The True Cost of Ownership
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How many times have you sat down to accomplish something at the computer and you notice an accumulated puddle of items just waiting to be cleaned, organized, or dealt with?
In this day and age, most peoples’ homes are bustling with unneeded, and yes, unwanted stuff! On counters, in drawers, on desks, under beds, in closets, in cabinets, in piles on the floor, etc.
Thus, when you sit down to try to achieve something, your mind wanders, and so do your eyes, to the nearby pile of stuff that calls for your time and efforts.
As I have gotten older and wiser, I have realized that this sheer amount of excess items surrounding my work area and living space is not necessary. These items steal my time to have to clean them, find storage room for them, and figure out what to do with them. Not to mention the worry and stress that battles my own health with having to deal with items that don’t even bring me joy, but just more cleaning tasks.
Time is my most precious gift. Time is an item that once spent, one can never get it back.
So, as each item comes into our home, I encourage my family to evaluate its presence within our dwelling, but also within our time.
For instance, I once had a humidifier that, even though I did enjoy its benefits, it required a large sum of required cleaning and maintenance time. Ultimately, the benefits of the machine did not outweigh the costs of time it snatched from me. The humidifier was returned, but the time I spent cleaning and maintaining it did not. Since that humidifier, I have gotten another one that financially cost the exact same as the prior unit. The difference between the first one and this one is that the time requirement for this unit is only a glimmer of what the other one was. The benefits surplus the time costs.
Before you bring items into your home and into your limited lifetime, ask yourself:
-Do I have the time that this item will cost?
-Is this item worthy of my time?
-Do the costs of time this item requires outweigh its benefits?
-Do I have the time that this item will cost?
-Is this item worthy of my time?
-Do the costs of time this item requires outweigh its benefits?
Remember, one only has a finite amount of time until the alarm clock rings and our real awakening occurs, once our time is up here on earth.
