About three minutes. My hair and body are clean, and my legs and underarms are shaved. Five minutes if I’m using conditioner, but I generally save that for the bath, which is much longer but that’s because it’s for pleasure (and physio of a sort - rotating my shoulders in the hot water). The actual washing time is the same.
I also do not understand people who need twenty minutes or more just to wash. If you enjoy standing under the spray or whatever, sure, but be honest about it. My ex needed that time, even if it was inconvenient for everyone else.
Usually 5 minutes for me. When I grew my hair out for the first year and a half of the pandemic lockdown, the time steadily creeped up until it reached ~20 minutes, as I found that a bigger volume of hair means more fallen hairs are trapped inside and requires extra effort to weed them out.
Also, longer fallen hairs also stick to my hands/arms and aren’t as effectively washed away by the force of the stream of water, so again I have to take extra time to manually scrub them off.
It was a relief when I finally got my second dose of the vaccine and was able to get a proper haircut afterward.
Since I’m sure people have been waiting with bated breath, I actually timed myself this morning. 8 minutes in the shower itself. 8 minutes to shampoo head and beard, rinse, and scrub everything else with deodorant bar soap. Then rinse and exit the shower stall. 8 minutes.
I’ve been told by several women who, according to them, know this tidbit from personal experience, that a lot of men wash their hair, their pits, and their junk and that’s about it thus allowing for one-minute showers. I offer no opinion of whether or not that’s true but if it is perhaps that’s why my showers are apparently longer than average? I make a point of scrubbing every square inch of skin including toes, back, and everything else.
I’m probably just slow. It’s literally the first thing I do in the AM, even before caffeine.
Yup. Since COVID, and I’m working at home now I’ve only not taken a shower first thing twice.
And of course ONE time that I did not get ready and dressed was when my Wife was trying to leave at 5am and a tree had fallen across our driveway. A 120 foot tree.
I have no idea how long my showers take, but I suspect it’s in the 15-20 minute region. It doesn’t matter, because I shower in the evenings, to relax. And there’s definitely a “now I will let the water wash over me for an amount of time until I have the relaxed feeling” component to it, which takes variable amounts of time.
I expect that people who have shorter showers have an easier time knowing how long they take.
Showers are relaxation time for me. Half hour? Ha. Try 45-60 minutes. I have a waterproof speaker, and will just zone out listening to an audiobook… If I had a decent tub, I’d relax in the bath, but until I do, showers will have to suffice.
Me too. My iPhone 12 has great speakers, and I have 2200 tracks of music in it. Plus, at my age, it takes me 10 minutes just to get into the tub (yes, I could really use one of those walk-in tubs). So I’d say about 20 minutes.
Wife and I typically shower before bed. I timed myself last night: 6 minutes, of which 2.5 minutes were spent shaving (my shaver has a timer on it). That’s fairly normal.
When I shower on other occasions - say, after sweaty yard work or messy shop work - I might luxuriate for a few more minutes in the hot water.
That was not the question. I’m sure lots of people know exactly how long their shower takes. That topic came up when I responded to someone who said, “it’s easy to be on time. Just wake up half an hour earlier, cut your shower in half, and pad Google’s drive-time estimate”.
What i thought was hard was just deciding to spend half as much time in the shower as usual and executing on that. How many of you could arbitrarily cut your shower time in half?
I don’t even shower in the morning. I usually shower before bed, or after I exercise or get muddy. My typical shower is somewhat businesslike, and would be difficult to trim down. (Although, like a couple others, it then takes me a long time before I’m dry enough to be comfortable getting dressed. I hate putting on clothes when my skin is still damp. If I’m not just going to bed, i typically putter in my bathrobe for a while – so i pretty much never shower before something time sensitive.) I do sometimes take a long, luxurious shower, or soak in the bathtub. And of course i can decide not to do so. And if course i don’t do that if I’m running late for something. But i thought it was rather bizarre to assume that one could just arbitrarily decide one day to shower in half as much time is usual, and that that’s not a skill most people have.
But it’s interesting to see how long people take in the shower. I admit I’ve never timed myself. I’d guess about 5 minutes if i don’t wash my hair, and much more if i do. I often pair “luxuriate in the shower” with "wash hair, so that shower is also probably more variable in length. I also take a lot more time to putter around drying if i get my hair thoroughly wet, although i do comb it out and get dressed before it’s fully dry.
