Time the little things

One way to keep tasks in perspective

I love efficiency. Nothing makes me happier than figuring out how to streamline some annoying task. But sometimes optimization requires energy. So, in the grand scheme of things, it might be worth figuring out how long those small annoying tasks actually take. Then, you can make an informed decision about whether a given activity is worth getting worked up about.

I think about this every time I empty the dishwasher. I do not enjoy emptying the dishwasher. When we do not enjoy things, they tend to expand in our mental accounting. Before I began studying time, if someone asked me how long I spent emptying the dishwasher each week, I might have given some ridiculous figure like 3 hours. Emptying the dishwasher does not require much skill, nor is it particularly engaging. It just has to get done.

So the quicker the better, right? I would see if I could grab more plates at a time, or grab a bowl with my left hand and a glass with my right hand because that corresponds with the locations in my cupboards. I played around with loading the dishwasher so that more of the spoons were in one side of the silverware compartment and more forks on the other.

Then I elected to time the process. Emptying the dishwasher takes 5 minutes. Since this chore is shared across multiple people in my household, I’m probably devoting 15 minutes a week to it. This is about the same amount of time I spend staring off into space, forgetting what I came into a room for. It would be a bit of a stretch to decide that emptying the dishwasher is keeping me from living the life I want. I can probably just live with it.

Just sit there

So it goes with many seemingly inefficient things. For instance, maybe your house has an older garage door, and it takes a while to go up. You are sitting there in your car just watching and waiting, and so sometimes you get impatient and park outside. But even a very very slow and rickety door probably takes less than 30 seconds, if that. You don’t need to use that time to review your to-do list. You can just sit there.

Even that cliche of boring, unengaged time — waiting for a pot to boil — doesn’t take that long. An electric kettle can boil enough water for tea in about 3-4 minutes. Boiling enough water for a single serving of instant oat meal in a pot on the stove is similar. You could just stand there, watching the water boil, and you would hardly notice the difference in your life. No one’s winning some major efficiency award by using the time to delete emails instead.

Keep the change

Indeed, I’d argue that sometimes wasting tiny bits of time has an upside. Just as a wealthy person doesn’t fret about the price of apples and whether they were ten cents cheaper last week, a person with an abundant perspective on time doesn’t fret about the occasional inefficiency. You have more than enough time for what you want to do in life. Waiting a few seconds for the garage door to go up is like saying “keep the change.”

Now, none of this is to say that there isn’t a reason to look for efficiencies sometimes. Also, if you seem to be the only person in your household doing things like emptying the dishwasher, and there are other people in the household who are also perfectly capable of emptying the dishwasher, that is a matter to be addressed in the cause of equity.

But not because emptying the dishwasher takes a lot of time. Timing the little things will show you that it just doesn’t.