Ask: How do you apply “programmer’s” efficiency in everyday life things?

But I try to do this with numerous things, from filling up the dishwasher, to taking out the thrash, to (quite often to irritation to my SO), postponing things: to add things up and then to everything in one-efficient go.

Some of these moundaine tasks are “repeated” items with a reminder of a todo-app. Or by paying all bills every 2 weeks, instead of when they come in.

My wife (2 kids) cleans the house basically constantly. While when I’m alone, I just do it at the end of the day, cause it doesn’t matter to clean up multiple times the toys.

I buy things that don’t expire (like toothpaste) in bulk. While she buys them by one.

Do you guys/girls have similar instincts and events happening? It’s really not about non-chalance, but rather the strive to do things as efficiently as possible with as little effort as possible, while having the same good outcome.

For example, I only communicate with companies/suppliers via email/phone (and change suppliers if they can't accommodate that). This means any physical mail that arrives must be spam, and goes in the trash without even being opened - anything I care about would instead come through phone or email. This means I haven't needed to fiddle with papers for ages, while my flatmate still wastes a good 10 minutes almost every day reading incoming mail (and then putting it into a huge pile she'll eventually have to sort out - akin to technical debt).

Bills are paid out automatically (via "Direct Debit") so I don't have to worry about that either.

Shopping is taken care by Amazon subscriptions, which means new stuff arrives soon before the old boxes run out. Haven't been grocery shopping in ages.

Food is handled by Deliveroo/Uber Eats, so no cooking necessary. I use throwaway forks & plates so no dish washing necessary either.

Cleaning/housekeeping is handled by a company that does it every week in the flat while I'm away, so no worries about that either.

Not all of this is possible for everyone (things might be different depending on your location, whether you have a family, your financial situation) but personally it works great for now and I have plenty of time when I get home. Basically for anything that you're doing, try to see if there's a way to not do it at all or to outsource it to someone else (who might be an expert at it and thus do it more efficiently than you can).

Treat your closet as an LRU cache—always put clothes away on one side, and start looking for items from the same side. As an added benefit when you run out of capacity, anything that has ended up on the far side is a likely candidate to be evicted to a higher latency storage layer (bins in the attic), or simply deleted and recomputed if ever needed again (just drop it off at Goodwill, you can always buy another).