In any location, be it an science lab down to your pants pockets, there will likely be some loadout of items kept there, and choosing that set of items is critical to saving space, money, and time.
In this paper I propose a process and a set of questions that can be used to assess whether an item belongs somewhere, or does not.
WorkInProgress!
Many items are kept in case of a specific scenario, either positive or negative. There are several questions one might use to assess scenarios, many of which are discussed by (Nick Shabazz)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2l7u4Hn41k&feature=youtu.be] in an excellent video.
Things like "I might want to go hiking, or maybe go up to visit mom this year" are very vauge, and buying things to prepare for them easily results in bad decisions. These kind of combined scenarios with lots of "maybes" are often used made up on the to justify buying or adding something that makes no sense.
The #1 cause of buying things you don't need seems to be future plans that never happen. As with the principle that "There is no later", one can't assume they will have the motivation to do something at any given point in the future, unless they are actively doing that thing right now, or can say with total certainty that they will be doing that thing.
Things like "If I buy this treadmill, I will excercise" are well known and well tested to not actually work.
If this scenario happened, and you did not have the item you think you need, what happens?
A missing fire extinguisher could be a real problem, but many other items can be easily sceen to actively make the situation worse with only a few minutes of planning.
In the event that the situation never happenes at all, what have you lost, if you choose to buy this object?
The following questions can be asked about objects, for similar reasons
Is this item redundant, and if so, does the redundancy actually do anything? A bag with three of the same flashlight offers no protection against all three being lost at once, damaged by water, e-bombed, or any other condition that could cause all three very similar items to fail.
For independant causes, things that have a 1% chance of failure on any given day have 0.01% chance of failing together on the same day.
For most things, redundancy rapidly becomes quite insane, and only relevant in scenarios that are literally one-in-a-million.