I have long, curly hair, but I don’t wash it every day. On the days I don’t, I can be in and out in about 6 minutes. If I had to, I could cut it shorter. Even when I do wash and condition my hair, it doesn’t add that much more time.
When I was in the Army for training, I wore my hair very short, though.
Contrary to rumor, most women don’t need to wash their hair, shave, and exfoliate every single day. You’ve been trained to do that, you might want to do that, but you don’t need to do that.
Actually, you shouldnt. Just the “pits, bits, and feet” and whatever is actually dirty. You really dont want to remove the natural oils unless you’re really dirty, and just a rinse will take the dust & sweat off. Most of the bad smell comes from the armpits, so wash them double.
Wash your hair when dirty or once a week. This includes you women. Once you get out of the habit of daily washing you’ll find your hair is healthier. The first weeks or so you will feel dirty and your hair wont cooperate, however. I am not a “no-poo” advocate (once a week is great) but they make sense.
5min…ima cat i hate getting wet. :o
We allowed the Soldiers to take a 2 minute shower on the first night of basic training. Two minutes. Not two minutes each; just two minutes. The platoon of about 50-60 were lined up at each end of the shower with soap in hand. From GO! to STOP! was only 120 seconds. That was enough time for all of them to get clean. Or at least, they would realize by about the third or fourth night that it is enough time for all of them to get clean if the guys in front are not being selfish and they all start working as a team. The showers could hold about 10 at a time, I believe. By about the fifth night or so, they would get short showers between 30 secs to a few minutes each. By about the middle of the second week, they would just shower on their own during personal time before lights-out.
When I joined the Army and went to basic training the answer sort of depended on the time of day. Obviously in the morning we were expected to be lightning fast because we had a full day of training ahead of us. If we did some type of activity later that day that made us really dirty crawling in the mud or something they also might expect us to take a quick shower before chow.
In the evening we generally had more time to shower but you have to keep in mind it was a lot of guys and not a lot of showers so people would get justifiably pissed if you tried to have some 10 minute marathon shower going on. Also you never knew when the Drill Sergeant might just bust in the door for some kind of surprise inspection, pt, or other “hip pocket training” and it generally wasn’t in your best interest to be butt ass naked and soaking wet if the Drill Sergeant suddenly appeared.
You also don’t need to leave the water running the whole time. Wet down, water off, soap and scrub, water on to rinse.
A very common water use reduction technique during drought is to ask people to reconsider their long, wasteful showers. When clean water is at a premium, it is very hard to justify a long shower just because you enjoy it. I lived in Victoria through the final years of the 10 year drought, and our local water authorities were giving away shower timers as an awareness tool. We even had a singer-turned-politician give advice about what songs last around 3 minutes, so singing in the shower could function as a de facto timer.
Back in 1972 when I was in the USAF basic training, we had to keep the bathrooms perfectly clean all the time. Therefore the Latrine Queens would place certain shower stalls, toilets, urinals, and sinks OFF LIMITS! With about half of the latrine out of commission, you better do what you need to do FAST.
I’ve never been in the armed forces, thank heaven – would not have been my scene at all; and few things heard about privation or unpleasantness undergone on that scene, would surprise me. However – interested to read this post, with my having encountered the “Hollywood Shower” thing in a Tom Clancy novel. Set on a US submarine, whose captain is a basically kindly, and also ingenious, guy. A bit difficult to find rewards and incentives, when the vessel is effectively “off the planet” for weeks or months at a time: financial rewards become not all that tempting, when you know there’ll be very little that you can spend the money on, for a long time to come. The captain in the book thought of the idea of – for a job very well done, or as an incentive to solving such-and-such a problem – granting exceptional permission for the sailor concerned, to take a “Hollywood Shower” while at sea.
2 minutes seems a bit longer than I remember getting. The shower included: get wet while rapidly soaping up (soap in the palm of the hand, hard pressure from fingertips for scrubbing), repeat without soap for the rinse. You’re in and out in about 60 seconds. Good enough for the guys sporting a #1 buzz cut because you do your hair with soap–you just start thinking of yourself as a bag of meat covered with a homogenous sheet of leather. To the extent I took the time to observe them, most of the women hadn’t bobbed their hair–I have no idea how they managed, and was frankly too tired to give it much thought.
You get used to it pretty quickly. After they take your mane you kind of accept you are born into a new life and actually welcome the direction and limits. Some folks accept that faster than others, who get extra help clearing their minds of any hesitation.
But they don’t. I do all of that - not daily, my skin and hair would be dry as a bone - but even when I do it never takes me 12-15 minutes. I have two feet of hair and wash it every other day.
When I take a “really long” shower, it’s 10 minutes. On the average, my showers run from 3-6 minutes. Once you’re clean, I just don’t get the point of staying in there any longer.
First off, I was in the Army and we only ever called it “Basic Training”. “Boot camp” is a Marine term.
Second, we took showers in the evening before bed. If I recall, the whole platoon had 30 minutes to shower, in an open bay with about 10 shower heads, and there were around 40-50 of us. In practice, it was a little less time, because we had to be dressed (in our underwear, which was also our pajamas) and “toe the line” by our bunks at the end of that 30 minutes. Occasionally they’d give us a few extra minutes if we had been wallowing in mud and dirt all day.
In the mornings, we had the same half hour between wake up and first formation for PT. It was more rushed then, because we had to shave (with few sinks), get dressed, and make our bunks and ensure our bunk area and wall lockers were clean before leaving for the day.
I have no idea how long it takes me to shower. I wake up at 6 and leave the house around 9. Some portion of that time is spent showering. What’s everyone’s rush?
We wake up at 8:00 and leave the house at 8:15. Why are you in such a hurry to wake up? 
This is a fifty year old recollection. Forty young men, one gang shower with maybe nine shower heads, same number of sinks and toilet stools. Very demanding and unsympathetic guy with a whistle. Time is limited. Hard to say how fast you do stuff but you do it pretty damn quick because the only down time you have is in the mess hall during breakfast and you need to get a couple mile run and a bunch of calisthenics in before breakfast. It is best to evacuate you bowels and shave in the evening.
This actually is my reality. I start work at 8:00, usually wake up at about 7:40. Luckily I live about 2 minutes from work.
Going to sleep and waking up are the two hardest parts of my day.
Marine Boot Camp in 1995. I don’t recall any time, but 3 minutes sounds awfully long. I’m thinking 1.5 to 2 minutes tops.
Showers after PT were interesting. All the shower heads were turned on, then we’d line up butt naked and walk under all the heads in a constant motion. There were about 10 shower heads on each wall, so you had maybe 45 seconds to a minute to lather up and rinse off before you were at the last shower head. Every now and again someone would suddenly stop, causing everyone behind him to run into one another.
I could deal with the fast showers, especially since all our hair was shaved off. It was the forced meals that had a lasting effect. Once through the chow line, you had to bolt your meal and get the hell back into formation. It’s a habit that I’ve never been entirely able to break, which means that over the years I put on quite a bit of weight, going from 130 pounds in boot to about 205 pounds by the end of my career. Granted, there was muscle gain included in that. I still eat too quickly.
I wasn’t able to last 3 WHOLE minutes, there was rarely any hot water after the first minute. Ft. Knox KY in 1973.