Living lean: The management system for your household

On her latest family holiday, Christine Manby follows the modus operandi of Eva Jarlsdotter’s book ‘The Lean and Happy Home’ – to the chagrin of her companions

Jarlsdotter suggests managing the home as companies manage an office, with organisation and planning (iStock)

As an early adopter of Marie Kondo’s KonMari method as outlined in her international bestseller The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I’ve long been convinced of the joy of Japanese lifestyle hacks. I’ve decluttered. I’ve bid whole charity shops’ worth of clothes “goodbye” with a vote of thanks. I’ve rested my socks and folded pants into tiny little packages.

So naturally, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on The Lean and Happy Home: 7 easy ways to create order in your family and find joy and calm at home by former journalist Eva Jarlsdotter. She isn’t Japanese – she’s Swedish – but the methods she espouses are based on management techniques first developed at Toyota. There’s endless jargon-filled literature on Lean but in brief it’s about creating a management and organisational culture in which every employee works to maximise customer value and minimise waste by examining manufacturing “streams”. Jarlsdotter believes it could work at home too.

She explains: “In the family and in the home, we are hard on one another’s love, trust and self-esteem; we put a strain on the environment and on ourselves, and many people waste resources – both time and money. Lean curtails that wastefulness. Persistent work with Lean can dramatically reduce waste and create a more sustainable, harmonious home – and ultimately, a more sustainable society ... Lean is about keeping an eye on every stream, and recognising what truly creates value, and what is pure waste. It’s about untangling all the knots to create smooth and easy processes.”

She gives as an example her own family’s approach to laundry. Pre-Lean, the “stream” via which a piece of dirty clothing got from being cast off on to the Jarlsdotters’ floor to being back in the wardrobe clean and pressed had become so convoluted and took so long that on several occasions Jarlsdotter’s children grew out of clothes before they were ready to wear again.

Jarlsdotter was wasting time looking for clean clothes and wasting money buying new ones when she couldn’t find them. The solution? Do the laundry as soon as it needs doing. That’s what I took away from the chapter anyway, all the time feeling slightly itchy that anyone could let laundry get so out of control that it took a whole month in the first place. But then I don’t have children.

Reading the book, it became increasingly clear that you’ll get the most dramatic results from being a Lean-style manager about the house if you have minions. For which, read offspring. Fortunately, I was able to borrow one of my sister’s for the purposes of this column.

I finished reading Lean and Happy Home ahead of a week’s self-catering holiday in Dorset with my seventy-something mum and 14-year-old nephew. It was the perfect opportunity to put Lean to the test. I warned them in the car that in the interests of research, I would be implementing “Lean and Happy Holiday Home” for the next seven days. Mum couldn’t hear me from the back seat. Nephew had his head-phones on. When he did hear what I wanted to do however, nephew immediately embraced the concept of the “Five Whys”, which Jarlsdotter recommends for getting to the bottom of any issue. Why does the laundry take a month? Because we’re disorganised. Why are we disorganised? Etc Etc.

“Why do we have to have a holiday according to some self-help book?” My nephew and I only got to three ‘whys’ before we reached the traditional “because I said so”.

Lean is complicated. There are five principles, eight “wastes” and heaven only knows how many buzz words. Fortunately, Jarlsdotter distils her wisdom into a few actionable actions (that’s my management speak) that you can start working on straight away. Number one is: “Have your first Kanban Meeting with the entire family.” Kanban is “visual planning”. In the Jarlsdotter family, it involves a white board, upon which the week ahead’s appointments, chores and plans are scrawled. Over supper on the first evening, I called my family together around a white note-pad.

Regarding Kanban, Jarlsdotter suggests: “If Lean at home is about how to create the life you live together at home, then you need to know just what kind of life you want to live. Think about your dreams and what you consider a good home and a good day-to-day life.”

If Lean at home is about how to create the life you live together at home, then you need to know just what kind of life you want to live

Eva Jarlsdotter

I know I consider a good holiday to be one where I don’t have to think about the next meal because someone else is cooking it. On a self-catering trip however, there was to be no getting out of the cooking so I hoped that at least knowing what we planned to eat on a daily basis would reduce the faff. We brainstormed some menus and compiled a list of groceries.

The following morning, my nephew and I headed to the supermarket. We left the shopping list on the kitchen table. It turned out not to be a problem since the supermarket nearest our holiday home was clearly not practising “Lean”. Rather it was practising “Hard Brexit”. When we arrived at half nine, the shelves were alarmingly empty and what remained had already been opened.

Three boxes of Ritz Crackers had the tops torn off. The lone box of GU chocolate melting middle puds had been fiddled with. I picked up a packet of smoked salmon, saw the rip in the wrapper, and swiftly put that back too. We grabbed whatever looked tamper-proof. Before we even got to the checkout with three boil-in-the-bag baguettes and a firmly-sealed tube of Pringles, we’d decided to go out for lunch. But at least our first foray into Lean gave us a very real demonstration of the difficulties of being a manufacturer relying on “just in time” delivery of components.

Jarlsdotter’s second suggestion is that a Lean family should calculate its environmental footprint using the World Wildlife Fund’s website. We couldn’t get online for long enough but, luckily, our holiday home owners had placed a meter showing the house’s energy consumption in a prominent spot in the kitchen so we were able to see in real time just how unsustainable we were being. We spent £1.89 on electricity before breakfast.

The visual reminder that “energy is money” worked. We got so diligent about switching the lights off every time we exited a room that when my nephew turned the stair lights off at the top while I was simultaneously switching them off at the bottom, we fused the entire house. Taking an hour to find the fusebox meant we saved an hour’s worth of electricity at least.

Thirdly, Jarlsdotter suggests you attach a sheet of white paper to the refrigerator, with two columns. She writes, “Label one STOP DOING. Label one TO SELL/DONATE.” Our first column had a single request. “Stop farting”. Column two was empty. Much as we all hated the draft excluder that looked like a badly stuffed Maine Coon, we couldn’t really throw it out. It would have come out of our deposit.

Jarlsdotter’s last suggestion is that you “start having a Clean-o-rama”. Clean-o-rama is a jolly hour in which everyone engages in a whirlwind of housework, after which family members rate each other’s efforts and then indulge in a family reward. Assuming they haven’t killed each other over poorly-rated dusting skills first.

I planned a Clean-o-rama for our last morning but the idea was met with short shrift. “We’ve paid all this money to stay here. I don’t see why we’ve got to strip the beds as well,” said Mum. She had a point. We keep hearing how Brexit has sent the cost of foreign holidays soaring. It seems to me that it’s still cheaper for a British family to spend a week at the Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc than it is to spend a week in a cottage in Dorset with bobbly sheets, a blocked bathroom basin and no toaster. We binned Clean-o-rama in favour of a last game of pool on the tiny table in the attic where we’d spent much of the week.

Jarlsdotter explains that one of the most important tenets of Lean is “Hansei”, which means reflection and learning. At the end of my Lean Holiday with Mum and Nephew Number Two, I looked back over what I’d learned during the past seven days. Truth was, I’d abandoned “Lean” to preserve the “Happy”.

In a more traditional family situation, I’m sure it’s worth persevering through the problems and protests to create a smooth and sustainable family life. The savings in time, money and space Jarlsdotter describes at the end of her book are impressive and considerable and I admire her application. I might have tried harder myself but ultimately I knew I would be dropping Mum and Nephew off at the week and returning to a home where the laundry gets done and the pants are always neatly folded, Marie Kondo-style.

‘The Lean and Happy Home’ is published by Yellow Kite Books, £12.99