Kaizen Mind

To a Kaizen Mind nothing is ever finished. This frustrates those without the kaizen mindset. Things are simply the best that they can be at this moment. The Kaizen mind always seeks perfection while knowing that it cannot be achieved. It is living in the moment. At this moment this thing is the best that I can make it, but I will strive in the next moment to achieve perfection yet again. Perfection can never be achieved, yet must always be sought. The reward is looking back at your long slow climb to where you are from where you were.

Visualization

One of the most powerful tools for eliminating waste is visualization. If you can clearly see that you are throwing away money, time, or any other resource, you will generally do something about it. It is much more likely that your losses or shortfalls are hidden. Seth Godin had a great post related to this today. Why should you even display something that does not help you to improve? Generally the metrics that are displayed around your house, in your car, and at your job, are those things that are easy to track and display. Seldom do they allow you to directly see what is needed to reduce waste. Your thermostat displays the temperature in your house. From this information you can indirectly estimate what your energy bill will be wrong. If you had a meter that showed the rate of power consumption and the cost to you at the current rate, what would be your reaction? Mine would be to search the house turning off lights and unused electronics until I could minimize that consumption. How do you think that would affect my spending on power? Going back to that thermostat, you probably have one or two of these in your house. These measure temperature where they are positioned in the house and control that temperature. How often do you sit beside your thermostat? Do you care what the temperature is there? Thermocouples could easily be positioned throughout the house and routed back to the thermostat to give you an overall overage temperature, or you could select the one room that you will be using most and control the temperature based on that. This also could have a large effect on energy consumption. Visualizing is a great way to control consumption.

Try the Buffet

Lately I have noticed that the majority of my tasks are completed online. I pay bills, research projects, follow interesting developments on my favorite blogs, shop, look up reference information, and keep up with friends all through the computer. This has the advantages of reducing the amount of paper I must keep track of, limiting the number of books that I need to keep handy, and making my projects available from any location. The downside is that I end up tabbing through multiple sites to get to the applications and information that I really need. I am also easily distracted by shiny objects, which results in my following links that look interesting but are completely unrelated to what I am trying to get done. The list of sites that I was using on a daily basis included:

1. Hotmail
2. Twitter
3. Amazon
4. Triiibes
5. The Four Hour Work Week Blog
6. Litemind
7. Seth's Blog
8. US Bank
9. Google
10. Blogger Dashboard
11. JustPlainMoody
12. Facebook
13. Various Blog Statistics
14. CNN.com
15. The Springfield Newsleader
16. Fidelity.com

Opening all of these, even with the tab function of Firefox was very time consuming, and refreshing all of the tabs to keep things current only added to the total. A few weeks ago I discovered iGoogle and Google Reader. Together they have made a huge difference in my online activities. I now have collected all of the sites that I need into one page that opens quickly and has only what I need. In this lighter form, my daily tasks have been reduced so much that I sometimes feel that I am done too quickly. The best part about iGoogle is the buffet style selection of gadgets that can be displayed on your page. These gadgets are very easy to search through to find what you need and are extremely easy to add and subtract from your iGoogle page. I found myself searching through them and adding ten or so gadgets then trying them out and removing all of the time wasters of slow loaders. Now I can open one page and scroll through everything that I need look at in five minutes then move on to other important tasks. I highly recommend this tool for reducing wasted time.

Real Cost

Anything that you pay for has an advertised cost and a real cost. The real cost is often invisible due to marketing plans, or the difficulty of seeing cost versus usage. In this post I would like to discuss one of the real costs in my life and how they compare to the advertised cost.

Everyone has a cell phone these days. There are thousands of phones and an even greater array of calling and data plans. I am a very basic user when it comes to wireless services. I do not text, and I do not surf. Thus I need only calling minutes. The plan we decided to go with is a pay as you go $.075 per minute. This seems pretty good: 300 minutes for $20. When I began to investigate our actual usage and what we were being charged for I found that a majority of our calls were far short of a whole minute. We were however being charged in rounded up full minutes even for calls that ended exactly on a whole minute. See the data below.



In the first chart you can see that every call that was made resulted in an overcharge for minutes. This resulted in the real rate per minute being slightly higher than the advertised rate on average. On very short calls the real rate was extremely high.

The real cost of our cell phone service comes out as $.088 per minute (20% more than the advertised price)

Unfortunately unless you live in Peru (one of the only places I can find that charges by the second for airtime) you are stuck with the roundup policy. The only real result of this analysis for me is a new tendency to not call anyone if I am not sure of getting through. Also if I think the conversation will take less than one minute I send an e-mail instead. Overall I am now using fewer minutes, and spending less

Paying Bills

I have already covered reducing time paying bills in another post (Family Values) and thought that I would share the next steps that I have taken. After a little research I discovered that the satellite and phone bill including internet can be set up for auto pay using a credit card. Sounds scary I know. By following up with setting the credit card bill to auto pay itself in full from our checking account each month, I can make sure everything is paid on time while at the same time earning rewards points that quickly add up to more purchasing power without me ever having to think about the bills. With paperless statements added in, I can let all of those companies digitally archive my statements and also avoid having to file them. Also it is very simple and fast to access them online at a planned date once per month to check for accuracy. We now have only three bills that require action each month and they are set up for bill pay. Total time now required is four minutes per month.

Lean Yardwork

There is almost never time to mow the yard and trim during the week. By the time I get home from work and eat dinner with the family, it is too late to mow the whole yard. My general method has been to spend two hours or more of the weekend getting my yard into step with the retirees around me. I hate losing that time. It always hangs over my head when I am planning for the weekend. This weekend I tried something different.

After some thinking about what takes so long in this process, I noticed that the mower bogging down during passes through the taller sections of the yard reduced my speed to 33% of my normal pace. By adjusting the height settings on the mower I was able to get an acceptable cut at my normal pace by sacrificing only 1/2 inch in cutting. The yard still looked good and I was able to cut the entire yard in half the time. Of course I may need to cut it more often if the rains keep up, but I do not think that I will get a sign in the yard for violating community statutes about yard maintenance.

My List

In the last post, I discussed how to identify the things that you should target for waste elimination. Reflecting on my own life I developed the following list:

1. Mowing the yard
2. Paying bills
3. Dishes
4. Laundry
5. Groceries
6. Vehicle maintenance
7. Meal preparation
8. Trip preparation
9. Commute
10. House cleaning
11. Trash / Recycling
12. Workout
13. Morning routine

I have already worked on a few of these. It is time to get to work on the rest