Time Management for Everyday Life
This section discusses the challenges associated with time management, particularly as it pertains to daily life and modern basic needs. I will present useful ways to identify and assess common time management issues, as well as a system I rely on to keep my home running smoothly.
I have linked resources that have been helpful to me. Some of these resources are products (such as books) available for purchase. These products may be linked through affiliate links. If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.
While there are infinite combinations of ways to spend our time, our lifespans are limited. Countless have searched for eternal life, but I have not yet been apprised of a successful venture (I’ll be watching you, though, Bryan Johnson).
We often admire the incredible feats of mankind while simultaneously disregarding the unalluring daily tasks which make those achievements possible. Lofty dreams are common, but regular chores and home maintenance requirements are universal.
This section considers the (often) mundane, recurring actions that build our lives. While we may not necessarily enjoy these tasks, they often play a direct role in our health, safety, and longevity. If we can make these recurring tasks easier, we can be more productive and spend that time anywhere else. With so much to do, there’s no time to waste.
Chorin’ as the Core of our System
From cleaning our rooms, to organizing our clothes drawers and managing our waste systems, home maintenance impacts all functions of our life.
There are three ways we can handle home maintenance chores: either we complete them, someone else completes them as part of our living arrangement (ex. one partner cooks and the other does dishes), or we hire someone else to do the work.
Regardless of how we complete these tasks, the less time they require, the more we can spend elsewhere.
Learning to Improve Our Chores
I am no robot, nor do I have professional cleaning team at my disposal. Therefore, I regularly toil with these *basic* tasks and the demands they impose. Importantly, I recognize that if can I can manage these tasks myself, I will better understand them, making them easier to automate or delegate in the future.
Along with understanding each individual task, I find that I can make significant efficiency improvements by better understanding everything I need to do in a given timeframe and bundling work1 when possible (ex. if I have to put laundry away, I can next go into picking up room because I will already be there. This is also a good way to take care of tasks you do not want to do, see HERE for more). Regardless of whether we can bundle chores together, a strong understanding of our basic needs and what they take to complete will help us better manage our daily lives.
1For a more structured approach to bundling chores, be sure to check out this article on Habit Stacking, an excerpt from James Clear’s modern classic Atomic Habits.
Time Management for Our Basic Needs
Efficient time management for our basic needs is essential because these necessities will always impose time requirements on our schedules.
Each day asks how much free time we truly have. Many of us wake up and acknowledge that we have sold most of our days to someone else for a stable life and schedule. For those with sufficient means to live without a 9 to 5, there are still constant chores that impact free time and resources.
If we want to maximize our available free time, we must focus on better understanding our basic living requirements.
I find that I can best manage time maintenance for my basic living requirements when I consider three factors: the time urgency, the necessity of the task in general, and the level of completion needed.
Let’s Begin:
In order for us to live, we have some basic needs. We need food (of course), water (even more of course), a place to stay (room, restroom, and preferably a kitchen), and appropriate clothing. In addition to our home, clothes, and nutrition, we demand regular cleaning and maintenance (shower, brushing teeth, trimming nails), fun, relaxation, and socialization.
While each of these requirements takes some level of effort to be satisfied at even the most basic level, much more thought and effort can be devoted to doing things better.
Our regular tasks are important to our day-to-day life, and each comes with its own unique timeline and risks from failure to complete. For example, if I fail to clean my clothes after a use, I can often get away with another wear with limited repercussions, as they are unlikely to be that dirty or smelly.
If I continue to wear unwashed clothing, I will probably get side-eyed by bystanders experiencing my dirty clothing, but I do not expect much more than that unless I’m going into the office in a mud-stained suit. Skip a few meals, however, and the risks are far greater (just try talking to a hangry person, I dare you).
NOTE: risks change with circumstances, and a meal is not always more important than clean clothes. We must can plan our tasks based on present needs and risks of incompletion. I find that a clean shirt is much more important than lunch when I’ve just had breakfast and have a lunchtime interview.
Spreading Time Across Multiple Tasks
We are often conditioned to look at tasks as being binary. Have you done the dishes? Yes or no. Have you eaten dinner? Yes or no. And so goes the checklist of day-to-day living. However, if we run our time through an ever-expanding checklist, it is easy to overwhelm ourselves and find time trapped in chores that are not pressing.
I find it is helpful to shift as many tasks as possible from a binary view into a fuel-tank approach. Under a fuel-tank approach, our available time and energy is the gas powering the various motors of the tools that make our modern day life go. While we can use this fuel however we deem fit, there never seems to be enough to do everything we want to do.
Often, we are faced with tasks that we do not have the time to complete in one sitting. More often still, our time is better spent across several tasks instead of completing a single objective from start to finish. Under a fuel-tank approach, we allow ourselves to consider the current state of each individual task and how much work it currently needs to get us through different scenarios.
