The Kaizen method derives from Japanese culture and this word literally means "continuous improvement" or "continuous improvement". The Kaizen method is based on the philosophy that not a single day should go by without a certain improvement.
In the business world the Kaizen method has had a great impact when extrapolating the concept to create production, distribution and administration systems with a degree of flexibility such that always allow new techniques to be incorporated into their processes.
This may sound too theoretical but I am simply referring to the possibility that from within the company it is accepted that to survive it is necessary to change for the better. And of course it will be much less expensive to change little by little than to make a profound change at once.
If the Kaizen method is good for the company as a living organism, it must also be for ourselves.
I personally envision my life as a series of compartments where I keep each of the facets of my "I" separately. For example, I have different compartments for sports, family, food, work, money, friends, partner, etc..
Obviously most of the time it is very difficult to keep these compartments separate from each other as they tend to overlap. As I have already mentioned on occasion, I am a regular runner and from time to time I go out for a run with a friend. Once I met a friend who had just had an argument with his girlfriend and that day I noticed that he was running less than usual, it seemed that his resistance had decreased.
He told me that he couldn't run as much as usual because his head was somewhere else. I told him that he had to learn to separate things and he said yes, that he was right, but that doing that was very difficult. So I agreed with him. With this example I want to show how complicated it is to keep each facet separately.
However, the objective of this article is not to explain how to isolate some facets from others but achieve continuous improvement in each of them, and to achieve this it is much easier to visualize the facets separately than as a whole. We are going to start visualizing according to the Kaizen method, are you ready?
Visualize a closet. This closet is your life. You open it and inside there are many drawers, as many as you want. Each drawer represents a facet of your life, as we have commented previously.
In each closet the drawers can occupy a different order depending on the importance we give to each one of them. For example, in some cabinets the first position will be occupied by the drawer of the "family" while in others it will be the drawer of the "job".
Also, not all cabinets have to have the same number of drawers. Maybe in a closet we will find the drawer "to travel"occupying an important place, while in other cabinets we have the drawer "sport" instead. Each person decides what their wardrobe is like and how many drawers it has.
Once we know what our closet is like, let's go opening drawers to see the status of each of them. We will find some drawers perfectly clean and tidy while others will be a bit neglected.
Our goal is for the entire wardrobe to look good. To do this, we will take a cloth and a "Kaizen method jar" and begin to carefully clean the dirty and messy drawers..
We will start by applying small continuous and permanent changes in each of the facets of our lives. To facilitate the explanation I will continue to keep them separate and show some of my personal examples:
In my case I recently became independent and for obvious reasons I don't see my family as often as before. The change I have made has been call a member of my family on the phone every day. With flat rates and free national calls, we have no excuse not to spend even 5 minutes a day and call your father, mother, brother, sister, grandparents, uncles, etc..
This drawer was pretty neat. Having an overweight childhood always made me be quite careful once I achieved my ideal weight. Recently the only improvement I've made has been to substitute sugary cow's milk for breakfast with soy milk and honey. At this point I want to emphasize that my way of improving the "feeding" drawer is Eat healthier.
For someone else, your way to improve may be to learn new recipes. You can also combine both concepts and try to improve yourself by learning new, healthier recipes. Each person decides how they want to improve and why.
As with food, it also had this facet in order. I have changed my way of doing crunches a bit, learning new exercises and stopping counting them. I have learned that it is a waste of time to count the abs since instead of being focused on correctly performing the movement with tension, you are concentrating on counting them. If you learn to listen to your body you will know when it is time to stop and rest.
Apart from this, I have also started take a timer to the gym to control the rest of 1 minute between series and series of weights and not to rest longer than necessary. Improvements in sport are very easily measurable.
Also in order (it is better for us)… However, new ways of optimizing time can always be incorporated. There is a great literature on the matter that I will comment on in future articles. In my case I try to always keep my desk tidy and my mail inbox empty.
I am recently reviewing new ways to save department costs with unnecessary printing tasks. Most of the time I spend doing graphic design and being an essentially mechanical task it allows me to listen to audio files on any subject that interests me. I have discovered the portal www.ivoox.com which is something like a "youtube" but with Audio files. I got addicted right away.
The home drawer is organized and disordered in stages. For this reason it is where I have applied the Kaizen method with the greatest intensity. After 2 years living alone I have realized that some of the distribution decisions that I made in their day have not been the best. Little by little I have gone redistributing things in a more comfortable and useful way.
As for clothes, I consider them part of the home because they occupy an important space in it. Now that the heat is approaching and you have to take out your summer clothes, I have decided to take advantage of and do a total review of old clothes and donate the ones that I haven't worn for a thousand years. With the excuse of "I leave this shirt for the beach" I have something like 50 old shirts, of which then I only use 3 throughout the summer to go to the beach.
As for cleaning ... there are always things that we clean less frequently such as the refrigerator, the extractor hood, under the sofa ... I have proposed every week clean some of these things.
By cleaning this drawer I don't mean to get more money but to know how to manage it. In my case, I have been forced to be more aware of what I buy, mainly food. If we pay attention to the private labels and the price per kg. we can save a lot of money on our purchase.
I am fortunate to have several supermarkets close to home, which allows me compare the prices of different products. Without the intention of advertising, I have always bought at Mercadona. However, I have discovered some products in LIDL such as pineapple, mushrooms or honey that are much cheaper. Therefore now I distribute my purchase between the 2 supermarkets. The good thing about all this is that if in the future we gradually overcome this crisis and money ceases to be a concern, all this information that I have now in terms of prices, I will continue to have it.
Having less money I have discovered something curious: I enjoy more of the things that I spend it on. One of the best times of the week is going to a restaurant on Saturday for dinner with my friends. Before I was not so excited because it was something that I could afford almost every day, however now it is something that I look forward to. Benefits of the crisis ... who does not console himself is because he does not want to 🙂
I do not want to extend much more. I hope that these 6 drawers serve as an example for you to understand the small changes that you can incorporate into your life by following the Kaizen method. The important thing is not my examples but that you yourself visualize your own closet and be aware of the drawers that make it up.
Yet No Comments