DEAD TIME

"Not that we have little time, but we lose a lot."

Seneca

I've lost count of how many times throughout my life I questioned myself about the simple fact of the amount of hours lost in everyday tasks that we do not want, but we must do.
All this has come to my head at this precise moment, and the primal guilty are the dirty dishes that wait submerged in the sink, but this has been simply the drop that shed the glass, there are lots activities that we must carry out one way or another by obligation that in sum and the long end it's costing a life, or perhaps half of it.
I will try to be as objective and generic as possible when submitting tasks, as there can be much difference in what some people live as a waste of time.

Pure math

Lets suppose we take an average individual, who lives about seventy years, of which, suppose that his first twenty years he does not perform any of these tasks because of the comfort of family life, or rather thanks to Mom.
We have a margin of fifty years where the sum of the day to day will leave us surprised with the results, and think twice when buying a dishwasher, or at least I'm already considering too much.
Here is a list of those daily tasks that we both hate but must inevitably do.

-Do the dishes

-Cutting nails

-Waiting in the supermarket

-Waiting for a bus

-Bureaucratic formalities

-Cleaning the bathroom

-Hanging clothes

Let's go over the list a little and assign an average daily time to each one of them and although they are not all tasks or problems of every day, whatI;m trying is to do an average to have an estimated calculation with a minimum margin of error.

Do the dishes:
At least twice a day, depending on how much you cook or how much you eat out, let's say the average I could be about 15 minutes a day.

Cutting the nails:
This includes feet and hands, is not an everyday task, but suppose a cut per week in feet and hands make a total of 7 minutes, which would be a minute per day approximately.

Line up at the supermarket:
To my liking one of the most tedious and annoying, we add all store boughts we make for day to day, approximately once a day, and not every day are long lines, but we could say we have an average of 3 minutes per day in this fucking line of people.

Waiting the bus:
De esta no se salva nadie, y creo que muy pocas veces en la vida de un ser humano se alinean los planetas de tal modo que la espera sea nula.
Aqui vamos a poner un promedio de una persona que va a trabajar en bus, o sea que toma dos por día, menos fines de semana y días libres, un promedio de un bus por día con una espera de 5 minutos, siendo totalmente afortunado con relación a los horarios de los transportes públicos.

Bureaucratic procedures:
It is not something of every day but the waits here are eternal, and if we had the obligation to do this daily the time of our life would hardly reach us to finish the basic collage studies.
Maybe a couple of paperwork per month would be a good average, with a wait of 30 minutes each, we talk about a couple of minutes a day.

Cleaning the bathroom:
I could have gone into something more general and include all the cleaning and housework, but honestly I do not think it has the same amount of disgust and annoyance as cleaning the bathroom, I do not know if the rest of the household chores could get to be enjoyable, but at least those don't suck.
A cleaning of 50 minutes aprox weekly, leaves us with an average of 7 minutes daily.

Hanging clothes
Like bathroom hygiene, it is not an everyday task, let's think of a person who does four weekly washes, four hung clothes, an average of 5 minutes at a time, 20 minutes a week that gives almost 3 minutes per day.

RESULTS

This leaves us a total of 36 minutes a day spent in this type of work that apart from changing the mood of the moment a little, we shorten life little by little.
This leaves us that if we have about 36 minutes a day average, a person loses a little more than 4 hours a week, which is 18 hours a month.
We are talking about almost a day a month, just running out of hands in front of our noses, 18 hours a month is no small thing, we are talking about 216 hours a year, 9 days a year, more than a week lost, a week less which could be wasted in vacation, or just do the things that we really enjoyed.

But as I said at the beginning of the post, these tasks are daily obligations, we have to do them and there is no alternative.
There is no way that is available to everyone to automate this so that time management favors us a little more. But we sure can take the best of something and learn from it, time passes, life is short and often the routine and the robot inside of us do certain tasks that prevents us from seeing that free time is the most precious thing we have and is where we really must find happiness.

Do not leave for tomorrow what you can do today, unless it is a horrible task.

Credits:
Photo 1 by Loic Djim on Unsplash
Photo 2 by 榮達 陳 on Unsplash
Photo 3 by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash