The Beginners Guide to Running Your Home More Efficiently Using Lean Manufacturing Principles
Becoming more efficient will save you minutes to hours every day reducing frustration and stress, and will give you more time to spend with your kids and spouse. More kid-time means less (completely unwarranted) working mom guilt!
What is Lean?
The Lean Principles (sometimes called the Lean Manufacturing Principles) are a set of Principles used mostly in the manufacturing world to improve product output by reducing product and process waste. In layman’s terms – produce better things faster with less mistakes. This philosophy was developed by Toyota to improve their quality and lead time in the mid 20th century. Toyota has since started training other manufacturing companies the all-encompassing philosophy. If you’ve worked in the manufacturing world you’ve heard of it.
So what is it?
The 5 Principles are:
- Value – Value is the need for an item or process. In manufacturing the need is determined by the customer, but in the home it’s determined by you and your family. Making sure everyone eats something for dinner is necessary to life and that may be where the importance stops for you, or eating dinner together could be just as important. Luckily it’s up to you! Your decisions on what’s important driving this process.
- Value Stream – The value stream principle is taking all the non-valuable time and steps out of the process. You list and/or map all the tiny steps in your process and find which ones are required. Then you remove the non-required steps. These can be mental or physical steps.
- Flow – Flow is rearranging everything to work smoother and faster. Mentally rearranging the order of tasks is just as important as physical rearrangement. The size also varies widely too; it could be as simple as simple as changing where you store your coffee, or as in-depth as rearranging your whole kitchen.
- Pull – Here’s a place you can save time already! This principle works with taking the stockpiling of goods away because a manufacturing plant can now produce what’s needed when it’s needed without paying inventory costs. In our reality, this step doesn’t apply since most people don’t stockpile things other than food. If you have several freezers of dinners because you don’t have time to cook, then you’ll want to think about this principle. Otherwise happily hop and skip past it.
- Perfection – A little nomenclature disclaimer here; this is about constantly striving for perfection knowing it is impossible due to changing requirements and the imperfection of people. It’s up to you to decide when things are best for you. Routinely evaluation reaps continued rewards.
After my company started training with Toyota and I discovered how effective it was, I decided to try applying it to my usually-harried home life. Couldn’t hurt, right? It worked wonders. It took only a few weeks for us to see the massive change in our lives. Three years in and I now have no trouble getting 8 hours of sleep (when my boys let me!), working full time, keeping my house organized and clean, making a family dinner nearly every night, and spending quality time playing with my children every day.
How to get started with the Lean Home
Learning this mindset is difficult if you’re not used to the terminology, but once you’ve got it you’re golden! Starting small with a room or daily process will give you a sense of accomplishment and strengthen your Lean muscle! Follow these steps, and use my posts as a guide to start working through your life to create so much more time!!
- Pick a frustration or time-sink in your life.
- What things and processes of this frustration are valuable to you? Which parts of it make you happy or are necessary to your life?
- What is the complete, step by step process? See my post on value stream mapping.
- Get rid of any things you don’t love or need. Move necessary things around to reduce movement or time required. Have things where you need them. Get rid or move things you don’t need for the process.
- Evaluate the process to find steps you can eliminate or rearrange to reduce the time required.
- Work with your new action for several weeks or days then go through steps 1-5 again.
- Continue periodic reviews to adjust for new hurdles in your life.
Tips for Success in the Lean Home
The fastest path to success is to not focus on perfection! Saving 5 minutes a day doesn’t seem like much, but it’s 35 minutes a week. That’s half an hour to color with your kids or wipe down a counter or just sit and relax. Or you can use that 5 minutes a day to find 5 more minutes. Soon you’ll have tons of new-found time to play with the kids!
The second top tip for success is to start small. Pick little daily routines like getting dressed or making lunches for kids trying to make the bus. Start by following one of my blogs on common routines to guide you. Once you’ve done it and seen the success, you’ll be more confident in tackling bigger routines (any takers on reducing cleaning the kitchen time?)!
Common Questions/FAQ About Using Lean at Home
My friends and family thought I was nuts when I first started talking about applying this to my life. My colleague friends wanted to know why I was “bringing work home”. Long story short, I’ve gotten questions. Here are a few of the big ones.
- “Why in the world should I or anyone else use the Lean Principles to run their home.” The answer is simply that it works. You can use all the hacks in the world, but they won’t solve your problem at the root. If you don’t fix the root, the problem will eventually reappear.
- “What is the use of saving minutes a day? I need hours!” First of all, do you really need hours or are you just so stressed by unseen inefficiencies that is seems like you do? Second, you have to start small to accomplish big things! By eliminating minutes from our lunch routine, I found 20 minutes to add a HIIT routine into my morning. I also found time to start a blog right after adding another member to our family.
- “You’re getting rid of a lot. Is this just a weird way to do minimalism?” Kind of yes and definitely no. I truly believe we as a society should reduce our consumption of material goods, but that isn’t this focus. Part of Lean is getting rid of the unnecessary; the bigger focus is working better. When we lived in a 3-story townhouse with bathrooms on each level, it was better to keep a set of cleaning supplies in each bathroom. After creating cleaning baskets stored in each one, my bathrooms stayed cleaner because I didn’t have to drag my supplies around. While creating them, I cut down in the products used. Therefore the value of having multiples of the fewer supplies in my house (where they were used!) was greater than reducing down to one set.
- “This sounds good, but I don’t know how to start. Could you do this with me?”. Absolutely. Start by reading ((this)) post about value-streaming. Then follow ((these)) posts as examples.
I’m ready to find time!!
Time management is a necessary skill for working parents. Unfortunately by the time you realize you need help, you don’t have time to get it! I’m here to help you find minutes everyday to take back control of your time so you can spend more time with your family enjoying life. Leave a comment below or email me with your time problems so we can discuss them later!