Example: The Lunchtime Meeting
You’re at home for lunch. It’s been a full morning after a long week and you’re behind on the dishes. Better yet, you’ve used every last clean plate. You also have an important meeting this afternoon and realize that you’re starving. Long day, I know. Given how soon your meeting is, there will not be enough time for you to do all the dishes and have dinner. However, you need some dishes because your only ready meal is mom’s leftover lasagna and that would be a disaster to eat that without a plate and utensils.
Rather than spending your available time time doing all the dishes, you decide to hand wash the necessary dishes for your current meal and let the others soak/ go through the dishwasher to handle later.
In the present scenario, a combination of some work across several tasks is more helpful than completing one task from start to finish. While all of the dishes may be dirty, not every plate needs to be cleaned before the afternoon meeting. Instead, only one plate is needed for the meal. The meal, however, is nonnegotiable because few people interview well on an empty stomach.
Under this (admittedly oversimplified) binary assessment, the proposed selection selection does not complete the dishwashing task. However, it allows for a clean plate and a meal before a big meeting. Furthermore, it makes later dishwashing easier later.
A fuel-tank approach makes it easier understand our basic needs and fine-tune our schedules (this fuel-tank approach is also helpful for understanding movement and will be discussed thoroughly HERE).
How Done is Done?
Not everything needs to be completed from start to finish in one go, and we can benefit from juggling several things at once to make progress as needed. It is more important still to recognize that many tasks do not ever need to be completed to 100%.
Yes, certain tasks need to be done (or we want done) perfectly. For example, if our job is to check rocket components prior to launch, checking 90% of the components won’t cut it. Similarly, many of us have beaten video game campaigns only to find out we are only 70% of the way through the game overall. If we want to completely beat a video game, 70% might not scratch that itch. If we aren’t riding rockets or passionate about maxing out video games, we can often see areas where getting to 100% may not be worth the time.
Let’s use this graph and table to illustrate:
This dataset depicts what a typical task that takes 200 minutes to complete to 100% might look like. As you can see from the key above, the blue line indicates the level of completion and the red line indicates the marginal utility from spending incrementally more time on the task, or how much benefit a person receives for each additional time unit spent on the task (ex. the benefit from going from 0 minutes spent to 10 minutes on a task is a 35% increase in completion, where as the benefit from going from 80 minutes spent to 90 minutes is a meager 3% increase in completion).
More Time Spent Isn’t Always Better
This dataset illustrates diminishing marginal utility, which is where we receive relatively less value for each bit more time spent on a task. Here’s an example to illustrate:
I’ve just finished the laundry, and I have to put away my socks. I like my socks, and I like them folded and stored in my sock drawer so I can find matching pairs easily.
I start by taking 30 seconds to get all of my socks out of the dryer to bring them into my room (I’ve got a lot of socks). My socks are much more useful to me in my room when compared to leaving them in the dryer, and the mere act of bringing them to my room gets me about 30% through the chore. It typically takes me about 5 seconds to match up each pair. Matching the pairs makes my life easier, and, when combined with bringing the socks into my room, I’ve done about 55% of the task.
The job is looking good, but certainly not passable. Once I match up my socks, I like to line the pair up so they fold together easily. This takes me another 5 seconds. It’s still important, but not as important as getting the matching pair together and still does not get me to a finished product. However, I’m about 75% of the way to my goal. I can find and store my socks easily, but they are likely to get jumbled up in the drawer, so it’s not the best way to store them.
Next, I start the fold. Another 5 seconds, but now my set matches, folds easily, and won’t get mixed up in my drawer. I’d say I’m pretty good here and would probably stop, but I’m probably only 90% of the way done to a perfectly folded sock.
If I wanted a perfectly folded pair of socks, I would have to make sure the fold is completely smooth and the socks are adjusted so they tightly fit together and take up the least possible space in my drawer. 5 more seconds gets the fold tighter, and probably another 25 still if I want to make sure I have a truly perfect fold that takes the least amount of space in my drawer.
Final Thoughts
How many of you read that and thought to yourself “man, this guy care too much about his socks”? While, yes, I do care about my socks, I find the illustration helpful. Matching and folding your socks keeps drawers more organized, saves time finding pairs, and helps better assess when to do laundry and/or buy more socks. At the same time, you really don’t need the most perfectly folded socks possible because the added time likely leads to minimal improvements.
Most tasks align more closely with folding socks than they do with rocket launches.
If you want to learn more about effectively managing your home and chores, click HERE to continue onto our next topic on time efficiency, titled “The Fuel Tank Approach”
-G
Efficiently ELITE
At the end of the day, this site is designed to serve as a resource. Like many good resources, Efficiently ELITE is always seeking outside input to refine its content and improve its ability to help people take more autonomy over their ability to move. Do you have any suggestions? Please contact me and let me know below!
