, which seemed like the perfect tucked-away spot for a phone/laptop/etc charging area:

The goal, as I originally saw it, was to transfer all our chargers from the old house into this cabinet. Easy enough, right?

The problem was it resulted in a hideous mess:

And this is without any devices actually plugged in. It only goes downhill from this point.

After months spent trying not to see this mess despite interacting with it daily, I took a step back and rethought how I was approaching this area.

I realized I needed to identify first principles.

Establishing first principles is a problem solving strategy that helps ensure you are solving the right problem. It boils things down to their most essential truths.

If this is a new idea for you, here’s a quick example of first principles: A while back, a friend mentioned she’s on the waitlist for one of those new “dumb phones” because she’s spending too much time on her phone. I sure could relate! I asked some questions and gently pointed out the essential issue is she wants to spend less time on her phone. It doesn’t logically follow that a new phone is the answer; we’re just conditioned to buy a new thing when the existing thing doesn’t work for us. Instead, I pointed out that a first principles solution is to just make her existing phone boring (for which I give a step-by-step in this post).

In the case of my charging area, I’d started with a mis-identified problem: How do I fit all my charging cables from the old house into this spot?

This wasn’t the right framing.

The reason I want a charging station is so there’s a consolidated, streamlined place to charge our most frequently used devices.

Using first principles, I reframed the question: what are the minimum chargers required here to meet our need?

Enumerating the details of our device charging routine is about the dullest thing I can imagine, so I’ll just say we have a handful of devices that require at a minimum these cables:

1 mini-USB cable (I needed Google to teach me what these things are called — you really don’t need to know, either)
1 USB-C cable
1 super-power mini-USB for faster laptop/iPad charging
Wireless two-area charger for overnight headphone & iPhone charging

I realized that a big chunk of the mess was caused by my husband’s two sets of rechargeable hand warmers (he has a condition that causes very cold hands), plus a few cord splitter-type devices that weren’t needed when you look up close.

I rooted around my cable collection to find the minimum required length for each of the above 4 charging cables, along with a small device that lets me plug two USB cables into one socket. With warmer weather upon us, I asked my husband if his hand warmers could primarily live in a drawer, and if charging could happen in a different spot (following the rule of prioritization).

After stripping things down to first principles, I achieved a much streamlined charging cabinet that is no less functional:

I mean, charging cables are never going to be beautiful, but…

Now, instead of averting my eyes and feeling my cortisol spike every time I open the cabinet doors, I feel calm and happy to have exactly what I need and nothing extra.

Coming up…

In my next newsletter we’ll be discussing the single most useful piece of home hardware, of which I installed approximately 1 million over the past couple months. Can you guess what it might be?