The Art of the Shortcut
Everyone is time poor these days, and we’re all trying to fit so much into our lives we often end up wearing ourselves out. There is a constant bombardment of information and marketing that tells you how you must devote yourself to a fulfilling career, raise a perfect family, run a beautiful home, start a business, travel the world, take up a new sport, do more community work, complete a bucket list, spend more time with your family, learn a new language; the list goes on seemingly forever. On top of all these activities, you should also be making time for yourself, finding ways to relax, meditate, exercise, pursue your dreams, and keep a journal in which you examine all the aspects of your life and analyze your happiness.
It’s no wonder there are also thousands of books and websites claiming to have the answer to the question of how you’re supposed to fit everything in. Some will have very useful and actionable solutions, and anything that helps you get more done and save more time has got to be a good thing. Just be sure to think about what really matters, and choose your shortcuts carefully.
What are shortcuts?
A shortcut is a way of achieving a task effectively while saving time and/or money in the process. If you were traveling from Point A to Point B, you would check the map or program the GPS for the shortest route, thus saving time by reducing the overall mileage. Simple, right? Not entirely.
You may have found the shortest route, but what types of road will you be traveling on? If they are narrow country lanes, you may be restricted to a much slower speed and find you must stop and back up for oncoming traffic, meaning it ends up taking you longer than if you’d stuck to the freeway. Or you could find yourself taking the route that seems far shorter on paper, but takes you through a busy city in which you become caught up with all the commuter traffic, which delays the journey. If you’d taken the longer route, you’d have avoided the hold-ups and saved time, even though you’d driven more miles. Ok, still manageable with a bit of forethought, right? Not completely. Have you compared the cost and time taken to drive to your destination to the costs and time involved in going by bus or train? What about the advantages of rail travel, like being able to eat on the move, not have to stop for comfort breaks, being able to get some work done or catch up on some reading whilst you’re traveling? On the other hand, if you were heading off for a day out with the family or some friends, taking the car could be a great deal cheaper, as you’d be transporting all your passengers for pretty much the same cost as one person, whereas by train you’d all have to pay for a ticket.
Shortcuts sound complicated
To an extent, they can be, as illustrated above. The trick to making the best use of shortcuts is to be sure that they are serving your priority needs. For example, say you want to whip up a nice homemade cake for the kids. You’ve made the cake a hundred times, so you don’t bother to find the recipe, you just crack on with the baking, congratulating yourself for saving ten minutes by not looking up and checking exactly how to make it. Then you discover that the cake comes out of the oven looking like a giant cookie because you used the wrong type of flour, or it tastes too sweet because you misremembered how much sugar to use. All your time has then been wasted, you are cross, the kids are disappointed, and your shortcut turned out to have been something of a bad idea.
You need to examine the motivation behind wanting a shortcut to assess your best course of action. If it was because your children had some friends coming over, or you wanted to celebrate something, but you are tight for time, would you be better off calling into the store on the way home and buying a nice cake? If on the other hand you wanted to make a cake because your kids love your home baking and it makes you happy to cook for them, buying a cake would feel like a cop-out. In this case, being better organized is your shortcut. Keep the recipe somewhere you can find it quickly, so it takes no time to locate, whether that’s in a recipe folder on your laptop or on a printed page stuck to the flour container.
Sometimes you just shouldn’t
There are certain things you should never take shortcuts with. Losing weight can be a long and difficult process, but resorting to starving yourself or taking illegal diet pills will only make you ill, and when you stop the weight will pile back on. There are certain tasks it is better to leave to the experts rather than handling yourself. You wouldn’t set your child’s broken leg yourself to save time and money at the hospital, and you wouldn’t ask a friend to give you a tummy tuck or sort out your wrinkles. You would seek expert advice from a reputable plastic surgeon by visiting a website such as https://drtonydaniels.com/.
Money saving websites might tell you it’s easy to change a washer in a leaking tap, or make your own clothes, but once you factor in the cost of buying tools and materials, the loss of time, and the fact that you don’t have the skills or the interest to do your own plumbing or dressmaking, you’ll see these are a shortcut too far.
Anything else?
