How to be Efficient:

Nobody likes wasting time. Wasting time is for suckers. And people that have time on their hands. Some people put time on their backs with tattoos. Most of those are ridiculous and ugly. By the way time is not money. Time is "The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future as a whole." Money is “A current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes collectively.” Do you sense the difference?

Even with time and money being different, there’s several ways to highlight the benefits of efficiency.

First and foremost think about your microwave. Usually the newer models love efficiency. Press one button for however long you want to cook something. That’s awesome. But with older models, thinking is required. Thinking creates efficiency. Say I need to cook a hot pocket. The suggested cooking time for Easy Mac is three and three quarters minutes. So usually you would punch in 3-4-5 on the keypad to get that cheese soup with noodles warmed up. Try this next time: 3-3-3, which requires one button pushed instead of three buttons, plus you’re saving 12 whole seconds by doing this! Do you really think that microwaveable pasta elbows are going to be that much less cooked if they miss out on 12 seconds of sauna time?

Other useful microwave substitutions include (keep this on a sticky note on your microwave to remember):

6-0 instead of 1-0-0 for one minute. Or better yet, 5-5.

9-0 or 9-9 instead of 1-3-0 for a minute and a half.

Here is the following example of me finding an efficient to get invited to sushi the next time that happens:

Daniel learned his lesson and invited me to sushi. I think we’re back to being friends. I sure hope so, he’s a nice guy.

This is an example of me being efficient in getting energy in exchange for internet that I would’ve let him use for free anyways:

Apparently Daniel and I are good friends again. He uses my internet, I get sugary drinks. Little does he know I would’ve let him use it even if he hadn’t got me that lemonade. But he doesn’t. And now I expect one every time he comes to use my bandwidth.

For some people using one pillow instead of two is efficiency. For me, bedding-wise, I use one queen sized sheet on a twin mattress because then all you have to do is flip the mattress every two weeks and cut laundry in half!

Speaking of laundry, efficiency is why laundry chutes were created. Who wants to carry a big load down the stairs when you can just chuck all your clothes down a hole in the wall? Heck, even use your queen size sheet as a parachute to save you time.  

Now I propose the idea of making a whole room a giant mattress, this way, you never have to make it all the way to your bed before lying down because everywhere is sleep land. I can’t remember if Daniel or I thought of this, but it is pretty genius.

Need to impress a girl but you don’t have time to learn how to sing and your voice is just as horrendous as mine? Put on Frank Sinatra and lip sync to make any girl’s heart melt. Particularly effective with “Way You Look Tonight.”

Is she not impressed enough yet? Does she want a piano playing man and you don’t know how? Easy enough. Just take some wire cutters, cut all the strings in a baby grand and throw a Bluetooth speaker system in there. When you sit down to play, throw on some classical piano through your music player and “play” along. Something that takes some people a whole life to perfect only takes you about 10 minutes.

If you like wearing shoes outside but not inside, the easiest fix is Mary’s favorite fix: flip flops.   

Another idea from Mary: instead of calling it the “Engineering Computing Center in the James G. Scrugham Engineering & Mines Building on the campus of the University of Nevada – Reno,” she just calls it “nerdville.” Instead of 23 syllables, she uses 2. Wow!

Instead of emailing my little brother I just get on Gmail when he’s online because he can use the chat on Gmail. Sure it might be 2 in the morning where I am, but it is 11 AM in Mozambique and it saves me the pain of writing him a ton.

My older brother is a pretty efficient brother. This is all he’s sent me in the past month to know he’s alive:

Good laughs and letting me know his body is not chopped up and spread across Denver’s dumpsters all by sending me this. That’s efficiency for sure.

Imagine you are pumping gas and you have to pee but the stupid handle on the pump doesn’t have that piece of metal to keep it pumping on its own. If you’re smart, you’ll always keep a plastic soda bottle in your car in order to put it in the handle so you can go do your business and get a candy bar while you refuel.

Instead of plugging in thumb drives and taking them out and then plugging them in somewhere else and then unplugging them again, I just email my homework to myself to move from computer to computer. Plus the less weight you carry, the faster you can walk. Unless you weigh as much as a feather cause then the wind will blow you around. Then life just sucks and blows.

Living efficiently is not only bound to these few ideas. There is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Living by the spirit of the law means thinking of new efficient ideas in order to enrich your life. The more efficient you are, the smarter you will feel and the happier you will become.  

"I love how you curse when I wake you up."

-Pistol- Dustin Kensrue