I’m thinking a lot about the 1% better idea that I heard about in one of the podcasts I’ve been listening to. Or maybe an audio book. The original context was with a bicycle team and their goal to win a race in 5 years. They started with very small changes – 1% changes – and ended up winning the race in 3 years. I started thinking about how I could apply this idea to my life as a budding Senior Minimalist.
Here are two 1% ideas that have turned out to be game changers in my daily life.
- The Convenience Fallacy. I’ve been actively working through suggestions related to the convenience fallacy discussed by Joshua Becker (www.Becomingminimalist.com). The idea is that it is more convenient and efficient to leave items out on counters because we’re going to use the items “regularly”. Joshua talks about the toaster, but I don’t have one of those, so I resisted this idea initially. It seemed to me that I really did need to leave things out because I used them every day – think salt shaker, cooking implements, the knife holding “thing”. I have a plastic box of lotions and toners for my skin and face – all the beauty products you can’t take on planes.
At first, I just couldn’t see my way clear to putting this stuff away after using it if I was going to use it again right away. The logical suggestion was that it only takes a few seconds to open the door to the cupboard or open the drawer and pull that stuff out, and a couple of seconds to put the stuff away when I was done using it. Initially, it just seemed overwhelming.
Then, as part of the preparation for the open house to show the condo to potential buyers, my friend and real estate agent instructed me to “clear the counters – especially put the knives out of sight” (yikes!).
This was a lot of work, but I did it. I found homes for everything and then took off for a vacation. When I returned home, many of the items stayed where I put them, and I gave some of the items away since they no longer seemed important or even interesting to me to see every day. But most of the items I used on a daily/frequent basis made their way back to the counter, especially in the kitchen.
After a couple of weeks of living like this, I began to rearrange my cupboards and drawers to see if I could find permanent homes for some of the items. I started feeling relief when I saw the counters cleared of clutter. I listened to the podcast again to understand how the neatness had affected other people. I looked at pictures of places without clutter. I took the on-line house tours offered by The Minimalists. My daughter cleaned up her office counter tops and sent pictures. I felt relief.
I’m not all the way there but I’m working on it. The adjunct to clearing off the counters is that in order to have the space to put things away, I had to get rid of stuff that was in that space. And even organize the space better.
Here is a link to the convenience fallacy. https://www.becomingminimalist.com/convenience-fallacy/
- A second recommendation was to do the dishes immediately after eating, which my husband and I do together every evening after dinner. However, I would wait until morning to run the dishwasher because it wasn’t completely full, thinking that I would add next morning’s dishes to it. This would mean that the snack dishes were in the sink the next morning. Then I would wait till I finished my breakfast to add those dishes. Often, I would run the dish washer while I was preparing dinner (creating more dirty dishes that needed to go into the now-busy dishwasher).
I started running the dishwasher at night before I went to bed (this is the 1% part). Now I start my day by putting away the clean dishes, leaving myself with an empty dishwasher to hold items that I use.
These two changes have led to what feels like additional time in my day! I don’t know how or why. It’s like magic!
I feel like this is the start of my version of 1% “better” because these are activities that I would be doing at some point in my day. A simple shift in the time of day has translated to more time to do more activities – like attending to this blog!