Just how do you shave them so fast? I can’t do my face that fast & it’s a lot less surface area.
Yesterday’s shower was soap everything, soap again, rinse off, then I decided I wanted to soap everything one more time because I was in shitty river water (literally, at least one upstream sewer treatment plant was inundated in the flood waters) before a final rinse; all in < 10 mins.
Summertime post-ride showers I get in then turn on the water. Do you know how cold that is? Do you know how good it feels? I’m usually rinsing off as the water warms up. Certain wintertime showers can be the longest, just standing there under the warm water & warming up, but even those are 10 mins or less.
Taking a shower is the third most pleasurable everyday activity I know, after good sex and good food. It is quite intensely pleasurable to me, and no, I don’t rub one off while there, either. I can clean myself up in a couple of minutes, but I have no problems soaking for 20+ minutes. Having hot water pouring over my head and body in semi-isolation is almost like meditation and a massage, all rolled into one.
I agree that’s it’s a great pleasure. Easy and cheap availability of heated shower water is one of the great luxuries of modern life. (Go back even a hundred years, and this was not available to most.)
I’m probably in the 15-20 minute category. There definitely is a component of just standing under the spray because it’s relaxing, but also I think due to my general perfectionist tendencies I am probably more thorough in my washing than the people in the 5 minute category. Like taking the time to wash in between each individual toe. And spending several minutes on scrubbing my face. And making sure I thoroughly rinse off every bit of soap. And thoroughly rinsing all the soap out of the washcloth under the spray after I’m done washing.
Puzzlegal, it’s because they weren’t talking about showers that are already a few minutes long and just do the basics. Those who luxuriate in the shower (and why not, if there isn’t a local water shortage) could and probably do cut their shower time in half or even more by just getting themselves clean.
Also most people don’t actually need to wash their hair every day, so unless it hasn’t been washed for a few days (or you’re the unlucky type who does need to wash it every day), you could skip that. That saves a lot of time.
Takes me about the same amount of time. Less surface area, but also fewer hairs. Because I shave my legs every other day, it’s just a quick sweep to take the heads off the ones that have snuck through by then.
I am perhaps taking the “why are you late” thread too personally, but it seems bizarre to assume that people who have trouble getting someplace early in the morning are just randomly luxuriating in the shower, and can easily cut their shower time in half. I think there’s a lot of misplaced hatred in that thread.
I think it might be a bit of both, and I hope you don’t mind me saying that. You are taking it a little personally, but anyone who ever claims they don’t do that sometimes is lying. And it’s especially easy to do when some people actually are being pretty judgmental about a characteristic that could apply to you.
The shower thing was assuming longer showers, but some people do take long showers where half the time is just enjoying the shower itself - reducing time in the shower if you’re running late isn’t bad advice in general, although it isn’t good advice for you.
It’s so utterly basic, however, that considering it advice worth offering requires making a batch of assumptions.
The assumption seems to be that people who are chronically late are late in part because they spend a long time luxuriating in the shower, significantly longer than they themselves need to get clean and rinsed, despite already knowing that they’re in danger of running late. The assumer seems to be imagining a person who thinks ‘I know I said I’d be there absolutely no later than ten past ten, and it’s already 9:30, and it takes twenty minutes to get there and I have to feed the cat and change clothes before I leave. I think I’ll take a nice long shower first, standing under the pleasant hot water for quite some time after I’ve got the soap out of my hair.’
I’m not going to say that no such person exists in the world; there are way too many people whose thought processes in one area or another make no sense to me for me to come to that conclusion. But I very much doubt that’s what’s going on in the heads, or in the lives, of most people who are chronically late.
I don’t believe any of the chronically late people I know think that but I absolutely know some who do that whether they are thinking about it or not. They follow their routine with no deviations no matter how late they already are. If their normal morning routine takes 60 minutes then it takes 60 minutes even if they woke up 45 minutes late and now have only 15 minutes to get out of the house. If these people normally take a 20 minute shower, they will take a 20 minute shower even if they are already running 45 minutes late. It will not occur to them to shorten the shower or skip it. If instead of a shower, that morning routine includes 20 minutes of hairstyling and makeup, they will spend that 20 minutes on hairstyling and makeup rather than simply brushing their hair and skipping makeup.
So while I agree that shortening a shower is very basic advice, that doesn’t mean there aren’t people it doesn’t occur to - or people who ignore that advice once it’s been given.