Advantages for Applying Lean at Home
This article is republished from the April 2025 ASQ Lean Enterprise Division newsletter
I must be honest.
The application of Lean into my personal life was not something I picked up right away.
Someone made a comment that my cubicle organization wasn’t aligned with my role as a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. I took it personally, and tried to dismiss it, but they were right.
If I was promoting process improvement and standard work and organization, but my desk was messy and disorganized, could I really be an influential leader?
That feedback got me started with a simple 5S on my desk.
5S is a five-step process for organizing a physical or digital space, resulting in less clutter, finding what you need more quickly, and keeping the area organized over time.
The original Japanese words are listed below, along with some English translated words in parenthesis.
- Seiri (Sort)
- Seiton (Straighten, Set)
- Seiso (Shine, Sweep)
- Seiketsu (Standardize)
- Shitsuke (Sustain)
When I was done with the 5S, I realized that I had moved about 100 pounds of paper with me on my relocation to Florida (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Papers I recycled after my 5S at my desk
It opened my eyes that I had more opportunity in my own life, and I should “practice what I preach.”
Thus began a journey for me to look for other ways that improvement methods could be used in my personal life.
I started out slowly, working on reducing some clutter at home. I started to organize the storage of dog food, and 5S my bedroom closet and dresser drawers, and go through my personal belongings that I haven’t looked at in years.
After implementing a kanban system with dog food cans at home, I felt more comfortable recommending and helping set up a kanban system in one of our production areas. Explaining how my system worked made it easier for others to understand, and I’m convinced that it helped move that project forward quickly.
Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer and manager at Toyota Motor Corporation, identified seven different wastes in a process that should be reduced or eliminated.
- Overproduction
- Waiting
- Conveyance
- Processing
- Inventory
- Motion
- Correction
A few years later, I started to think deeply about processing waste (also known as extra processing or overprocessing).
Where was I exceeding the value-added threshold in my personal life and wasting time, money and resources?
The largest expense in our Florida home (after the mortgage) was the electricity bill, and most of that cost was from running the air conditioning. One day it dawned on me. Were we cooling our home too much?
I was able to convince my wife to experiment with less air conditioning. As we gradually increased the temperature set point beyond 80 degrees, we started to incorporate more fans and cold showers but remained comfortable. We decided to go the entire summer without using the air conditioning. I’ll admit, it was a bit extreme of an experiment. It made for a few difficult nights of sleep. In fact, on three occasions we gave in and turned on the air conditioner. However, we saved $1200 in one year, and it was a great sense of accomplishment (and she didn’t divorce me), so I took that as a success!
By challenging ourselves with this experiment, we realized we had been processing too much energy in our life. We do use the air conditioning these days, but it runs at 80 degrees all year in Florida and is very comfortable for us.
With each apartment and house move, I kept simplifying my life and belongings and looking for ways to save time in my life.
At the same time, when I was teaching Lean Six Sigma classes, I would mention some other personal improvements I was making, like wearing clothes multiple times before washing, optimizing the time to vacuum my house, and learning to enjoy cold leftovers, and it resonated with my co-workers.
They would discuss their overflowing garage, external storage facility costs, frustration of looking for tools or supplies, and all the wasted food in the back of their jam-packed fridge. It helped them understand the concepts and connect them back to their work situations.
Applying lean methods at home was also helping me reduce my personal expenses, as I was planning a transition into consulting, and wanted my bills to a minimum. We moved into smaller and smaller spaces, ending up in a 450 square foot mobile home for 2 adults and 4 pets. We switched to more fuel-efficient vehicles to save money and reduce our pollution. We downsized our fridge to reduce electricity, which forced us to buy groceries just-in-time and in smaller batches to reduce food waste.
I was also organizing my digital life as well. My personal photos, emails and business files were hard to find and caused frustration, and I needed a better system. After many years, I finally feel like I have control over these files and can find what I need more quickly, but there is still more work to do.
The house we live in today has a pool, but we often forget how to clean the filter because it’s not a task done frequently. Creating a standard work document (Figure 2) showing the current best practice of how to do that task has been very helpful. If we ever need someone else to do this task if we’re on vacation, we have the documentation ready to go!
Figure 2. Standard work for cleaning pool filters.
My favorite improvement was the switch to making my own coffee. For many years, I would go to a coffee shop every day and pay for a latte. The cost was over $200 a month (not including fuel) and it took 10-15 minutes out of my day for transportation and waiting in line. But it was a habit I had formed, and I was comfortable doing it every day.
After we decided to move to a new state in 2020, I took the opportunity to change this habit.
After multiple experiments and iterations to come up with a low-cost, quick and tasty coffee in the morning that I could make at home, it now takes me only 3 minutes a week to make cold brew coffee at home for about $20 a month, and each morning I can prepare my coffee in about 1 minute (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Internal and External Setup Times for Making Iced Lattes at Home (2020-2023).
Aside from the personal time and money savings I have achieved by applying Lean in my personal life, there are other benefits I’ve noticed:
- Hands-on Experience – Lean at home offers a low-risk environment to experiment and better understand improvement techniques like kanban systems for laundry detergent, 5S for your personal photos, statistical process control (SPC) for your pet’s weight and checklists for when you travel. You can fail or struggle without anyone knowing. Once you get it figured out, you can bring these struggles and challenges up to your co-workers and clients as examples, so that they might better understand how these methods work.
- Reduces Stress & Increases Productivity – Personal process improvements (like better organization or reducing the time for daily tasks) enhance well-being, lower stress, and improves efficiency (so you can sleep in longer). When your personal life is in order, it will naturally carry over to your work life and lead to better results.
- Helps explain your role to friends and family – If you work in process improvement, your job title might be confusing to others. If you can explain how Lean can help them make more consistent tasting meals or complete those meals in less time and struggle, it can start a great conversation. I walked my mother and siblings through a Personal Lean class last year, and I think they finally understood what I do at work!
I’m confident you have already applied Lean to your personal life, but you might not have realized it. Perform a gemba walk around your house to see what principles you have already adopted. While you’re at it, take note of the waste that you’d like to eliminate or reduce, and schedule time on your calendar to work on these wastes.
Finally, share those improvements with your co-workers, friends and family and see where the conversation takes you!
If you’d like to find more examples of Lean applied at home or in your personal life, check out LeanSixSigmaHomes.com
