Many home chores are parallelizable. e.g. cooking something nice may take around 40 minutes, but most of that is spent waiting for timers to go off. The intervals of non-cooking are too short to do anything interesting, so I use the time to get other chores done. During morning hygeine and breakfast cooking, I run laundry. While cooking dinner, I fold laundry and make the next day’s lunch. This reduces the real loss of time to chores, because it was time you would have lost anyway. From another perspective, it reduces the time lost to cooking, because most of that would have had to have been spent on chores anyway.
For meals, we buy about five kinds of meat at Costco and freeze it all, then thaw what we need as we need it. (I’d be happier getting groceries delivered, but no one seems to do it here) We have about a half-dozen dinner recipes that we rotate through so we at least feel like we have variety. We’ve sometimes found that making a list at the start of the week of what we’re going to have each night helps with the Trivial Inconvenience of “decide what we want to eat before we can start cooking.”
If you’re not disposed to abusing a credit card, here’s a good way to handle personal finances: Get a credit card with a sufficient limit and put absolutely everything on it. At the end of the month, pay it off in full, preferably online via electronic transfer. This ensures that you will never accidentally bounce a check (because there’s never any checks “in the pipeline” to worry about), makes it apparent very quickly if you’re overspending (if you can’t pay it off in full, you fail), and reduces the time spent on managing finances to about ten minutes a month. The year-end reports CC companies send you are quite useful for figuring out where all your money’s going, too. For bonus points, use a card with cash-back benefits. If you can’t trust yourself with a CC (or can’t get one with a high enough limit), use a debit card.
If you live in an apartment, small annoyances can often be solved by the owner’s maintenance people. I’m thinking of things like clogged drains—we went through a lot of drain cleaner before realizing it wasn’t actually our problem.
The best chores are the ones you don’t have to do. Have your paycheck direct deposited. Do everything by CC and online banking so you never have to go to the bank for cash. (but carry emergency cash if you want to) If you can order something instead of going out to buy it, do it. When you do have to shop, do it all in one place if you can. We have a walmart and costco right across the street from each other, which makes groceries and necessities easy.
And for keeping the place neat and tidy, it helps to have a partner who’s a professional housekeeper. :-)
The intervals of non-cooking are too short to do anything interesting, so I use the time to get other chores done.
I tend to try to go back to the computer/book and use the oven or heating plaque at low-intensity. After my fourth or fifth carbon-coated pan, I’ve only started to get it right...
Do everything by CC.
I used to think that was an awesome idea, but then I found out banks make businesses pay 1€ out of every sale they make whenever I pay by DC (no CC for me if I can avoid it), and suddenly every time I paid for a 6€ expense with my card, I felt bad about myself… I’m seriously considering going back to cash.
it helps to have a partner who’s a professional housekeeper.
I need to research manuals for professional housekeepers: there might be some interesting secrets and tricks there.
Here’s a few things that work well for me:
Many home chores are parallelizable. e.g. cooking something nice may take around 40 minutes, but most of that is spent waiting for timers to go off. The intervals of non-cooking are too short to do anything interesting, so I use the time to get other chores done. During morning hygeine and breakfast cooking, I run laundry. While cooking dinner, I fold laundry and make the next day’s lunch. This reduces the real loss of time to chores, because it was time you would have lost anyway. From another perspective, it reduces the time lost to cooking, because most of that would have had to have been spent on chores anyway.
For meals, we buy about five kinds of meat at Costco and freeze it all, then thaw what we need as we need it. (I’d be happier getting groceries delivered, but no one seems to do it here) We have about a half-dozen dinner recipes that we rotate through so we at least feel like we have variety. We’ve sometimes found that making a list at the start of the week of what we’re going to have each night helps with the Trivial Inconvenience of “decide what we want to eat before we can start cooking.”
If you’re not disposed to abusing a credit card, here’s a good way to handle personal finances: Get a credit card with a sufficient limit and put absolutely everything on it. At the end of the month, pay it off in full, preferably online via electronic transfer. This ensures that you will never accidentally bounce a check (because there’s never any checks “in the pipeline” to worry about), makes it apparent very quickly if you’re overspending (if you can’t pay it off in full, you fail), and reduces the time spent on managing finances to about ten minutes a month. The year-end reports CC companies send you are quite useful for figuring out where all your money’s going, too. For bonus points, use a card with cash-back benefits. If you can’t trust yourself with a CC (or can’t get one with a high enough limit), use a debit card.
If you live in an apartment, small annoyances can often be solved by the owner’s maintenance people. I’m thinking of things like clogged drains—we went through a lot of drain cleaner before realizing it wasn’t actually our problem.
The best chores are the ones you don’t have to do. Have your paycheck direct deposited. Do everything by CC and online banking so you never have to go to the bank for cash. (but carry emergency cash if you want to) If you can order something instead of going out to buy it, do it. When you do have to shop, do it all in one place if you can. We have a walmart and costco right across the street from each other, which makes groceries and necessities easy.
And for keeping the place neat and tidy, it helps to have a partner who’s a professional housekeeper. :-)
The second paragraph of this post reminded me of the second (full-sized) paragraph of this.
^ “this” is a little horrifying. I’m not sure whether it’s more horrfying than playing Starcraft all day every day, though.
I tend to try to go back to the computer/book and use the oven or heating plaque at low-intensity. After my fourth or fifth carbon-coated pan, I’ve only started to get it right...
I used to think that was an awesome idea, but then I found out banks make businesses pay 1€ out of every sale they make whenever I pay by DC (no CC for me if I can avoid it), and suddenly every time I paid for a 6€ expense with my card, I felt bad about myself… I’m seriously considering going back to cash.
I need to research manuals for professional housekeepers: there might be some interesting secrets and tricks there.