BellaOnline Forums Home and Garden Organization 55 min/day lost to clutter

I was just reading a book that claimed that every person in the US loses about 55 minutes EVERY DAY to looking for things. That struck me as outrageous.

Try tracking it for a day. How much time do you spend hunting for items? I'll give that a shot on Friday - we have family coming over for St. Patrick's Day and the day will be hectic enough

I am guessing even with as messy as my house is that it can't be nearly 55 minutes. For example they say you spend 10 minutes every day looking for your keys. I don't - my keys hang on a hook!

This is why moving makes me insane. Try never knowing where ANYTHING is. Brain melt!

55 minutes is that all!?

I live with two men who are constantly asking me...where is?

I am not actually looking for my stuff for 55 minutes but I guess I spend quite a lot of time looking for things other people can't find.

My keys are the thing I spend the most time looking for as I am constantly in and out of the house with the dogs. I have a place to put them but sometimes if I am distracted I just put them down and forget where! And because 3 of us walk the dogs at some point during the day, trying to find where someone else has put the collars and leads can take ages, even if they are hung where they should be, I can't always see the wood for the trees.

Oh and my glasses, I have 5 pairs yet there are days when I can't find a single pair. That is frustrating. Once I had 2 pairs of glasses on my head and spent ages looking for a pair!

Oh and let's not forget the dog's balls. He likes to carry two in his mouth at the same time. Trying to find two balls that are not chewed or mauled or in pieces can take ages! Just trying to find one ball can be a nightmare at times.

I believe it. I'm still looking for my ring with the MVP store cards on it. I have no idea where it is and now will have to go back to the stores and re-sign up for cards. I often cannot find a piece of paper with a note or item - there are too many of them and they get lost in the pile.

LOL, Jilly - I totally AGREE. We are moving this weekend and I am DREADING trying to find stuff tomorrow

LOL ok maybe their 55 minutes is actually right for some people! But doesn't it suck enormous amounts of time out of your day to lose an entire hour every day just to finding things? I can't imagine losing an hour every day!

Are there ways to not lose all that time?

I still haven't done my test - I will try to do it tomorrow.

Lisa, you have lived in one place for many years. Surely that makes finding things easier for you!

That would be surely be just more than 55 minutes, most of my time is wasted in searching a dress in my wardrobe that I want to wear.

This is fascinating to me that people spend so many precious minutes of their time on hunting activities. I think part of it is that I am so jammed for time all the time - I always have a huge backlog - that the idea of losing time feels like an awful thing to fix.

And yes I suppose I'm not working on my backlog because I'm in these forums, but this is my short sanity break from my 3 chapters of management textbooks I'm reading right now. Trying to read three chapters in a row has super-saturated my brain and I need some gentle, fairly mindless activity before I can keep going with it

So yes I have actively been keeping track of every time I am looking for something now. It's become a normal part of my life. Just today we had to head out somewhere and I was looking for my iTouch which I needed to use for a task. I did spend five minutes looking everywhere for it and finally gave up. Then I found it in my purse Which I swear I had checked first. So that indicates that I need to clean out my purse, it is too cluttered!

But I believe that's the only thing I have looked for so far today.

Kaycee - I'll make a separate post about organizing clothes!