1. My crockpot. I love being able to put together the meal hours ahead of time, turn it on, and walk away.
2. My bread machine. This was a Christmas present years ago (thanks, Mom!) and like the crockpot, you put the ingredients in, turn it on, and walk away.
3. Swiffer extendable handle duster. Makes cleaning high, hard to reach places and weird angles easy. Even dusting the ceiling fan! Anything that speeds up dusting is my friend.
4. Shopping in bulk. We became Costco shoppers when we became a family of 4. You save time and money by buying your staples in quantity. (Shop less often, get economies of scale.)
5. Junk mail controls on email client. A fraction of the email I get is “real”. The rest, thanks to filters, goes right into the junk folder and empties itself every so often. I was wasting probably half an hour a day manually deleting the crap.
6. Mollum on my blog. It eats spam comments like the Cookie Monster eats cookies. (Or used to, before he tragically became the Veggie Monster. Poor Cookie.) Again, you would not believe the time this task used to suck up.
7. Drupal. I kiss Drupal’s feet after some of the other content management systems I’ve tangled with. Oh, Drupal, I love you more than Swiffer. Because let’s face it, I update my website more often than I dust. Way more often.
8. Getting rid of everything in my closet that didn’t fit. Need to go out in public and pretend I don’t live in sweats? No more frustrating time spent trying to figure out what fits. It all fits. Yes, I embraced the reality that I have 2 kids and will never be a size 6 again. Also ditched the pre-baby shirts that will never again button over the post-baby cleavage. I cleave. Oh, how I cleave.
9. Buying only a few things that mix and match. Not only does it all fit, it all goes together. Geranimals for grownups.
10. Getting rid of mysterious utensils that jammed up the drawer and I had no idea how to use. I mean, other than summoning Annoia*, what were they for?
*See Terry Pratchett, Discworld
I’m right there with you on living the crock pot, but as much as I’d love to have a bread machine, that might not be a good idea. 🙂
I find that making my own is healthier, higher in fiber, and better for the scales. *g* Also, it smells great!
Getting rid of everything that doesn’t fit turned out to be a big time-saver for me. And I don’t have, nor did I ever have cleavage issues. 🙂
Do you mind sharing a bit more about the bread machine? I’ve been lurking in the small appliance aisle in Wal-mart but by the time I’m done studying all the models and features I have a headache and have to go buy a bag of dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses–for medicinal purposes only, of course.
Darlene, the model I have is by Welbilt and it’s a convection oven/bread maker. You dump in the ingredients, program your settings, and it does it all. Mixes, rises, bakes. Ta da! Bread! It takes maybe 5 minutes to measure things in and turn it on.
I also keep dark chocolate handy. Purely medicinal. No, really, have some five minutes before you write and notice the difference.
Hold UP. The Cookie Monster now only eats VEGGIES? How sad is THAT?
Simplify is good. I simplified when I moved from 3000 square feet to 1200 square feet. It made me realize that I don’t need stuff. Just books. Which aren’t stuff at all.
Books are essential! And I mourn for poor Cookie Monster. Feeding him veggies will not prevent juvenile diabetes.