A Quick and Simple Way to Save About an Hour a Week

by Firefalls on March 23, 2011

Ok, bear with me because I’ve recently had an epiphany. It came out of my sheer frustration at my early morning time management skills (or lack of any organizational skills pre-8:00 a.m.).

Let me back up a bit and explain the situation and then I’ll explain the easiest way to save a few minutes each and every day. I have to be at “the office” at 8:00 a.m. and I’m sure you’ve gathered from the last paragraph that I’m not a morning person. My routine is pretty similar every day, wake up read a book while having my coffee, jump in the shower, then get dressed and go.

Simple?

The few snags I deal with is the obvious wrinkled clothes, so there is ironing involved most mornings (unless I get it together the night before, although not too likely). So after the coffee, shower, brush teeth, comb hair and dressing my last step is shoes and socks. To back track even further I once thought it clever to have socks of all shapes and sizes… well, more like materials, colors and patterns.

Here’s where the epiphany comes in.

It happened on a Saturday afternoon right after I finished my laundry. I brought my clothes into my bedroom to fold and put away. The shirts and pants no problem, you just fold it (or put it on a hanger) and put them away. The real problem seems to be that besides my Basset Hound Elvis living in my house, my house is also home to one of the ancient, sacred sock smugglers. (I haven’t actually seen it yet but once I catch it on video you can bet I’ll post it)

No matter how hard I try to keep my socks together, a couple always seems to go missing. It wastes probably a good 20-30 minutes just pairing up socks. Not only do I lose a few socks here and there but just the sheer waste of time matching every sock is so frustrating. Half the time I just throw half of the socks into my drawer loose, but then we get into the whole early morning, “I’m going to be late” problems.

Enough talk of jeans and socks, what’s the solution you ask?

I’ve recently threw out every pair of socks I owned. Well to be completely honest, I did it immediately after buying 12 pairs of the EXACT SAME black socks and 12 pairs of the EXACT SAME white (gym type) socks. I figured black dress socks go with every color pants and shoes.

Just get basic socks like these:

Now laundry is no problem I just throw all the socks into my “sock drawer” loose, then each morning I grab 2 black socks or two white socks, I know they will match and it doesn’t really matter if I lose one because I have 22 more socks EXACTLY like that one to match against.

Between doing my laundry and trying to match them all or trying to find matches in a laundry basket in the morning I probably save about an hour each week. If you’re not a morning person or you’d like to save some time give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

~Charles Darwin

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