Live Your Life Efficiently

This is something I say A LOT.  I find myself obsessed with the idea of efficiency-- and for good reason!  Don't worry; I'll elaborate.

It probably started with Runescape.  I'm sure you've heard of it; it's a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in which you create a character and complete incredibly repetitious and simplistic tasks over and over to gain levels and items and blablabla.  That's the simple version, of course-- if it was really that easy, it wouldn't be very fun.  So in middle school, I played Runescape, and I quickly learned that the key to success in the game was efficiency.  Fight monsters with lots of hit points, and good drops so you can get lots of XP and items with few clicks.  Rather than operating task by task, operate area by area, so you don't waste all your time running from Lumbridge to Varrock and back to Lumbridge, when you could have done all your Lumbridge business at once and saved yourself the trip back.

During and following this stage of my life, I found myself applying this principle to my every day life.  Get the milk, cheese, eggs, and bacon bits out of the fridge all at once, rather than making multiple trips to and from the giant, cold box.  Bring the backpack downstairs when it's time to eat breakfast, rather than going all the way up the stairs to get it when it came time to leave for school.  You get the idea.  Then, I stopped playing Runescape, but the obsession lived on.

Jeffrey and I began playing Yu-Gi-Oh! competitively a few years ago, and, through it, I learned another lesson of efficiency.  The game works, again, basically, in a system of pluses and minuses; I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say it's important to accomplish multiple goals each time you play a card.  This added the idea of efficient use of resources to efficient use of time.  Don't pour the milk, then close the fridge-- pour the milk AND close the fridge.  Don't brush your teeth, then put on deodorant-- brush your teeth AND put on deodorant.  You have two arms, use them both.  Don't pack pretzels and a peanut butter sandwich for lunch-- pack a pretzel AND peanut butter sandwich for lunch.  Don't do your homework before you get to school-- do your homework WHILE you're at school.  Except Physics homework-- do that at home.

Speaking of which, the next giant leap for Calvin-kind was when I took Physics and Calculus.  As you might imagine, this completely changed my perception of efficiency, and this change in perception manifested itself mostly in the way I traveled.  Don't accelerate to a red light just to break-- try and time it so that it changes to green while you still have some speed, so you don't have to waste gas and time accelerating again.  Don't just walk mindlessly through the halls-- pick a path through all the zombies that won't force you to do the awkward "which way tango" with ten strangers before you get to Spanish.  Don't use the sidewalk just because it's there-- take the most direct route to your destination.

Now that I'm aware of this obsession, I've begun to think about it on a grander scale.  At college, I probably spend at least an hour every day just walking from place to place.  What if I took slightly larger strides?  I began to count seconds.  It took me eleven minutes to get to my Seminar on Tolkien from Calculus II walking normally; it took me eight when I was in a hurry.  What if I hurried to every class?  I could waste just eight elevenths of the time that I normally would!  For the sake of simplicity, we'll call it eight tenths, which would be forty-eight minutes to the hour.  Only accounting for week days, I would save exactly an hour a week.  An hour a week begins to add up to entire days very quickly, when you start looking at semesters.  And what did it cost me?  Practically nothing.

The walking example is a good one, but there are hundreds of other little ways to save time every day.  Setting up the home screen on your smart phone and bookmarking frequently used tabs to save you clicks, foregoing the making of the bed, which you'll just mess up again when you go to sleep again, getting all of your food before your sit down to eat it, the list goes on.  Over the years, you could save yourself weeks, even months in tiny little increments.  That's kind of awesome.  Imagine all the extra stuff you could do with that time!  Honestly, not that much.  It's just a few minutes a day, and you'll probably end up wasting them staring your phone or computer, anyway-- I know I have.  But it doesn't matter whether you make good use of the time you save, really!  Because would you rather waste your time a) looking at your phone or b) walking by yourself in the freezing cold?  The correct answer is a, for those of you who had a doubt.

So next time you're walking somewhere, take bigger steps, and next time you open the fridge, get everything you need for your breakfast, so you can waste that time doing something else, instead.