To Build or Not To Build (Your Furniture)
I just got married, so my wife and I are buying a lot of furniture right now. There are two main ways to buy furniture. You can either buy it assembled, or you can buy it unassembled and build it yourself.
I’m in a bit of a dilemma between the two. At first, I wanted to avoid buying assembled furniture because I didn’t want to spend time driving to a store or someone’s house, loading the furniture in my car, and then bringing it home. I figured I would just buy unassembled furniture, get it shipped directly to our apartment, and then put it together. It seems so much more efficient.
My estimation of time was pretty off. My wife and I have spent hours assembling our bed, our TV stand, our couch, our shelves. To make things worse, all of these pieces are shipped in mountains of cardboard packaging, which has genuinely taken hours to break down and fit into our recycle bins.
As a freelancer, I’m pretty protective of my time, as the optimal freelance business model delivers a high-quality service in the most efficient way possible. I didn’t want to spend time driving to pick up furniture, because that would mean I couldn’t spend time working or relaxing. But now I’m realizing that assembling the furniture and breaking down the boxes takes just about the same amount of time.
At this point, it’s a toss up between which chore I dislike less. Hypothetically, I could hire someone on TaskRabbit to build my furniture, but I can’t quite justify doubling the cost of my furniture to save an hour or so. So the choice between chores still stands.
I haven’t found the lesson here yet, but thought I would share my musings on time optimization as it relates to purchasing furniture. Maybe we just need to pick the chores we dislike less and put a podcast on while we do them.
See you tomorrow.
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