$10 or 10 minutes

A while back I posited that [the best way to save money was to not spend it](http://ryskamp.org/brain/personal/the-fastest-way). As an extension of that, I’ve been considering a rule to “not sweat the small stuff”–namely, not worry about price differences less than $10. If I’ve decided to purchase something, and a price difference of less than $10 is causing me angst, I choose to purchase what I like and disregard the price difference.

Similarly, I wrote about leaving earlier to arrive someplace sooner. The analogous extension of that is to not worry about stressful practices that will result in less than 10 minutes of time saved. So I make the stressful move over to the carpool lane for an hour-long drive, but not for a 5-minute one, since I couldn’t save 10 minutes on the latter.

The sum of all these small compromises does add up to more than $10 or 10 minutes. But so does the stress from worrying about all those little decisions, and I’ve decided that it’s not worth the stress for so little gain.