I think, sometimes, a lot of people mix up or interchange the words time and effort. While these two are related, they’re not always the same thing.

I hear people tell me I do a lot, and I definitely do. But some of the things that I do don’t take a lot of time or effort. Or if they do, they may take more of one or both of those at the beginning rather than throughout. One of my mottos is “Work smarter, not harder.” I want to do things that are easy for me. I like to do more work at the beginning of a task that sets me up for success throughout the whole process. Let me show you what I mean.

Something I want to do this year is keep my fridge clean. It’s not really related to any goal, and it doesn’t necessarily benefit me long-term. But I like having things organized, and I want to be better about food waste. I am working on checking the status of the fridge every two weeks and cleaning out old leftovers or other things that no longer need to be in there. At first, this took a lot of work. The initial cleaning of the fridge took probably an hour. Now though, my fridge maintenance takes about 5-10 minutes. I make sure that old leftovers get tossed, nothing is expired, and there are no spills that need my attention. And then I’m done. It required more effort at first. But now it just takes time with minimal effort.

On the other hand, there are things that take a lot of effort without taking as much time. One of those things for me is laundry. Putting away laundry realistically can take only about 30 minutes. However, it takes a lot of mental effort for me because of how I put my laundry away. It’s also one of my least favorite tasks, so I’m never wanting to do it.

Then there are things that take both lots of time and effort. For me lately, going to the gym has been one of those things. To go to the gym, I have to change clothes, drive there, then exercise for at least 30 minutes. I’m trying to find ways to exercise at home, so it cuts out some of the steps, but being in a gym (except for taekwondo) has been too much for me as of late. So I’m looking to find alternatives.

While I do many things, I try to find ways to maximize my use of time or effort. My prep period changed again for the school year. At the beginning of the year, I created a list of things to do each week in that time and broke them down by day. This way, if I had a rough day or I’m tired or something, I’m not trying to get everything done in one day and panicking. Some of that has dropped off (it’s third quarter after all), but some of that has stuck. At the very least, the plan is still relatively in place. I think this has managed a lot of my time and effort issues I may otherwise have.

Another thing I’m trying to start implementing is doing things that take minimal time AND effort first. This works well if I have a lot of things I want to clear out or heftier projects. This past weekend, I knew I wanted to clean my house and get caught up on some other things. Well, in general, cleaning my house is a lot of work. I started with smaller steps. The kitchen table had a lot of extra stuff on it (most of it was mine). I cleaned that first. We had some stuff that didn’t get put away from weekend shopping trips sitting on top of the stove. I put those away next. Then I took the time to clean out the fridge (mentioned earlier). And all of a sudden, the kitchen was clean in about 20 minutes. I approached the living room in the same way. I cleaned and straightened up smaller things of what I could in small amounts of time. That took care of most of it. All that was really left was sweeping and mopping. That obviously took more time. However, I was able to get the ball rolling by doing the smaller things so that I could work up to the bigger parts of the project.

I want to get better at understanding the difference between time and effort for myself. They’re related but not always conflated. I feel that if I can group things into either time or effort, then I can sort through what I need to do to maximize productivity. Also, it’s important to recognize (both for myself and for anyone else) that this is not a perfect system. There are things that take more time and/or effort than anticipated. And there are things that take less time and/or effort than expected. Both are okay. Give yourself grace on the things that take more time, and use that extra energy on things that take less time. Time and effort need to both be recognized, but they may not always be equally used.

This is definitely still something I’m figuring out. But I wanted to share where I’m at in the hopes it helps me or someone else. If I can do that, then I’ll call that a success.