105 hours: Minimize chores

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Some of those hours are pre-committed to chores, to taking good care of our possessions, our affairs, and even ourselves.

But what if we remove the thing itself instead of the care for it?

Are you really giving away that guitar?

It's December. The hall in front of my home office is stacked with clutter: video-game action figures from NiNoKuni, Playstation 3 games like all three Final Fantasy XIIIs, Japanese lesson materials done and undone from Kumon, a bunch of Guitar Hero fake guitars and a real 7-string black Ibanez guitar.

Yes, we did a clean-up of our possessions every year, but this was the biggest one yet. Things with sentimental value that I hadn't used in the prior year? Gone.

Including going back to owning just a single guitar.

For those among us who are not guitar players, it may be hard to understand why we need to stack anywhere between fourteen and fourteen hundred guitars on our home studios (or basement) walls; pianists seem satisfied with a single piano, after all.

We end up with an extra thirty guitars the same way we end up with an extra thirty pounds: adding one at a time and never shedding them away.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says, "sunny day today, I'll buy 20 guitars!" – it's more like, "wow, what a beautiful vintage Fender Strat!" and a year later, "wow, what a beautiful Gibson Les Paul!", and sometime later "wow, what a beautiful .."

So my wife takes a picture of the stuff we're piling up to give away this year and sends it to my friends.

Friend: "Wow, is that a real guitar?"
Dui: "Yes"
Friend: "Is it broken?"
Dui: "No, it works perfectly, pristine condition. Sounds great too."
Friend: "But then why are you giving it away?"

Chores minimalism

Someone must do the chores that need doing. But what if instead of doing the chore, we remove the need?

One great benefit of minimalism is that eliminating a possession removes the chore of caring for it.

In his book Goodbye, Things, Fumio Sasaki often talks about the relationship between things and chores. Here's an example:

Cleaning becomes three times easier when you have less

When I had been living in my old apartment, I might have vacuumed once in a good month. Even after I had minimized quite a bit, I still only cleaned my apartment on the weekends. But now I vacuum my new apartment every morning. It became a habit simply because it’s so easy.
Cleaning can be really easy if you have fewer things. Let’s look at how we might clean the floor if we had an owl sculpture in the room.

Step 1: Move the owl over.
Step 2: Wipe the floor where the owl had been sitting.
Step 3: Return the owl to its original position.

And if we didn’t have this statue in our home?

Step 1: Wipe the floor.

There! Done! It’s that simple. It takes a third of the effort, and probably a third of the time, to clean the floor. And forget about wiping those intricate hollows and crevices in the sculpture itself.
Now imagine the work we’d have to do if we owned three or four, or maybe ten or twenty of these sculptures at home.

Sasaki, Fumio. Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (pp. 170-171). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Removing possessions removes chores because they are connected – the chores we have come from the things we have.

Our chores are a consequence of our possessions, both material and virtual.

Stuff we have, be it a lawn or pool or a membership at a club or church, a family member or a friend, almost invariably means having more chores. It's why rich people are always so busy: all those possessions consume a lot of time.

I don't mean to imply that every possession takes up time: your dishwasher is probably helping. But our possessions have a cost of ownership in time that often goes unnoticed.

The silent to-do list

Minimalism is not a philosophy for maximizing free time; it's about removing our non-essential possessions from life. It just so happens that reducing our possessions is a very effective way to free up time.

One guide to thinking about chores coming from material possessions is what Fumio Sasaki calls the silent to-do.

The silent to-do list

When we let go of our possessions, our ability to concentrate improves. Why might this be?
Things don’t just sit there. They send us silent messages. And the more the item has been neglected, the stronger its message will be.
Maybe there’s an English textbook that I gave up on before I even got halfway through it. It might be looking at me now and saying something like You look bored. Why don’t you try to study me again?
Or there’s a dead lightbulb that has yet to be replaced: Don’t tell me you forgot to buy my replacement yet again! Why can’t you do something so simple?
Or a stack of dirty dishes: Here we go again. I can never count on you.
We even get messages from items we use on a daily basis. Imagine what your TV might be saying to you: Uh, you have a bunch of recordings that you haven’t watched yet. Oh, and maybe it’s about time you gave me a light dusting.
And your laptop: It sure would be nice to have a printer as a friend . . . oh well, nevermind.
And there’s the body soap in the bathroom: Excuse me, I’m running out!
As to the bedsheets: I know you’re busy, but would you mind giving me a wash one of these days soon? All of our possessions want to be cared for, and they tell us that every time we look at them. They begin to form lines in our head, waiting their turn for us to really look at them and listen to what they have to say.
This line of things gets longer and longer as we acquire more material possessions. I call that list the “silent to-do list.” Of course our possessions aren’t going to literally tell us to do this and that. Unlike our real-life to-do lists, there aren’t any bosses or clients to harass us until we get it done. But when left unattended, it’ll grow into a huge to-do list.

Sasaki, Fumio. Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (pp. 198-199). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Our silent to-do list of chores grows and shrinks with what we have.

Minimizing possessions is incredibly hard, especially social ones, commitments, the things we virtually have. It's often easier to give away the couch than the implicit role of organizer for the weekend family get-togethers.

But to reduce chores and take back our time, we need to constantly re-evaluate whether to keep the possessions that are the source of those chores in the first place.