My latest obsession in life is the “little things that add up,” and how costly they are in time, money, sanity, quality of life.
Take for example calories. That’s an easy one. We’ve all done the math, “If I forgo that 100 calorie indulgence every day, that’s ten pounds per year!” We opt for light beer and butter substitute because we believe that the little things add up.
But what about general household organization? I wouldn’t describe myself as unorganized, but I’m a far cry from perfect. I set things on surfaces, maybe in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “I’ll wait until there’s a whole slew of stuff sitting on this surface and then I’ll put everything away all at once!”
Then, as a result, I spend my weekends doing “heavy duty cleaning” and the rest of the week running around in circles grumbling, “WHERE IS MY XYZ? HOW DOES AN XYZ JUST DISAPPEAR?” I’m not enjoying my home as much as I could if I were to keep it a little more tidy. It’s not squalor or anything, but sometimes there are dishes from the night before in the sink/on counter, my bathroom gets overrun with cosmetics and hair dryers because I don’t put them away right away, laundry sits on my bed and then if I’m too lazy to put away before go to sleep, I’ll just shove on floor (classy, huh? lol), and the junk mail on the kitchen table. Oy. I do clean every day, but my point is that I don’t always do it right away, I do something lazy-assed on most days.
So ... lightbulb. If I would put things away right then and there, I’d know where to find them, I wouldn’t have to bother with them later, and I’d feel much more relaxed and comfortable in my home - which can look quite lovely when it’s in order. Time caught before it reaches the cracks.
Your mama taught you that when you were 3 years old didn’t she?
Lucky. 
It also goes for my car, I leave things in my car, I am a lazy car person. And don’t get me started on my purse, otherwise known as the hot jumbled mess of receipts, pens, spare change, junk mail that needs shredding, makeup, checkbooks, cell phone, and other various sundries that I tote around with me every day. It’s embarrassing enough that I walk around like that, but what has me contemplating a major life change about it is the fact that I spend SO MUCH TIME hunting for my damn wallet, cell phone, pen, blah blah whatever.
Follow me on this: if it takes me 18 seconds to find my cell phone as opposed to 2 or 3 seconds if I were to put it in my cell phone pocket where it belongs, that’s 15 seconds of my life each day, 5475 seconds per year or 1 hour and 31 minutes! Imagine having that hour and a half back, what you could do with it: Make money, have more fun, or how about just spend less time bitching about how busy you are.
While we’re on the subject, this is probably my biggest pet peeve conversation:
Friend: “So how’ve you been?”
Other friend: “Oh you know, busy.”
Being busy sucks, it probably doesn’t even mean you’re accomplishing all that much, so I don’t know why some people wear it as a badge of pride. Bottom line it means you’re not spending your life doing things you enjoy and you’re missing out on time with your friends and loved ones. Think of all the hours that we could have back if we didn’t let time slip through the cracks? What if our cultural paradigm were to shift from the “I’m so busy” as virtuous to “Oh the usual, just having fun and spending lots of time with my friends and family!”?
If I had to guess, I’d say that I spend at least 30 minutes of wasted time on little things like that each day. That’s 182 hours per year! That’s just time slipping right through the cracks.
This notion has inspired me to be a more organized person. (By the way, I don’t think that getting time back is only possible for the unorganized people. The folks at the other end of the spectrum could just as easily lighten up a bit and let things slide every now and then. Sometimes you can go a week without dusting, or balancing your checkbook, it’s true!)
I have read Getting Things Done and use a lot of those techniques at work, it does help tremendously. And I have a fairly efficient system of project management. But overall, there’s a lot of room for improvement, I just have this strong feeling that my life could be so much better if I could pick up just a few teeny tiny habits.
And then there’s money. How much of my money slips through the cracks? Just today I had to pay a bill over the phone and they charged me $3.50 for no good reason other than because they could, then added a $2.50 late fee. It was two days late, two! I got absolutely nothing for that $6, multiplied over the course of a year, that’s over two thousand dollars of money that’s just flushed right down the old pooper. I don’t incur late fees on a daily basis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if on average, I pissed away 5 or 6 bucks a day away on absolutely nothing, sure. Chewing gum, finance charges, magazines at the checkout stand, so on. Dudes, that’s adds up to at least a vacation in Hawaii, the one I bitch about never being able to take! I’ve never been “cheap,” and I will never choose thrift over quality of life, I won’t spend my precious time hunting down nickels, but I’m going to be a hell of a lot more aware. I am going to cash in those little things for bigger things, and I’m going to stop handing over my money where I get nothing in return. That $6 really chapped my ass today for some reason.
Little things slip through the cracks, and little things add up. I’m going to be running a tighter ship around here!
Does anybody have any advice or tips or books to recommend for helping me become a more organized/frugal human?
