Following on from my last post and staying with the topic of ‘efficiency’, I want to put an idea to you:
That, sometimes, being too efficient from the economy point of view is counterproductive to efficiency from the time point of view
Let me illustrate this notion with an example from my own life:
When lockdown started last year, my life moved to Zoom. Life, now, is much free-er. Although much of it has stayed on Zoom (haven’t you also discovered that doing Zoom brings a great saving in travel-time?), there is now much more real-time traffic in my home and work-space.
The status quo in my head tends to be a reflection of the status quo in my environment (and I imagine it is the same for you too). And so, no matter whether I’m doing Zoom or I’m doing real-time, I live and work more productively when the space around me is neat, orderly – and dust free.
Eye-level dust is quick and easy to deal with. Floor-level dust …. Well, that is another story. You know how it is: the hoover is at the back of the broom cupboard and the broom and the mop topple over as you haul the vacuum cleaner out. The hoover’s cord has entangled itself around the broom handle. And, as you try to disentangle the cord, you trip over the mop handle.
Your hoovering session has become fraught before it even started! Moreover (and I say this from the efficiency point of view), the time you’re now going to spend disentangling the cord from the mop handle, reinstalling the mop and broom in the cupboard, attaching the brush to the hoover – never mind then actually accompanying the machine around your home and workspace – is time you could have spent going through today’s e-mails or going to the library or helping one of your kids with maths homework.
I remind you (as you’ll have heard me mention in my post Pearls of Wisdom) that:
There’s time to do anything …. But always at the expense of doing something else.
There’s time to vacuum your house. Yes. But it’s at the expense of doing something that would add value to your life if you could dispose of the hoovering task.
You can dispose of the hoovering task!
I have done this by investing in a robot vacuum cleaner: Ecovac Deebot. If you’d like one too, you can find it on Amazon.
Using the Ecovac app, and with the friendly cooperation of Alexa, you can schedule vacuuming sessions, which then happen automatically. Once your floor is dust-free and visitor-friendly, the machine loads itself back onto the charging station, ready for next time.
Having the Deebot has revolutionised the start of my week. The Deebot is programmed to vacuum my work space on Sunday night (and other parts of my home at other points in the weekend), which means that the start of the week is dust-free (at floor level, in any case!) – without my having spent any part of the weekend in making it so and with my weekend time having been put to more pleasant use.
I would like to put to you that, often, the expense of investing in a labour-saving or time-saving or stress-saving device or strategy, if this leads to greater efficiency, is more than worth it. You earn the money back by being more productive.
Your investment may be in joining a gym, in an effort to ensure that you get exercise. If the investment results, in the long run, in your being less stressed and more productive, then the investment will have paid off.
A journey to a meeting or appointment by cab may be pricier than taking the trip on public transport. But if the cab journey is quicker and if it is less stressful than plunging into the depths of the earth to reach the Victoria Line, and if it means that you are brighter, alerter, and more effective at the meeting, then the investment will have paid off.
Economists talk about cost-benefit analysis. In essence, this means making a decision about whether the value of the benefit gained by incurring an expense is greater than the cost – or not. If the benefit is greater than the cost, then the investment may well be worth making.
Although we usually talk about ‘efficiency’ in relation to work and to productivity, I would suggest that efficiency is an equally important aspect of our domestic lives, our family lives, and our social lives. Being more efficient with the way we manage time allows us more leisure time: time with which to do as we please and choose.
I wish you success in your own endeavours to manage your time more efficiently and hope that the ideas I’ve given in this post might go some way towards helping you do this. But, if you’re finding that trying to manage your time and your stress levels more efficiently continues to be problematic, then please message me. It may be that a collaborative approach to finding a solution is what you need.
In the meantime, feel free to read more about my approach to counselling, mentoring and life-coaching.
