Tag: efficiency

Still more ways of reclaiming lost time

Yesterday, I talked about getting rid of TV as a way of reclaiming some lost time. While dozing off last night, I came up with a few more things I can do to get back some time during the day. Some of these are easy to do and I plan on getting started as soon as possible:

  1. Shower only once a week. Granted, it doesn’t take me long to shower; especially if I’m not shaving, I can get through a shower in less than 4 minutes. But 4×6 = 24 minutes or nearly half an hour saved by taking only one shower per week. I can probably write 2 pages in 24 minutes and over the course of a year, that adds up to 104 pages of writing that I can get done by giving up most of my showers.
  2. Wear the same clothes every day. By wearing the same clothes every day, I can save quite a bit of time. First, I don’t have to spend time deciding what to wear the next day; I already know. Second, I don’t have to do laundry as frequently as I do now. One load every couple of days should be adequate. I estimate saving an hour or so per week by doing this. I can write 5 or 6 pages in an hour and that adds up to over 250 pages of writing I can get done each year just by wearing the same clothes every day.
  3. Spend some nights at the office. Why waste the commute time to and from work when I can make better use of that time doing other things. I can sleep in my office, and use the time I would otherwise be using to commute to write. I commute about 1.5 hours per day, five days a week. Granted, I’d have to go home sometimes, but suppose I stayed in the office two nights per week. That would save me 3 hours and in three hours I could write 15-18 pages. Over the course of a year that adds up to 750 pages or enough to produce a novel each year!

Even more ways to reclaim lost time

New email processing

I have complained before about how we are so flooded with information these days, that it is virtually impossible to keep up. I send out an email message to friends at work each year, giving an estimate of how much email I actually read versus what I receive. In FY2005, I read just over 1 in 4 email messages I received at work. I simply did not have the time to read the others. I calculated that, if I did read just about every message I received, excluding spam, which is filtered), I would spent three-eighth of my day doing nothing but reading email. Over the course of a work-year, that’s 82 work-days of doing nothing but reading email!

Read more about my new email processing scheme