The Day I Shaved My Legs

What would you do if you had an hour all to yourself tonight? Read a book? Soak in the tub? Take a leisurely stroll? I’d shave my legs. With a full-time job, kids, a three-legged dog and an old house that’s mid-reno, by the time I get to my legs, I need a weed wacker.

Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that learning some time management skills would probably help (it couldn’t hurt, anyway). So I took the plunge. I dusted off my two time management books (ones I’d bought five years ago but had never found the time to read) and got started. My goal: To plow through those books and transform my life in seven days. I wanted one job-free, guilt-free hour at the end of each day—an hour just for me. Easy, right? Here’s what the books told me to do:

1. Shorten the paper trail
Turns out the average person spends three hours every month just paying their bills—and they’re slammed with an additional 2,700 pieces of unsolicited mail every year. Frankly, I don’t know how they could be getting that much mail, since the post office appears to be forwarding everyone’s flyers to me. Anyway, one of the time management books pointed out that we waste a ton of time dealing with all of that paper—and we never actually use 80% of what we choose to keep, either.
*Saturday: At the book’s prodding, I cleaned out my over-stuffed cabinet to make filing faster and easier. That meant tossing all but the last two years’ worth of credit card receipts and bank statements, plus—are you kidding me?—instruction manuals for cars, furnaces and vacuums that we no longer owned, and insurance papers for houses we’d sold over a decade ago. Then I attacked the week’s mountain of mail. Quickly tossing anything that wasn’t important—instead of reading it out of morbid curiosity—helped me plow through a week’s worth of junk mail and bills in 15 minutes, instead of the full hour it used to take.

2. Get thee to bed
Doesn’t it feel great when you climb out of bed feeling awake and energetic, raring to take on a brand-new day? Yeah, I wouldn’t know, either. If I’m not working until midnight, I’m treating myself for getting my work done early by watching TV until midnight. Both of the time management books bashed this habit. Sleep deprivation, they nagged, sabotages creativity, memory and concentration—and when you’re exhausted, it takes up to twice as long to accomplish tough mental tasks. Crud.
*Sunday: I was feeling pretty snarky when I went to bed at 11 pm. How could I possibly gain an hour of free time by going to bed an hour earlier? Very easily, it seems. After a full eight hours of sleep, I felt weirdly alert for the first time in months. I was able to do the dishes, sweep the kitchen and fold the laundry before work—a feat I never could have accomplished in my usual morning stupor. That meant I didn’t have to do those tasks at the end of the day. The books had been right. Crud.

3. Work at work
Is staying late at work—or dragging paperwork home with you—eating up your free time? Then try actually working when you’re at work, one of the time management snots suggested. Turns out we’re spending less than 60% of each eight-hour work day doing actual, productive work. Think that’s an exaggeration? Log off Pinterest for a minute and we’ll talk. The know-it-all snot’s advice: Turn off your cell phone, shut the door, and force yourself to do a job from start to finish.
*Monday: Procrastination is my downfall—if I have no plausible excuse for putting off a project, I’ll add paper to my printer, check that my stapler has staples, and sharpen my pencils to the point where they’re capable of performing brain surgery. So I wasn’t looking forward to diving into the day’s work without any distractions. Yet, by noon, my biggest assignment of the day was done—a new record, since I usually have to work Monday evening to finish up.

4. Get unconnected
I was starting to really dislike these time management putzes. Now they were targeting my favorite distractions: Facebook, Twitter and email. Constantly checking and responding to every message and post, they said, is like having letters delivered to your door one at a time—it’s a distraction, and a poor use of time. Their solution? Only check and respond to messages twice daily. Twice daily? Were they serious?
*Tuesday…and Wednesday…and Thursday: I failed miserably the first day—the second and third days were no picnic, either. I check my e-mail four (okay, maybe five or six) times every hour all day long. And whenever my brain hits a dry spell, I give myself a mental break by logging onto Facebook or Twitter for a few minutes to wake myself up. True, that means my train of thought is interrupted—or completely derailed—multiple times every day, but I don’t mind. It makes me happy. Unproductive, apparently, but happy. I’ve weaned myself down to two message checks every hour and, yes, I am getting more done—but cutting myself off espresso was easier than this.

5. Put your to-do list on a diet
News flash from one of the time management books: People spend 75% of their day doing tasks they think are urgent—even though those jobs could have been put off for days, weeks, months or even indefinitely. Ironing, mending, car washing…forget what Martha Stewart might think, one of the time management gurus boldly said—cut corners, do some jobs less often, and you’ll have more time for the things you truly value.
*Thursday: My original to-do list for the day had read: Vacuum the rugs, clean the bathrooms, catch up on the damned mending and go to the hardware store—oh, and work all day, too. My wallet-sized to-do list: Work, and wash the worst bathroom—the ones my kids had spackled with blue toothpaste. The bag of mending? I hadn’t touched it in six months—my kids had probably outgrown the stuff, anyway.

6. Prune your home
There’s no question it takes time to purge the junk out of overflowing closets, drawers and basements, yet you could lose even more precious time if you don’t. Turns out we spend 150 hours every year looking for things we’ve misplaced (I’ve probably lost that much time in the last year just looking for my purse).
*Friday: A small house fire would have made this job easier. The gravitational pull in my house is very strong, and “things” constantly trickle in, often in the grimy hands of children. I stomped through the house room by room, throwing anything we were no longer using into bags and boxes for Goodwill. Even my dresser lost one-third of its cargo (Who was I kidding? Only liposuction would get me back into my pre-pregnancy jeans.).

7. Keep a long (long) errands list
The last tip from the time management pros? If you run to the grocery store two or three times every week, plus make quick trips to other shops, you could save at least an hour every week just by combining all of those errands into one mega trip.
*Saturday: Adding up trips to the grocery store, hardware store, farmer’s market and Walmart, our total time spent shopping each week: five hours, minimum. Combining everything into a Saturday afternoon shopping spree: 3 hours, 10 minutes. By 9 p.m., my kids were happy, fed and in bed, and I’d finished everything on my (now blissfully short) to-do list. The evening was truly mine. I shaved my legs.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to my blog and you’ll never miss my monthly posts (plus I’ll send you a free copy of There’s Nothing Wrong With Claudia to say thanks). It’s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I’ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information.