Lost and Found │ How Minimalism Gives You More Time to Do What You Love

I just lost my phone in my own house. Or at least I thought it was in the house. Five minutes later, I finally wised up and asked my husband to call it. I found it, in my car, under the seat.

Nice.

So, I just wasted five minutes. Five minutes I can't get back. Five minutes I could've spent watching cute dog videos, reading, or writing fiction. Five minutes I could've been savoring a cup of coffee.

It got me thinking. Is this something I do all the time? And if so, why am I still doing this? Why am I losing things and why is it taking so long to find them?

Well, I lost my phone because I was carrying about two thousand things out to the car. My phone was in the way essentially. But those two thousand things to the car... that right there is the problem. Doing too many things at once. 

But why does this still happen to me even when I'm not taking two thousand things to the car? Because I have too much stuff. I'm a minimalist, and I still own too many things.

How often do you look for things in the house? For me, it's at least once a day. It's a dolorous situation. I literally grieve when I know I've lost something and have to spend time finding it, and that's assuming I can find it. A serious waste of time.

What happens when I have a home stuffed with things? How easy is it to find whatever I'm looking for when the home is overflowing with garbage I don't need? It's a slippery slope, one that only adds to the elimination of a precious commodity: time.

It is said that the typical home has  300,000 items in it. I may not have had quite that much before my minimalistic ways kicked in a few years ago. But, I know many people do. And more than that.

It still meant I probably had at least 100,000 to 200,000 items to go through. It had to be because so often, I couldn't find the things that mattered most. As in, items I needed to access but couldn't find because I had misplaced them within the 200,000 other items in my home. Therein lay the problem.

I've heard that the average person spends 12 days a year looking for misplaced items.

I balked when I first read this. 12 days? That's absurd. Then I did the math and divided those 12 days by 365 days and it made perfect sense. That's only about 30 minutes a day but over a year, that's a whole lot of wasted time.

If there is any good reason to become a minimalist, not losing things would be high in the top ten for me. Become (and stay) a minimalist and your time is yours again.

Here are ten things you can do for thirty minutes instead of spending thirty minutes a day looking for a lost item:

• Read
• Take a walk
• Talk to someone on the phone / Facetime
• Paint or draw 
• Write 
• Pet an animal
• Make a meal
• Bake a treat
• Stretch
• Play an instrument

All of these things are helpful to both your brain and body. They are stress relievers and blend seamlessly into the slow-living lifestyle, which in my book, is an integral part of the minimalist lifestyle too.

If you're on the fence about adding minimalism into your life, let this be your guiding hand into a new world of living and loving. It may feel foreign at first - a life without time wasted and extraneous stuff - but it's a new life that allows you more time to do the things that really matter. It's freedom.

Minimalism is about creating space for what we love and how to really live. We give up what doesn't belong in our lives in order to bring in what does.

Book Pairing:

Slow Living: Cultivating a Life of Purpose in a Hustle-Driven World - Stephanie O'Dea