“There simply aren’t enough hours in the day” is an observation that is both keen, witty, and observation-y. It gets truer every time it is said aloud, so say it often. Who was the fuckwit that decided to measure time in correlation to the Earth’s rotation, by the way? If I ever met him, I would put a bag of hay in his car.

Here are some easy tips to streamline your daily productivity, allowing you slightly more free time per day to listen to Enya (rhymes with “Kenya”) or Alanis Morrisette or Natasha Bedingfield in between hot yoga classes.

1. Coffee. It’s a common myth that you actually have to drink the coffee to experience the sensation of waking up. It’s not caffeine that serves this function so much as the exciting tingling feeling you get in your nether regions from being around heat. To truly give the start to your day that extra “kick”, plunge your “hand” into a “pot of freshly brewed coffee”, or briskly walk across a room with two over-sated mugs of coffee at nipple height. No more coffee breath to dispel your friends!

2. Occasionally you’ll forget errands you have to run, so loudly repeat them to yourself. “BUY ALMOND MILK. BUY ALMOND MILK.” If you’re doing this in public, it may be wise to invest in a sandwich board where you can write the same memo/reminder to yourself, and while parading around chanting “BUY ALMOND MILK”, sign a contract with the Almond Milk Corporation to do so as a second job so you can maximize your potential income!

3. December 26th, the day they get marked down, buy twelve advent calendars for a fraction of the price and freeze them. This way, you can spend your year counting down days rather than dreading them and brunches and family gift exchanges can consist entirely of frozen chocolate.

4. Everyone loves going to the movies, but cinemas are always so crowded and overpriced and pushing some sort of capitalist agenda.  Instead of spending twelve dollars too many on the latest Kelsey Grammer vehicle, why not spend a night out with the family watching dogfights? Not the inhumane ones that Michael Vick runs, adorable ones like when two dogs paw at each other over a piece of fallen telephone wire.

5. Pee on escalators. That’s right. Just do it. You don’t have the time to take a bathroom break when travelling from point A to point B, and nobody has ever seen the inside of an escalator so they’ll never find out. It’s as easy as number one, two, three. You can go...on the go!

6. Religion is an important practice for any modern family, but sometimes your child plays soccer or bocce ball on Sunday mornings and this takes precedence. It’s still important to spread the word of our Lord, so why not collect Bibles from various motels and hand them out on busy street corners while reciting verses? If you run out of Bibles, Xeroxed pages of psalms will do. If strangers don’t stop and listen, remind them that the end of days is near and they will not be forgiven.

7. Light incense around the office. Your co-workers will appreciate the hard work of both you and the manufacturers at Yankee Candle, and constantly being around fire goes back to that tingling sensation in your loins I was talking about. If you missed your morning shower, it wouldn’t hurt to hold a Yankee Candle dangerously close to the smoke alarm either, meaning that guilt-free you can now pull the fire alarm, setting off the sprinklers. While everyone evacuates the building, use this as your “me” time. Pre-shampoo. Rinse. Repeat.

8. The average person spends thirty-seven minutes a day drying their hair, and this is thirty-seven minutes a day you could instead spend constructing a tin-foil hat to wear outside, allowing the sun to do all the hair-drying to perfection for you.

9. Stop shaving. Just forget about it, facial hair makes you look distinguished and there simply aren’t enough minutes in the day to waste on this. Caveman never shaved and they invented both modern art and the fire. Alfred Einstein never shaved and he’s been mentioned in “Wired” magazine at least three times. If you’re a woman, and you probably are because you’re reading a guide about streamlining productivity when there aren’t enough hours in the day, you can especially take this advice to heart and potentially pick up a third job (alternate weekends when the kids are away) at the circus.

10. Don’t have time to organize a garage sale to clear out the house, what with working anywhere from fifteen to eighty-seven hours a week and constantly escaping fires? Buy yourself a heavy trench coat and sell either your old jewelry or a friend’s or an enemy’s out of the pockets. If you see any police officers, tie up the trench coat and run. Those guys love to buy jewelry for their wives and will probably clean out your stock.

11. You’ve probably heard of power bars and go-gurt and “Pizza-In-A-Toob”, but it’s encouraged by a board somewhere probably that you have all your meals, one-handed, while running. For mid-exercise meals, chicken can serve as a leaner substitute to beef, and there are many ways to prepare it (fried, grilled, on-a-stick). If you take the effort to chase down and kill your own chicken you can also save significantly on a gym membership. Not to mention in most experimental sub-cultures, chicken blood is still an aphrodisiac.

12. Brushing your teeth. I cannot stress enough how important a hygienic practice this is and how great of a first impression it can serve you when you tell employers in job interviews that you regularly brush, so take your toothbrush everywhere. Brush at regular intervals. But, if for some reason you’ve been forced to whittle your toothbrush into a shiv and it’s currently in some guy’s thorax (it happens), you can just as easily clean your mouth be applying the toothpaste directly and gargling. One time while staying at a friend’s, I forgot my toothbrush and did this for five days. It was the best five days of my life and the toothpaste tasted so ridiculously good and cinnamon-y when applied directly that I began doing this about twenty times a day, eventually forgetting to gargle and spit and swallowing the paste. It was an off-brand toothpaste that probably had some questionable chemical components because I don’t remember anything else that happened that week.

And there you have it! It’s as simple as changing all these things about your life, giving you a more efficient start to your day and much more free time to sweep mines or increase your words-per-minute quota, but in all likelihood, an extra two hours a day to arrange a fantasy dog-fighting roster.  Remember, the first rule of dog club is you do not talk about dog club. Adios.


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