blooming flower

Sassy chose the blooming flower as her prize at the Art Museum



For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about my various time suckers recently. I feel like one of those analysts that companies hire to find out where they can save money, especially in human labor. I've been jokingly referring to myself as a "systems analyst" in my own head. (OK, and to Jeff, too. I'm sure he was rolling his eyes, even if he was kind enough not to do so during our "face time.")

It is true, however, that our house is bleeding money through as yet unidentified avenues and weeks will go by with me not seeming to do much besides repeating long cleaning or organizing processes over and over and over again. Couldn't there be a better way? A way that enables me to spend more time doing something that would make us some money or feed into my daughter and other family/friend relationships? Finding and reducing these time suckers often has some lovely little surprise benefits, like saving money or saving resources to help lessen our environmental impact.

So can I write "systems analyst" on a resume one day? :-) Here are a couple I've identified.

Dishes
Our dishwasher broke again (never, ever, EVER buy Frigidaire anything), leaving me with lots of time spent not doing dishes, but thinking about the dishes. I have implemented a new plan for our family. Each of us has chosen one mug, one glass, one bowl, one plate, one fork, knife & spoon. These are only to be used for the individual that chose them, and no one was allowed to choose the same style. That habit I've cultivated of buying mismatched dishes, to the dismay of my more OCD friends, is paying off!

We have a special drying place for these dishes. Each time you use your dishes, you rinse them & put them on the drying place. Every time I do a load of dishes, I wash those too & we start over. In my estimation, this will eliminate about 50% of the overall dishes. No longer will we have a steady stream of plates, mugs, glasses & silverware. The full loads will be made up of our cooking & storing dishes. It should save the same amount of money spent and water wasted.

Pictures
I've realized that my camera is a big time sucker for me. It involves a loooooonnnnnnggggg process to get pictures from the camera to, say, a website like this one. Unfortunately, I don't have such an easy fix on this one, though I'm trying. Here's the steps:

Transfer pics via camera cord to my laptop
iPhoto auto starts and imports the pics
View pics in iPhoto and decide which ones to keep (this is by far the longest step, since the camera's resolution overwhelms my very slow computer)
Delete unwanted pics from computer, first to iPhoto trash, then empty iPhoto trash, then empty desktop trash
Name those pics destined for other places (email, websites, photoshop)
Export those pics to the appropriate places by apple-clicking on each one from the organize view, choosing export & typing in my specs (this too is very time-consuming & annoying since I can't always remember which pic I've chosen for which app when in organize view)
For a Blogger upload, open the image dialog box in Blogger & configure specs
Upload
Copy & paste to the right spot in the post since it always annoyingly puts it at the top of the post

Using this system, one picture -- just one -- could easily take 20 minutes or longer since a lot of time is waiting for iPhoto to stop spinning its little rainbow ball and recoup enough to perform the command I just gave it without crashing my system. Then, of course, there's the waiting for the Blogger site to respond. It can be very frustrating. If I want to use a grown-up camera, I think I need to find a grown-up system to deal with the pics. Maybe this involves different software or maybe different hardware for my computer. If you all have any ideas that have worked for you, I'd love to hear them!

So if I can eliminate these time-suckers, what will I do with myself? That's easy. I'm looking at my bedroom around me right now. It's dusty. So, so dusty. It needs to be vacuumed. Thoroughly. Even under the bed. I have 3 baskets of clean clothes to put away. Dishes to take downstairs. Empty cans & bottles to be recycled. And that's just one room. My usual tactic is to just jump in to get it done. You know, because thinking about the problem would be wasting time that could be spent doing. Maybe that's not so. Maybe thinking about the problems is exactly what would turn my life at home from a "when am I going to ever catch up?" atmostphere to an "I'm on top of it" atmostphere.

I would love for my house to be a safe haven for our whole family. A place to unwind, drop our stress & actually relax. Instead, I actually dread walking up to my front door whenever I come home. While I'm out, I can relax and just be. At home, from the minute I step in the door, I see work. I feel work. I am crushed by work and the everpresent feeling that I am way behind and there's so much more work to do. If I'm the hamster, my house has become the wheel.

I've even thought I will probably have to leave my house to school Sassy when she reaches that hands-on teaching age. I'll have to go to the library to homeschool my child, because my house has become a crushing weight of neverending responsibility and failure. That's just wrong!

So this week, I'm doing a little more thinking and a little less doing. Just for this week. I'm already hopelessly behind, so what's there to lose?