Our possessions consume our time. Whether we are cleaning them, organizing them, buying them, or selling them, the more we own the more time they rob from our lives.
Take shopping for example: the average American spends nearly 12 hours every month shopping. Now, while it is impossible to completely remove shopping from our schedules, one benefit of living simply is the opportunity to live a more productive life by the plain fact that we spend less time shopping. Add in the time we spend cleaning, sorting, and organizing our stuff once we get it in our homes and we’re beginning to talk about a significant chunk of time.
We only get one chance to live this life; we would be wise to make it as productive as possible.
Great post. I could’t agree more. Luckily for me – despite being female – I HATE shopping, window shopping, or hanging out in shopping centers. Therefore, over time I have reduced it to the bare minimum. I buy kids’ clothes online, exept for shoes, where I have a fixed retailer. So no searching time. I buy few but high quality clothes for me that last ages. My last pair of shoes, Italian fabricate, were rather pricy but lasted 12! years. I buy groceries, etc., once per week online and get them delivered to the door, which in total takes me around 15 minutes. I love this possibility, especially as the site stores all old commands, so I have ‘packaged’ the shopping list into items that I have to buy in fixed intervals, which means that I can simply reactivate the old orders. This saves me so much time for more important stuff. With a little creativity one can reduce these errands to very little time per week. And yes, of course buying less stuff in general is probably the most efficient measure to save shopping time.
I usually only shop for one hour in any store.