Why Can't You Tidy Up? A Rate-Distortion Account of Organization Behavior An Application of Adaptive Compression Advantage Theory (ACAT)

Why do some individuals maintain immaculate living spaces while others inhabit perpetual disorder—despite equivalent intelligence, motivation, and awareness of social norms? Existing accounts fragment across executive function deficits, decision fatigue, attachment theory, and environmental psychology, none providing a unified mechanism. This paper applies the Adaptive Compression Advantage Theory (ACAT; Murata, 2026) to demonstrate that tidying behavior is governed by the same rate-distortion trade-off that underlies all cognitive processing. Specifically, tidying constitutes a pure verbatim operation—returning objects to predetermined locations—that generates no gist update and therefore no reward signal in compression-first (α-high) cognitive architectures. We derive four distinct failure modes mapped to cognitive function stacks (Ne, Si, Ni, Se dominance), explain why existing interventions show differential efficacy, and generate testable predictions including the hypothesis that the KonMari method succeeds specifically by converting verbatim operations into gist-extraction tasks. This framework provides the first mechanistic account of organization behavior, unifying previously disconnected clinical, psychological, and popular observations under a single information-theoretic principle. Keywords: rate-distortion theory, tidying behavior, executive function, ADHD, cognitive architecture, gist extraction, verbatim processing, KonMari, ACAT, individual differences