Tybee, it is a trade off. Like “your money or your life” - we have a limited amount of time..
so if having your environment clean and neat and uncluttered is a need for you, hopefully you will prioritize it. And if that frees up your energy for other things, you will feel like you have “more” time because time won’t be wasted by the friction of dirt and mess and clutter. But there was still something else you didn’t do because of the cleaning up. If it was something less important, that is good. If it was something totally unimportant or undesirable, awesome!
this past week, as I have been focusing on getting work done for my class, I found myself saying out loud twice “I would rather do pottery than eat.” Dh has been busy, and I have skipped some dinners. And this morning, finally, after struggling for weeks with no results, the needle on the scale budged down. Just a pound, but it moved - with no effort at all on my part. My body doesn’t need meals. It just needs balanced nutrition - which I can accomplish with the bouquet of kale I ate from the school garden while talking to students, the bag of nuts I keep in the door of my car, the apple I eat walking out to my home studio, a glass of milk.... etc.
“dinner” is an experience. A pleasant experience, but one with a large time footprint. The struggle for me is that it is important to dh. He wants dinner every night. (Which amuses people when I complain about it. You “should” have dinner every night. That is “normal”) but dinner every night is actually bad for me. It creates frustration the way mess creates frustration for Tybee. It conflicts with other priorities and goals. (Example - weight loss goal - because I never grab a glass of wine or a few teaspoons of cooking oil or sugar to satisfy hunger or thirst - they are blended with my food to create a “dinner” experience. And I eat more when I am focused on enjoying the food.)
and yet, the experience is very important to dh, who is important to me, and I enjoy it and it is a part of spending time with dh - which is important to me. So I struggle with it. For now, my focus has been on trying to improve the healthy aspect, but also trying to reduce the time spent on prep and clean up - goals which often conflict as most ways to improve health aspects use time.