The Subtraction: How a Bar of Soap “Bought Back” My Time

Today I am going to share how to declutter my washing stuff for a simple life.

The Chaos of Three Cleaners

Last winter, while organizing the bathroom storage cabinet, I froze.

Three cleansers stood side-by-side in my shower room.

• The mint shampoo is one-third full.
• The citrus body wash is nearly empty.
• And the pandemic-purchased hand sanitizer is barely touched.

They were bought in different seasons:

• The shampoo from a Taobao purchase after reading reviews last summer,
• The body wash picked up casually at Watsons in autumn,
• The sanitizer was an add-on item from a Jingdong order placed earlier that year.

What exhausted me wasn’t the bottles themselves, but the “management memory” behind them. I remembered spending two evenings scouring Xiaohongshu for a replacement for that discontinued shampoo, making a special trip to the mall for body wash only to find it out of stock, and those scattered order screenshots and discount coupons in my phone, like an invisible web of pending tasks.

The pivotal moment occurred late one Tuesday night. Upon returning home from overtime work, desperate for a hot shower, I discovered the body wash bottle was completely dry. Hand sanitizer was too harsh, and shampoo was too sticky. The absurdity hit me: here I was, an efficiency-advocating adult, trapped by three bottles of liquid.

Purchasing Time and Energy Calculation

That weekend, I did something seemingly boring—I opened Excel and started calculating.

I tracked my “personal care procurement time” over two months: from need recognition, price comparison, and decision-making to placing orders and receiving goods. Shampoo averaged 42 minutes, body wash 28 minutes, and hand sanitizer—with its ingredient safety checks—took 51 minutes. This number didn’t even include the hidden time spent organizing, storing, and monitoring inventory.

When I entered the 9.2 hours under “annual total time expenditure,” the screen’s glow reflected my bemused expression—this amount was equivalent to a full workday spent solely on managing these three bottles.

The Change with a Soap

The change began with a simple bar of olive oil soap.

The first time I used it on my hair, the lather was unexpectedly rich. Washing my body, I passed it over my face without any tightness afterwards. That pale yellow bar sat on a white ceramic dish, like a quiet period at the end of a sentence in the bathroom.

The shifts happened quietly:

• My “personal care” favorites folder in shopping apps shrank from 37 items to 3 (really, only 1 was needed)
• Two-thirds of the bathroom counter space cleared
• Two fewer bottles to pack for every business trip
• Most wonderfully, I never again experienced that late-night anxiety of “suddenly running out.”

One morning three months later, as I used the last bit of soap to scrub a shirt collar, it dawned on me: I hadn’t just saved those 9.2 annual management hours—I’d gained something more precious: certainty in daily life. As physical objects decreased, the associated decisions, worries, and maintenance expenses dropped exponentially. What I’d unlocked was a “time battery,” continuously recharging my fragmented attention.

The Successful Mindset

Today, three identical soap bars sit in my storage cabinet—not from hoarding, but because they happened to be on sale. When friends ask for the secret to simpler living, I hand them a bar and say,

“Try it. This cleans not just your body but also the invisible background processes of your life.”

True simplicity isn’t deprivation. It’s liberation from being the “system administrator” of our possessions, freeing our precious energy to flow back toward what truly matters.

Here’s my take: One small change — buying that bar of soap — bought back hours of my time. Start small.