Lessons in Efficiency

Over the years so many articles about de-cluttering and home organizing.have gotten me thinking. I keep a neat home -- visible clutter is not my issue, but having too many possessions does annoy me. Here's what I have gradually come to realize:

Efforts to be efficient have led to some of my issues with having too much stuff, and even some of my issues with putting on too much weight.

Economical use of my time meant I always tried to combine activities to do all at once, but I have come to see that I wasn't being efficient, I was really stockpiling tasks. 

And stockpiling "to do" items meant stuff accumulated.

A trip to return mail order items at the UPS store had to wait until I was doing errands in the area or had other packages to return. As a result, packages lingered unreturned, and it was just easier not to deal with returns at all, and I kept things I didn't want, because --- well, who knew when I'd have a bunch of reasons to be in the area where the UPS store was.

Now I make a point to re-pack any unwanted mail order item, get in the car and take it over there. A whole trip for a single return item, no matter how insignificant. It's completely inefficient. But I make an event out of it, and that little bit of mindfulness -- the time and gas spent, the dedication to the task -- is helpful.

It's easier here in Santa Fe than it was in Connecticut, everything is close by. But still, I have to make an effort to do a single, inefficient task when it is needed, and not when I have other things accumulated to do.

By being inefficient and making a trip for one little thing, I don't end up keeping stuff I don't really want.

When we had a two story home, household items that belonged upstairs or had to go to the basement used to sit in the hall until there were more reasons to make a trip up or down the stairs. 

Stuff accumulated. Finally I started to make the inefficient trip up the stairs, one toothbrush in hand or one washcloth at a time, and I justified the "inefficiency" of wasting time on such a trivial task by chalking up points for the exercise I got.

So many chores were put off while I waited for similar tasks to be combined in the most economical manner possible. So I never dealt with taking unwanted items to Savers until I had a carload full, and stuff just multiplied in my closet.

Now I make a short morning of it, and take one or two items -- so little! when I have them, and am mindful that I am spending time and effort on this single trivial task. No more waiting until I had some other task to do at the same place, or until I had more and more things to donate, enough to make it "worthwhile".

Stockpiling chores to be more efficient meant things didn't get done, and so material stuff ended up not being dealt with at all. Until it got to be too much.

And food -- yes, it's wasteful to throw good food away. But why send leftovers through my body to be eliminated, or unfortunately stored? Some of my problem with weight gain has been trying to make economical use of food by eating it up.

Throw it away.

I need to fight my natural tendency to be economical -- eat the food, combine the trips, save the gas, organize the chores into one big task. 

So now I celebrate the effectiveness of wasting the day doing one inefficient time sucking errand at a time. . . . but getting it done.