Dear LPG

I think many aspects of life, people, and all the world's other commodities fall into groups. 
It is a fact; I think because I vaguely remember learning this theory at school. It is one of the rudimentary rules of filing things successfully. 

It is accepted that everyone, even people, fall into one category or another. While the rest of the world believes that we pensioners have nothing but time on our hands, many of us often don't have enough hours in the day to get through everything.

I never seem to have enough time, which is why I take time to make an hour-by-hour itinerary of exactly what I am going to do each morning before I get started and  doing things in bulk is one of the tricks I use to minimise the time it all takes.  

In light of the energy crisis, I see official hints as to how we can use all our resources more effectively.  One such piece of advice we are being given is that it is better to save your laundry and put a bigger load in the machine on fewer occasions to conserve more energy.  Using the same attitude, I have adapted the principle to a few of my daily activities to save time. For instance, I now open my mail in bulk. I suppose I treat it like doing a load of washing. 

I now do opening of letters once a week. 

Some may think that I have become somewhat lazy or perhaps that I have a fear of the bills inside them, but that is not the case.  Most accounts are paid by direct debit these days, and most of my mail is junk, so only having to use the letter knife, file the needed ones and throw away all the paper that is not required once a week is a cost-effective way of commodity-saving when the commodity is time.  

I have a system where I do my emails on Mondays, texts on Tuesdays, go through phone voice mails each Wednesday, flick through the pages on my Facebook and other social media on Thursdays, and it is the turn of WhatsApp on Fridays.  

The routine ensures that everything gets addressed regularly, nothing is missed, and as you get older, it often takes more time to get into the concentration headspace needed for doing such things, so you might as well prepare once for the week rather than waste all that extra time doing it every day. 

It saves a bit of time, but if you apply bulk tasking to your other tasks, all those little bits of saved time add up, although there will be occasional communications you will need to check for.

It is generally accepted that we retired people have all the time in the world, but could it be that retirement is the time when you only appear to topple off the 'not having sufficient time to fit your life into' state of mind.  It is usually not long before so many of us find a different load of things to fill our time with and end up on yet another  treadmill of our own making. 

Whatever the situation, I remain one of those who feel it is better to have too much to do than too little.

 ST, Lee

… LPG adds some information on this month’s celebration…

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