5S is pretty much setting up a process space. The requirements of a process space are:
- Accessibility. Everything you need to perform the task are accessible in 2 sec or less.
- Unhindered. Both physically and mentally your movement and activities are unhindered/unimpeded/unobstrcuted by clutter, disorder, and distractions.
- Space to perform the task.
It may sound simple but in my experience it can get pretty complicated. What happens is typically:
- I try. to start a Process. First document or track what I do. Because my attention needs all it resources I take notes before and after.
- It takes practice. when much of the tasks are routine thats when I have the attention available to observe what I am doing.
- I struggle to define, narrate, and describe what I’m doing. I research the terms and look for analogues.
- Learning from Mistakes. All my thoughts and note taking is disjointed as my work-space evolves and I am distracted, and obstructed in my planning and experimenting. m its like moving water between a number of buckets with a leaky cup. The water my attention, the buckets are the task at hand, my notes, and my ability to keep track of it all.
To be systematic and Attempting 5S in everything from:
- My Studies. I have an elaborate system in my Chinese studies that has evolved over time. Complicated by my need to migrate to Anki.
- Exercise. To be able to do 30mins of exercise a day and the kinds of exercise I do are complicated loaded with all the history and lessons of the past attempts.
- Cooking and Eating. The kitchen, the food I eat, how food affects me and my health goals complicate my eating habits.
- Grooming and Dressing Up. The speed and efficiency as I bathe, groom, and clean up for work.
- Work. My desktop systems, cloud file systems, and my methodologies – from a standard methodology for Analysis, Project Tracking/documentation, Cost Benefit Analysis etc…
- Fixing things around the House. How my tools are set up.
- The maids tasks and responsibilities. If these tasks and responsibilities are not defined well we have wasted effort. So typically I try to write the stuff she needs to do down, for both our sakes – so that I can perform it as needed and provide her the tools to make it easier and faster.
- My Children’s studies. organizing the mess of the schools notes and the time it takes me to prepare my son for his next day of school.
Its easier to use a Core Methodology and change various steps for different task or duty. All that knowledge is Documented for me to be able to check back (by scanning/speed reading for keywords) in my notes. It allows me to compress a Thorough System into a Programmed Sophisticated Response.
The process emphasizes in Forgetting a Ton of complicated understandings and details, and to pick up a Methodology that builds all these details into its execution. The OCD or the irrational adherence to the method is because we made this technique specifically for some concerns that would be too much mental load to remember. All we can remember is the emotional scaring that complicated event has created in our methods.
Its like Learning Logistics Mechanics, its an ingrained process that simplifies and habituates a complex mechanism for ease of use and accessibility. You dont need to be average intelligence to use this, it just takes a teacher, in my case Games and Friends, to set the right path.
Life is Complicated. Lets keep the complication in the History Documentation and use the Simplified Methodology to free up some mental horsepower to be able to adapt to changing circumstances.
This Kaizen methodology is a lot of Learning in the front end, and gains happen way in the future. The only promise of Gains is the promise of Learning from mistakes, and that the new method will prevent the same mistakes from happening again, and that practice makes us perform our tasks faster.
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