Finding things
Reclaim four minutes every single day
TLDR: One designated place for each item
Word count: 650 words
Read time: 4 mins
This is the second of a six-part series on Not-forgetting. Please share this email with friends who might use their time more intentionally.
It’s been a long day. Your train was delayed and the commute long. You finally reach your front door, lost in your thoughts. Then, bam! Everything’s happening, all at once. You put your bag down and go into the living room. There’s a pile of post on the kitchen counter (and one of the letters looks like an unexpected bill). There’s also an Amazon delivery which someone has already opened. Music blares from a room upstairs and you instinctively go to track down and turn off that noise…
We’ll come back to this.
In the first chapter of Timeboxing, I wrote that ‘The problem is that we don’t use our time well’. I stand by it. It’s a big problem, one we all face multiple times a day and don’t ever fully solve. And it’s what timeboxing is substantially the antidote for.
Well, one waste of time, which almost all of us are susceptible to, is looking for physical objects that we’ve misplaced. This is a perfect example of us not using our time well. And, as we’ll see, it has a ludicrously simple solution.
Not only is looking for misplaced items a waste of time in those moments, it has several adverse knock-on effects. It causes frustration. It causes stress. And it can lead to us being late: for a bus, a colleague…a timebox.
One study estimated that we spend 2.5 days every year looking for misplaced items. That works out as four minutes a day, which seems an under-estimate (certainly if you add in the time looking for misplaced items for the kids!) That study listed out the most frequently misplaced items, namely:
TV remotes (45%)
Phone (33%)
Keys (28%)
Glasses (27%)
Shoes (24%)
Wallets/purses (20%)
The order surprised me. I’d have thought phones, keys and wallets/purses would make up the top three. They are the unholy trinity that adorn many an Etsy doormat, tray, hook set, etc.
I’d also have expected clothing to feature somewhere. But no matter! There is one solution for all objects.
The solution
The paragraph I’m just about to write is so obvious, I feel self-conscious typing it out. We all know this solution. Many of us do it, without thinking about it, every day.
The solution is simply to….keep each item in its own designated place. Keys on the key hook, phone/wallet by the bedside table, TV remote on the coffee table, shoes on the shoe rack. If you can rewire your brain and adjust your behaviour, 2.5 days each year and a pie-full of serenity will be yours.
Adjusting behaviour is no mean feat. But let’s take one of the items from the list above, say - keys. What happens to your keys each evening? Picture the scene for you as you reach home from work…
It’s been a long day. Your train was delayed and the commute long. You finally reach your front door, lost in your thoughts. Then, bam! Everything’s happening, all at once. You put your bag down and go into the living room. There’s a pile of post on the kitchen counter (and one of the letters looks like an unexpected bill). There’s also an Amazon delivery which someone has already opened. Music blares from a room upstairs and you instinctively go to track down and turn off that noise…
At some point in all this you understandably and absent-mindedly lay down your keys somewhere. Since the aying-down is absent of mind, no memory forms. And so when you next need your keys (likely the next day, five minutes after you were supposed to leave the house) your mind and memory comes up blank. Four minutes or so later you find them and off you go, finally, nine minutes late.
If only they’d been on, say, the key hook. One way to get them there, if it’s not an automatic behaviour for you, is to retain a degree of mindfulness as you step in the door, as you are met with loving welcome and/or waiting chores alike. Before you cross the chasm from quiet commute to domestic cacophony, have the presence of mind to have and hold the thought that you will hang up those keys, etc, before anything else. You might even like to have an Etsy-style doormat on the outside of your abode that reminds you at the end of the day: ‘keys, phone, wallet’.
Links you may like
7 days of Timeboxing (the free email micro-course)
Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
My Insta for shorter-form content
Connect with me on LinkedIn (I will say yes!)