On time (part III) - Little things add up

One of the most powerful and yet most underestimated techniques to better manage time is the observation and optimisation of small habits and routines.

Lets take a quick look at some examples.

Say you have a bunch of keys on your keyring, and every time you lock your front door from the outside or you open the door, you fumble around for 5 seconds until you find the right one. For the sake of creating a more realistic scenario, let us also assume that you have a building door you have to open every time you want to get in.

So that's 5 seconds to lock, 5 seconds to open the building door, 5 seconds to open your flat door. 15 seconds per cycle.

Let's assume that on average you do that twice a day. So on a given day, you spend about 30 seconds fumbling with keys. 900 seconds per month. 10 800 seconds per year.

Now let's assume that you are a small business owner in Europe, where the average hourly labour cost in the Eurozone is 29,5€ (check it at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Hourly_labour_costs)

That's 3 hours every year spent fumbling for keys! Or the equivalent of 88,5€!

So just by buying a simple pack of plastic sleeves to organize your keyring that saves you 4 seconds each time you look for a key, which costs less than 2 € on Amazon



Buy it here!

That's 2,4 hours per year saved or, discounting the 2€ investment, 68,8€ of savings on the first year.

Think about that! 2,4 more hours to be with the ones you love you do something you are passionate about instead of... fumbling for keys!

Let us now consider one of the most used tools in the world, the personal computer.

You work with a computer that is just "good enough" in order to save money on an upgrade. Lets be very conservative and assume that, on average, a typical user opens 200 pages per day (to put into perspective, in 2007 in the US the average would be 138, source http://kickstand.typepad.com/metamuse/2007/10/how-many-web-pa.html).

If your "cheap" computer takes one second more to render a webpage than an updated computer, barely noticeable to the average user. Still, that's 200 seconds per day, or about 20 hours per year.

Even if you did nothing else than web-browsing, your "cheap" computer costs you 590€ per year in lost productivity!

So it's time to invite you for a little exercise.

For one day, pay attention to how much time you spend on the little things, the one's that don't matter much but really add up. Make an estimate. Be amazed.

All this serves a purpose. In this blog I will sometimes point to small optimisations to your life that will make you wonder if they are worth the effort.

Probably on the short run they won't. But we're playing a long game here...