How to do kaizen cleaning

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The life hacker has already written about how to apply the principles of 5S in life. Today we will move on to more specific tasks and tell you how to clean your house according to the principles of kaizen.

- a practice that was invented at Toyota factories to bring work processes to perfection, spending a minimum of funds on organizing production. This is how the principles of the absence of large warehouses, constant quality control at every stage of work, monitoring the process in search of flaws, and much more were formulated. Including, with which the study and implementation of the kaizen system usually begins.

5S: sorting, organizing, keeping clean, standardizing, improving are the principles on which ideal work should be built.

We have as much to do at home as we do at work, so why not use the helpful advice for your own benefit? 5S is sometimes perceived only as a mandatory cleaning of workplaces at the end of the working day, so the results are not visible. What is the point of putting things in their places if they are inconvenient to use! No, you cannot assemble a car with simple cleaning.

5S is a workplace organization tool for efficient performance of functions.

Kaizen cleaning should give certain results. There should be more space, daily activities will become easier, and keeping your home clean will become a natural habit. Kaizen implies an endless pursuit of excellence, so don't expect your home to shine after just one general cleaning. Kaizen is being introduced gradually and will take time.

The purpose of cleaning is not just to keep it clean. The main task is to create such a space in your apartment or in your house, which will be convenient and easy to clean. There isn't much to do for that. And you have to think a lot. The speed and comfort of cleaning will depend on your decisions.

Tools that you need to stock up on before cleaning: colored stickers (they will act as kanban - an icon that marks an object), enthusiasm and a willingness to reverse the usual order. Moving on to the 5S system.

1. Sorting

This is a clear division of things into necessary and unnecessary, and the latter must be quickly disposed of.

How can I do this? First you need to free up space in the middle of the room, we will temporarily send things there for which there is no room. Then define the zone from which to start sorting. Be sure to take the position in which you function in place. If it's a desk, sit on a chair. If it's a wardrobe, stand in front of the mirror. If it's a kitchen, stand by the sink or stove. This is the starting point from which you will decide how and what to do with things. Pick up any object and answer a few questions:

• How much do I need this item?
• Is this item needed here?
• How often do I use it?
• When was the last time I picked it up?

If the item is needed in this place, is often used and should be at arm's length, then mark it with a green sticker. Mark required items that are rarely used in yellow.

If the item is not needed at this place, move it to where it should be. If you don't know where to send it right now, paste the orange and fold it in the middle of the room. If you haven't picked up an item for more than six months, it will receive a red mark.

What to do with red marks? Optimally, discard. Kaizen philosophy is incompatible with large stocks, one of its tenets is the reduction of warehouse space. Of course, it's not that simple. Sometimes the lack of stock is simply unprofitable, but we are used to putting old things, broken equipment "just in case", and what if they come in handy?

Throwing out old stuff and rubbish is necessary without pity!

Give an honest answer to the question, when will you finish embroidering this pillow, which you started in school at a needlework lesson? When will you assemble a third working fan from two broken fans? When will the fashion for such a dress, which is still nothing, come again? Now or never. It is enough to throw away all the trash to make the house much cleaner. After all, keeping a dusty museum in your home is unprofitable: just count, for comparison, how much the annual rent of a few square meters in your area costs.

2. Observance of order or systematization

Necessary things must be stored so that they can be quickly found and used. This is ergonomics in its purest form, only your experience and your practice should help here. As you put things in their place, it is important to break free from patterns that have been entrenched in behavior. If you are accustomed to the fact that the chair is always to the right of the sofa, because your parents always put it that way, then think, maybe it is worth placing the chair where it will be convenient?

Finding out that you are folding things wrong is very easy. If the same object is constantly out of place, it is simply not in its place. Your task is to find such a space for each thing, in which it will be convenient to return it. When it is convenient not only to take an object, but also to put it back, cleanliness is brought to automatism.

If items are used together, store them side by side. Closer - with green markers. With yellow ones - away. Any object with a green mark should be easy to reach, and your paths should be very simple. For example, a box of jewelry fits well on the top shelf, but you take it out every day, and you need to reach the shelf. So this place is not suitable.

Place similar items in containers. Determine your purpose for each desk drawer. If you keep equipment in one place, do not put documents there. Organize your documents into different folders. And do not be lazy to sign boxes and folders!

Don't be afraid to spend on functional furniture and quality tools. Good furniture is half your success. While cleaning, you won't be able to change the environment right away, but you will be able to outline a plan for changes.

Do not hurry. Kaizen is incremental change, not revolutionary change.

3. Keeping clean

Think about the steps you can take to keep your home tidy every day. For example, if there is too much distance between the shelves in the closet, then large stacks of things get confused and wrinkled. To prevent this from happening, change the distance between the shelves and make it smaller - you will fit the same amount of things on them, and they will not wrinkle. Given the prevalence of furniture ateliers, such a task will be within your power.

If you have many rooms, it makes sense to put a waste basket in each one. This is how apathy is overcome: when you don't want to carry the papers from the table into the trash, just throw them into the basket under the table, and once a day collect waste from all over the apartment.

Identify sources of debris, crumbs, and dirt, and create barriers in the way: place rugs in front of the door or make room for the scoop and brush near the kitchen counter so you don't run into another room every time you need to sweep.

Little things like that that diminish our work seem like an easy solution for the lazy. But, even if you are ready to rush to clean the floors at any second, they will save you time.

4. Standardization

Cleaning and cleanliness rules should be binding on everyone, and good solutions should be standardized and applied in practice. At home, it is hardly worth posting instructions and collecting signatures from all family members under the cleaning schedules, but it will be helpful to orally fix everyone's responsibility for one area of work. Few people like to clean. But it's not for nothing that we are looking for solutions for the lazy.

Standardize the reward system: if someone comes up with a new ergonomic solution, be sure to give it an award. This method works especially well when you need to stimulate children. Children's imagination is the best source of non-standard solutions, even when it comes to cleaning.

5. Improvement

The principles of the system should become a habit so that you want to make your home a better place every time you clean. It makes no sense to sort all the things in the apartment every week, but repeating the general cleaning with colored marks is useful once every few months. Include funds for your furniture renovations and renovations in your budget planning. Draw layouts and don't be afraid to rearrange. Evaluate the results with before and after photos.

Kaizen principles don't open America. They are based entirely on common sense and experience. But they are included in a single system, which we all use in one way or another (or at least try).

If you want to clean up your desktop and see that cleaning takes a lot of time and effort, you want to drop everything and return to the old mess. But it is more profitable to analyze the reasons for the difficulties, put a smaller table or have a special shelf for storing papers. So you can improve your workplace, and yourself along with it to infinity. This will be the kaizen philosophy in action for you personally.