Walking The Talk

In about a week I will be dragging my family along on a real world experiment in lean living. In past posts I have discussed matching capacity to demand in living space. With this in mind we will be moving from a 2000 square foot house to a 900 square foot apartment. If this sounds crazy to you you are not alone. I have been excited about this new experience ever since we made the decision, but I have
been amazed at the inability of most people to understand. Virtually everyone I have spoken to about our new living space immediately assumes that this is a temporary move to get through my job transition. No one can imagine that we would not want to buy a house at the earliest opportunity. For us however this is a chance to simplify our lives by physically limiting our footprint. We have sold off nearly all of our stuff and made many difficult choices about what we will keep. There will be no room to keep the unnecessary. In addition, the new apartment is as walkable as we could possibly find. We are making an escape attempt from the suburban driving culture. Nearly everything that was only a short drive away will now be only a short walk away. This walkabilty is calculated to reduce the time cost of many of our frequent tasks and gain us more discretionary time for each other. The next few months may be a difficult adjustment but they should at
least be interesting.

Time for the News

One year ago I could have answered most any question you had for me on current events. I faithfully listened to NPR both to and from work. I had RSS feeds from CNN, BBC, NFL, and various other alphabet soup organizations that ensured I knew the minute something happened, anything. Then we had another child. I ran out of time to do much of anything. When I started seriously looking at what I needed to cut back on to free up enough time to just get the absolutely necessary tasks completed, I noticed that I was spending a lot of my time keeping up with the world. Sure I could readily converse on nearly any topic in the news, but I was missing workouts, rushing the trash to the curb just ahead of the trash truck, not making any progress in the books that I needed to be reading, and getting "the look" from my wife far too often when sitting at the computer. I decided that knowing the status of the current government scandal was no longer worth the time that it took to acquire the details. It was time to cut back. When I began to look at what I really needed to know and the information that I was actually taking in it quickly became clear that I had no real need or interest in roughly 80% of what I was taking in from my various news streams. After sitting down with a blank sheet and a pencil and a little focused thinking I was able to identify the things that I am truly interested in knowing on a regular basis. A few more minutes research and I was able to identify blogs or twitter feeds that had good updated information for those areas. Now all of the news that I really want comes to me with a minimal amount of gossip, scandal, opinion, blatant lies, or general sensationalism. So far I don't miss it. It actually makes me feel go dd to say things like "I have never heard of Lady Gaga" or "There is another political sex scandal? Huh, guess I missed it" I'll keep you updated on my low information plan. Special thanks on this one to Tim and the
4HWW.

Christmas is the season for getting...

In past posts I have mentioned some of the ways that we super size our lives for convenience. This Christmas has really brought home to me the mindset of getting more stuff as an agenda. Yesterday a cashier at Walmart was talking to my four year old son. Her first question was "Did you have a good Christmas?" Her second question was "Did you get a lot of good stuff?" Perhaps this is a clever marketing technique that the multinational mega-retailer is pushing, but other interactions over the last few days have convinced me that she was just voicing the general thinking about the holiday. No matter how many times we say that Christmas is about giving, most people seem more concerned about getting. In a strange twist, many people I have spoken with seem happy for others that have gotten large numbers of expensive gifts. Not only do we want to get lost of stuff for ourselves, but we want everyone else to get lots of stuff too! This would be fine if everyone had plenty of money, stable jobs, and not debt. Unfortunately very few families find themselves in that situation. I am not advocating a miserly lifestyle absent of fun and things that make you happy, but the idea that more stuff is better needs to be laid to rest.

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