Hey there, here are some things I do:

I started using Obsidian notes a while back and have two weekly notes for a weekly plan/schedule, and a menu & grocery list. Each week I spend a little time (maybe an hour total) on Sundays making a dinner menu and getting the groceries listed, and then planning my week. Every morning I look at and edit the weekly schedule note, and it really has helped me be more aware of my daily priorities, which seems to make things more efficient.

I’m also always trying to find ways to become more efficient, and I think there is really something to be said for taking the time at the beginning of whatever the goal or project is (i.e. grocery shopping, planning the week, working on a project, cooking, etc.). When I cook, I’ve begun getting all the necessary ingredients and cookware out ahead and setting them in order, then it all goes so much more smoothly. When I get my groceries, I take a minute in the car and sort the items by their location along the path I take through the store. (This is far easier on a notes app than with pen & paper! and I’ve also become a skilled WinCo shopper over the course of time).

I usually have some small boxes (diaper boxes are best), around the house and I’ll save one for a trash box in the car. I put it behind the center console of the car with a plastic bag in it so I always have a place for putting the trash. Creating a place for things makes all the difference in the world.

The last thing that I’m trying to do more is practicing a quick 1-4 minute tidy in whatever room I’m in depending on the task. I’ll throw something away, notice something is on the floor and put it away, do a quick sweep or vacuum, etc. But that’s it. It’s quick but useful. It seems to be going fairly well so far. Little cluster piles begin showing up and it’s helped to become aware of what I do with stuff once I’m done, which is usually totally unconscious. Anyway, short bursts of tidying make the place much easier to keep clean, rather than what has typically happened, which is clutter building up and a whole few hours are needed to just get the place tidy, and then I can start doing the actual deeper cleaning.

I think the goal for me is instead of only trying to find tips & tricks, is to over time focus on becoming someone who is more efficient as a characteristic.

Hope this helps!

As a general rule :

• Never doing stuff that will take care of itself. Since the dishes want to dry themselves, it’d be really rude to prevent them from doing so by manually wiping them.
• Minimising the time spent in pointless effort for things that will need to be undone. So never making my bed, only folding clothes that really need folding and that I won’t use soon, etc.

Random stuff :

• When cooking, making food for several meals at a time.
• Using a rice cooker (or other appliances that cook food for you and that you don’t need to watch).
• Using several laundry bags, one for each type of laundry program or liquid, so that it’s already pre-sorted and I can see easily if there’s enough in one bag for a wash. It avoids going through everything only to find there’s not enough black clothes/white clothes/delicate clothes/towels/bedsheets/whatever for a laundry.
• Never using laundry clips. They take too long to put and remove. Instead I use hangers and S hooks, and for the small items that can’t be hung on hooks and won’t stay on hangers like gloves and socks, I just dump them on a shelf made of metal bars (there’s folding ones you can put on a radiator).
• After doing laundry, leaving clothes I will probably wear soon where they hang instead of folding them and putting them in their place only to have to take them out later.
• Having a “to put in bathroom” and “to put in kitchen” basket where I put stuff I need to put back in the bathroom and kitchen, so I don’t have to walk there for every item.
• Not putting a duvet in a cover because it’s very tiring and I really hate doing it. Instead I sandwich it between two larger bedsheets.

On my computer :

• Keybinding every frequent apps and actions, rofi almost everything else (apps, ssh, file browser in some cases, calculator, unit converter). Saves a lot of time, pain and aggravation by not clicking so much all the time.
• Using ‘vim -y’ for simple text editing cause I don’t have months to spare learning regular vim, or years reconfiguring emacs’ shorcuts, just to take some notes or make an ASCII drawing. And nano’s shortcuts make my brain hurt almost as much as emacs make my hands hurt. (To be fair, I probably would save more time in the long run by just learning vim but my brain starts going “NOOOPE I’m on strike” whenever I consider doing it ^_")
• I’m considering trying NixOS because I keep wasting time forgetting if I already configured something, how I did it, what settings I used, etc, and having a declarative config file instead with everything listed in it seems much more practical.

Know what you want to buy before going into a store, stick to your guns. Unless you want to dilly dally, it saves time.

Organize your stuff, makes finding things much faster. Adam Savage had a good tip: Befor you put something away, pretend you’re looking for it and put it where your first thought was. Next time you look for it, it’s in a natural spot for you.

Toothbrushing when taking a showwr, and using two bars of soap yo wash myself akimbo style.

Bluetooth themometer for food so i can jusy stick it in and wait till its right and done, no more constantly checking.

Robot vaccum has saved me a lot of time vaccuming.

Airfryer has significanrly cut down my time cooking too.

When unloading the dishwasher’s silverware rack, just take the whole thing out and unceremoniously dump it out onto a towel on the counter. Makes a ruckus but beats taking flatware out one by one while bent over the dishwasher.

Also, pick up all of the same size fork or spoon, then hold them loosely while shaking your hands and they’ll naturally align into their proper nested position. Actually lots of identically shaped things will do this when gently shaken. I used to align nerf darts vertically in a bucket like this as a kid

When you do a task with multiple steps several times, do each step for everything at once, before moving to the next step. As opposed to doing all steps for each item and repeating.

Example: slicing apples requires splitting, coring, and slicing. It is faster to split all apples, core all apples, and finally slice all apples than it is to split, core, and slice each apple before moving to the next. You basically want to manufacture your slices in an assembly line.

I use a similar process for laundry. Throw likes into piles. Turn each pile right side out. Stack. Fold. I’ve heard people complain about laundry. I’ve seen the same people pull shirts out of the dryer one at a time and fold them.

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Customizing your keyboard. The biggest one is mapping capslock to control. How often do you use the former vs the latter? Try pressing ctrl+t vs capslock+t. Now think about how many new tabs you make in a day.

I also map right alt to escape, left ctrl to alt, and left alt to a third layer I use for global vimmy keys (e.g. hjkl)

Learn what the software or device you’re using can do. There’s often so much productivity packed in, you don’t even know what you’re missing.

For example code editors like VSCode or Sublime Text have easy ways to select and work on multiple lines/words at the same time that can make work SO much more productive and fast, it’s like magic. I see other people doing things line by line and it takes ages.

Microwaves have all kinds of presets that people rarely use. Read the manual and try them out.

I wrote software scripts that help me at my job and save time. I had taken the course CS50 which is free from Harvard/edx, and that was enough for my purposes. But I’ve also seen people recommend the book “automate the boring stuff”