Yes, and it’s fundamental to the success of taking a shortcut – it must work, and it must be safe. You could, for example, combine walking the dog with getting some exercise. It makes sense to combine the two activities, you running alongside the dog; what may not work so well is trying to walk the dog while riding your bicycle. Cue tangled leads and you are scraping yourself off the floor while the dog disappears after a rabbit. If you sharpen your knives to make food preparation quicker, don’t make them so sharp that when you try the quick chopping method you read about on a cooking tips page, you slice off the end of your finger and end up in the Emergency Room.
Be smart when it comes to taking shortcuts, and you could save enough time to squeeze in ten minutes of mindfulness – or whatever makes you happy!
What are shortcuts?
A shortcut is a way of achieving a task effectively while saving time and/or money in the process. If you were traveling from Point A to Point B, you would check the map or program the GPS for the shortest route, thus saving time by reducing the overall mileage. Simple, right? Not entirely.
You may have found the shortest route, but what types of road will you be traveling on? If they are narrow country lanes, you may be restricted to a much slower speed and find you must stop and back up for oncoming traffic, meaning it ends up taking you longer than if you’d stuck to the freeway. Or you could find yourself taking the route that seems far shorter on paper, but takes you through a busy city in which you become caught up with all the commuter traffic, which delays the journey. If you’d taken the longer route, you’d have avoided the hold-ups and saved time, even though you’d driven more miles. Ok, still manageable with a bit of forethought, right? Not completely. Have you compared the cost and time taken to drive to your destination to the costs and time involved in going by bus or train? What about the advantages of rail travel, like being able to eat on the move, not have to stop for comfort breaks, being able to get some work done or catch up on some reading whilst you’re traveling? On the other hand, if you were heading off for a day out with the family or some friends, taking the car could be a great deal cheaper, as you’d be transporting all your passengers for pretty much the same cost as one person, whereas by train you’d all have to pay for a ticket.
Shortcuts sound complicated
To an extent, they can be, as illustrated above. The trick to making the best use of shortcuts is to be sure that they are serving your priority needs. For example, say you want to whip up a nice homemade cake for the kids. You’ve made the cake a hundred times, so you don’t bother to find the recipe, you just crack on with the baking, congratulating yourself for saving ten minutes by not looking up and checking exactly how to make it. Then you discover that the cake comes out of the oven looking like a giant cookie because you used the wrong type of flour, or it tastes too sweet because you misremembered how much sugar to use. All your time has then been wasted, you are cross, the kids are disappointed, and your shortcut turned out to have been something of a bad idea.
You need to examine the motivation behind wanting a shortcut to assess your best course of action. If it was because your children had some friends coming over, or you wanted to celebrate something, but you are tight for time, would you be better off calling into the store on the way home and buying a nice cake? If on the other hand you wanted to make a cake because your kids love your home baking and it makes you happy to cook for them, buying a cake would feel like a cop-out. In this case, being better organized is your shortcut. Keep the recipe somewhere you can find it quickly, so it takes no time to locate, whether that’s in a recipe folder on your laptop or on a printed page stuck to the flour container.
Sometimes you just shouldn’t
There are certain things you should never take shortcuts with. Losing weight can be a long and difficult process, but resorting to starving yourself or taking illegal diet pills will only make you ill, and when you stop the weight will pile back on. There are certain tasks it is better to leave to the experts rather than handling yourself. You wouldn’t set your child’s broken leg yourself to save time and money at the hospital, and you wouldn’t ask a friend to give you a tummy tuck or sort out your wrinkles. You would seek expert advice from a reputable plastic surgeon by visiting a website such as https://drtonydaniels.com/.
Money saving websites might tell you it’s easy to change a washer in a leaking tap, or make your own clothes, but once you factor in the cost of buying tools and materials, the loss of time, and the fact that you don’t have the skills or the interest to do your own plumbing or dressmaking, you’ll see these are a shortcut too far.
Anything else?
Yes, and it’s fundamental to the success of taking a shortcut – it must work, and it must be safe. You could, for example, combine walking the dog with getting some exercise. It makes sense to combine the two activities, you running alongside the dog; what may not work so well is trying to walk the dog while riding your bicycle. Cue tangled leads and you are scraping yourself off the floor while the dog disappears after a rabbit. If you sharpen your knives to make food preparation quicker, don’t make them so sharp that when you try the quick chopping method you read about on a cooking tips page, you slice off the end of your finger and end up in the Emergency Room.
Be smart when it comes to taking shortcuts, and you could save enough time to squeeze in ten minutes of mindfulness – or whatever makes you happy!
