Ever since the dog attack on our goats a few weeks ago, John and I have been splitting our time between home and Athens trying to make sure Edith has someone visiting her everyday. Unfortunately, real life does not stop when the unexpected happens. Bills still need to be paid, the grass still needs to be cut, fill in the blank because the list could go on and on. Thankfully, since we already travel a lot of the time we had most of the important things automated. Here are three ways to simplify your life so that you can be prepared for the unexpected or spend more time enjoying the important things in life that the people you love!
1. Automate your Bills
This is absolutely crucial for us to keep our household running efficiently. We never know from month to month who is going to be in town to mail a check and it's almost impossible to keep track of the different days everything is due. We know the amount of each bill every month and have all of our utilities, car payments, etc set up on automatic draft so we never have to worry about missing a payment. I recommend sitting down and making a spreadsheet of all of your monthly expenses then checking with each individual company to set up automatic draft. Most companies will allow you to pick your payment date so that you can schedule it around payday if necessary. Also be sure to ask if they offer a discount for automatic payments.
2. Unsubscribe to Spam
How much time do you spend a day going through and deleting unread messages from some company trying to sell you something? If you are like me, I used to delete close to 25 messages every morning before I could even tackle my necessary emails. When I thought about it, I was spending close to 3 minutes each morning, which means 21 minutes each week, 1 hour and 14 minutes each month, and 16.8 awake hours each year deleting emails I did not want to read…. Talk about a WASTE of time. Do yourself a favor, take 30 minutes to go through your unwanted emails and unsubscribe. You can typically find this button in very small print at the bottom of every email. Even better, use this website called unroll.me to mass subscribe. It is seriously a game changer!
3. Handle Items One Time
This is a MAJOR life lesson from my Mom, Mel. As much as possible, handle something once. For example, when you pull in your mail rather than dropping it on the first horizontal surface you find to handle later, instead walk straight to the trashcan and drop all junk mail in a trash and then put your bills and other necessary mail into piles. When you take your clothing off at night, either put it into the dirty clothes bin or hang them to be worn again. You can even invest in one of those multi section hampers than allows you to sort your clothes when you put them in each separate compartment. When you finish with your dishes, put them directly into the dishwasher instead of having to handle them twice when you put them into the sink and then have to load the dishwasher later. Whatever it is the fewer times you handle something the less time it consumes out of your schedule.
My challenge to you is to take one item off of this list to simplify your life today to make more time for the things you actually want to do!
What are your tips for simplifying your everyday life?
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