Ordered living: you want fries with that?

This weeks post is about ordered living. But should you read this thinking that our house runs like a well oiled machine, or a fine orchestra with all the parts moving in perfect harmony, I can assure you that it does not. Our house sounds more like Jazz. Not the Frank Sinatra, Michael Buble kind of jazz, more like Avant Garde experimental jazz; The kind of jazz where it seems to be going in a certain direction and then the musician climbs into the piano and starts playing the strings with his teeth.

Ordered living is the second principle in this, the second post in the three part series on managing time and balancing life.

Basically it works like this: life tends to run more smoothly when things are in order. On a physical level, when everything is in its place, on a personal level, when you have your priorities straight, and on a spiritual level, when you are harmony with the with your higher power....check that, when you are in harmony with the HIGHEST power. If you feel stressed, especially financially, there is a strong chance that one or more of these aspects of your life is not in order.

Think about it this way: nothing is more frustrating, at least to me, when a job that should only take 5 minutes or so, ends up taking two hours because the tool needed for the job was not in the place it was supposed to be. I am getting stressed-out right now just thinking about it.........

Once again I am going to reference the teachings of Catherine Dorhety, who taught: order, simplicity and consistency. In other words, in order to establish order, keep things simple, and consistent.

Lets face it, million dollar corporations spend big bucks and tons of resources to maximize efficiency. It is ironic that we don't spend as much time as we should trying to maximize the efficiency of our homes, and I'm not just talking about minimizing energy consumption.

Here is the math:

Lets say that you make a salary of $75 000/ year.
That is roughly about $1500/ week (assuming you take 2 weeks vacation)
That puts your hourly rate at $37.50/ hour.

Divide that by 60 and you make roughly $0.625/ min

Now let's take time spent wasted because you forgot to put something back where it was supposed to be. If you spend ten minutes looking for it, you waste $6.25 of your time! If you do that once a day, five days a week, that is $1562.50/ year worth of your time!

Now granted there are things that you will not be able to control that will take up a lot of your time. But the bottom line is, time spent dealing with disorder, is time taken away from your kids.

How much is that worth?

Next week: Now what was I supposed to do again? The power of writing lists.

TiPSI Dad