I suppose I should be more precise about my showering decisions since my most recent leftovers post hinted that I might not shower very much at all! Let’s make it explicit – I will shower if it’s been one full calendar day since my last shower. I don’t often use this rule, however, because my ‘shower after a run’ rule of thumb means I almost always shower at least once every two days. At the time of writing (May 11), it’s been over two months since I last went two consecutive days without running, and that means I can say the same about my showering.
I estimate that by not taking a shower every day I save around one total hour per week. Of course, this ‘savings’ is entirely hypothetical because I’m comparing my time to a routine that I haven’t maintained in a long time (one where I do shower every day). This is the danger of using comparisons to think about saving time, I suppose, because a lot of these savings are based on comparisons against hypothetical alternate routines that I’ve never actually done.
Hypothetical or not, this hour isn’t irrelevant given that I must use the time for something else. Since I’m always struggling to read, write, or sleep enough, I suppose I could credit my showering routine for creating extra time for those activities. However, like most things I’m not sure the showering decision alone saves me a significant amount of time. Rather, it’s the habit of reconsidering my routines that saves me time. Another good example of this concept is grocery shopping – I used to go once a week, but now I go only when I run out of tofu and eggs. This isn’t a major change because I still go to the grocery store roughly three times a month. However, skipping that one extra trip saves me around forty-five minutes for one week per month. If I went through my entire routine and counted up the time I save due to these little reconsiderations – fifteen minutes here, another half-hour there, and so on – I suspect I would see the origin of a lot of my free time.
