Overwhelmed by Data? Lay Everything Out with the Garage Sale Principle

A product team at a mid-size tech company faces their quarterly review with dread—they have too much data and no unifying narrative. Every team has their own spreadsheets and charts, but nobody can see the big picture. Inspired by a new approach, the manager calls for an impromptu “garage sale.” She orders everyone to print out their key graphs, messages, and doodles, then literally covers the meeting room table and walls. The mess is alarming at first. But as the team circles the room, small insights start popping up—overlapping project dates, repeated errors in two departments, communication breakdowns hiding in plain sight.

Even the most skeptical engineer, normally glued to his laptop, finds himself pinning a sticky note next to a designer’s wireframe, discovering a workflow overlap that had gone unnoticed for months. The project lead notices that certain patterns, invisible in spreadsheets, become blindingly obvious when seen side-by-side.

Later, those new connections lead to a breakthrough marketing strategy, and several team members admit that just seeing everything together made the solution feel obvious. Studies support this: physically arranging information activates spatial reasoning and pattern detection circuits, reducing overload and sparking creative connections.

Next time you feel overwhelmed by fragmented information, try gathering every relevant piece and spreading them all out in front of you, ditching the digital screen for a while. Group them by theme, type, or timeline, but don’t overthink it—just get everything visible. Stand up, walk around, and let your eyes roam. You’ll probably spot new trends, gaps, or solutions that felt impossible to see before, and the exercise gives your brain the variety it craves. Try it on your next big project or group challenge—it may kickstart clarity you didn’t know you needed.