Nice photo- bet the soup was good. One of the restaurants here used to have the best potato soup but they took it off their menu. I was probably the only person who ever ordered it.

Wow, I can almost smell it!!

Heh. That's cute, wish I had one of those, looks nice there!

Because I hate spaghetti wiring and rats' nests, I think my foremost consideration in laying out a box is to come up with a "visual design" that will be neat and orderly. If, for example, a panel has only a single long neutral bar, I'll tend to place the two-pole 240V circuits on the opposite side since they don't need a neutral. But I'll also take into consideration where the wires enter the box. The heavier guages that are stranded (e.g., #8 and larger) have more of a mind of their own and don't cooperate as well as the smaller guages in holding intentional bends and angles, so I like to let them take simple, "natural" paths to their terminals wherever possible and minimize the necessity for making sharp bends within the the box. In choosing the best wiring pattern I can come up with, a great deal depends on where the branch circuits come from. For example, circuits served by main panels located in basements very often come predominantly from above (i.e., enter the box at the top). Where that's the case, I like to place the smaller circuits below the larger ones so that the small guage wires have the longer paths with the most bends. With AFCI and GFCI breakers becoming more and more common, I also take into account the runs of the neutral pigtails from these "specialized" breakers to the neutral bar. Not only can those pigtails quickly contribute to ugly box clutter, but they won't always reach a neutral bar from all slots. (And who wants to have to splice on an extender?) Also, many of the AFCI/GFCIs are wider than ordinary breakers, so I try to place them in an area with plenty of space where their "porches" have a minimal impact on other wiring runs and where they don't obstruct access to ground bars and/or neutral bars. To the extent possible, I try to organize breakers in sets representing my idea of "logical groupings." Thus, bedrooms and general lighting circuits tend to end up clumped together, kitchen-oriented stuff ends up in another line of adjacent breakers, while furnace, well-pump, hot water and sump pump are clustered in another segment, and so forth. And, yes, I try to do at least a decent "seat-of-the-pants" balancing across poles, taking into account my best guesses on what things tend to draw power at the same time as well as the actual load demands. It's not always possible to optimize on all these variables simultaneously and I don't consider any of the above to be hard-and-fast rules. When all is said and done, I suppose I'm more of a neat freak than anything else. I really like a box that looks clean and orderly with like-type wires (e.g., neutrals and equipment grounds) running in parallel "visual channels" that are easy to follow and easy on the eyes. I guess we all have our OCD quirks, eh?