The secret of domestic bliss? Run your home like a BUSINESS
This top executive hated the chaos of family life.Then she had a brainwave...
THe struggle began the moment I arrived home from work each day. I rammed open the front door, pushing against the tide of shoes in the hallway. Then I tripped my way over the tangle of discarded coats, mentally cursing, before my three children bundled into my arms, asking for supper.
The kitchen cupboards were typically bare — it was either a mad dash to the supermarket, kids in tow, or cobbling together a weird concoction from what we had left. either way, I bought time with snacks that meant they were too full to clear their plates when food finally arrived.
With tensions running high at the meal, I’d look around my loving, but chaotic, home and feel a wave of sadness and frustration.
This was the most important moment of the day for my children — when we finally got to be together at the same table — and yet it was fraught and no fun.
I’d always dreamed of a warm, relaxed family home where guests could pop in unannounced and enjoy a meal with us.
But, although my husband Mattias and I both had good jobs — he is a doctor and I was the vice-president of an international telecoms company — we were embarrassingly incapable of handling the simplest of household chores. We desperately needed a change.
Long-planned events such as dinner parties, holidays and birthdays crept up on us without warning. We were wasteful with our time, money and the environment. A glimpse in the mirror revealed a tired, middleaged couple with sad eyes and silver splashes in our hair.
Like any couple under stress, we tended to snap at each other — and, worse, we had stopped really seeing each other at all.
As the long summer holiday starts to draw to a close, you may be feeling similarly putupon. But there’s good news. We managed to claw back control and find a sense of calm in our home — and so you can, too.
Nowadays, our friends pop over all the time to a warm welcome. Our children — Vendela, now 16, Tuva, 14, and Samuel, ten — pitch in with everything from loading the dishwasher to doing the laundry. And there’s no resentment over unfinished chores or unfair workloads.
So how did we achieve this nirvana? We did it by deciding to treat our home, and every aspect of family life, more like the wellrun companies we worked for.
That might sound strange, but it’s been truly transformative.
We came to this new way of living out of pure survival instinct. Samuel and Tuva were in nursery, while Vendela was in reception. Work was ever-more stressful and our home increasingly disorganised.
What finally broke us was the laundry. Faced with permanent towering piles of dirty clothes, I kept thinking about how long it took for a child’s shirt to go from the laundry basket to being hung back in the wardrobe clean.
The answer was 40 days — via a pile in the child’s room, to the bathroom laundry basket, to the laundry room, where it could remain for up to three weeks.
Starting the washing machine — which took only a couple of minutes — wasn’t the problem.
We only ironed about once a month and, each time, we got through only about a quarter of the clothes — garments at the bottom of the stack hadn’t been ironed in years, as we always ran out of time. Something had to change. It was then that we started using business principles — unconsciously at first — to untangle our web of household chaos. The first time I encountered the ‘lean’ method was when I was working for a pharmaceutical firm where we implemented the system in factories. It was powerful to see the operators’ pride as they talked about their 100 per cent productivity increase and their successful deliveries to various markets worldwide.
Mattias had also worked in hospitals that used ‘lean’ to help get things done more smoothly.
The method was developed by Japanese entrepreneur Sakichi Toyoda, founder of the Toyota car company, to ensure every process (or ‘stream’) in his business was carefully monitored, every knot along the way untangled and waste removed.
Management consultants in the U.S, scrambling to understand its success, named this style ‘lean’.
What started by revolutionising the car industry spread like wildfire to other industries, hospitals and police departments. Big businesses such as Zara and IkeA now use it to handle their supply chains.
It struck me that companies spend huge amounts of money learning how to run things well, but, when we stood, despairing, staring at our piles of dirty washing, no one had thought of applying the approach to the home. And so we considered applying a ‘lean’ approach to our laundry. We began by thinking of the whole process as a thread, and tried to identify all the ‘knots’ — the sticking places that were slowing things down.
First, we replaced our heaving laundry basket with four bags: one each for delicates, colours, white and black clothes.
everyone, even the then-twoyear-old Samuel, learned where to put their dirty laundry.
When a bag was full, whoever had filled it had immediately to load it into the washing machine. We dried and ironed the clothes as each load finished.
The entire process now takes us around four days — and is infinitely less stressful.
After that, we began to wonder in what other ways we could run our home more like a flourishing, efficient, ‘lean’ organisation.
If there’s one thing that every home — or business — needs, it’s a shared plan that is clear to everyone. In our home, we now have a board that shows what’s coming up. It includes budgets, bills, our goals, school timetables and lunch menus, and has a detailed schedule of the next two weeks, to which anyone can add or make changes.
EVery Sunday night, we hold a 15-minute family meeting at which we review what’s happening in the coming fortnight. This gives the kids a sense of predictability and expectation and the grown-ups a feeling of control.
Next, we created a set of values for our family. We thought long and hard about what a ‘good home’ and a ‘good life’ really meant to us.
We decided we wanted an open, welcoming environment where setting an extra place for a friend was never a problem. The trouble was that we rarely even knew what we were going
to serve. Today, we’re smart about our meals and the work ‘stream’ needed to get them on the table: we have six fixed weekly menus, each with a prepared shopping list.
Two weeks’ worth of evening meals are written up on the family message board, and we ensure all the necessary ingredients are waiting in the cupboards.
We now serve smaller portions and then offer seconds, instead of giving the kids more than they need. The food we used to throw away ends up in our lunch bags the next day — and we’ve cut our food costs by more than half.
There’s always plenty for an unexpected guest, too.
Another light bulb moment came one evening when I suddenly remembered that our cleaner was coming the next day. I wanted to tidy away things that had been left around the house before she arrived to clean.
Our eldest daughter then said: ‘We can have a Clean-o-rama!’ In other words, we would all ‘blitz’ the place together.
And so now, every Thursday afternoon, we have a routine: tackling each room in turn, dusting, vacuuming and tidying things away. We put on loud music — of the children’s choosing — and it takes about two hours. Then we celebrate, usually with ice cream.
In the beginning, the other children on the street thought it was such fun that they joined in. And we no longer need to pay for a cleaner!
These are just a few of the changes we’ve made to our home life by applying the principles of ‘lean’. As a result, this middle-aged, slightly greying couple are much more relaxed than they used to be. And our children have more attentive, energetic parents.
So read my manifesto for a modern, happy family and see how running your own home in a ‘lean’ way could bring you all closer together, too . . .
AdApted from the Lean And Happy Home by eva Jarlsdotter, to be published by Yellow Kite on August 22 at £12.99. © eva Jarlsdotter 2019. to order a copy for £10.40 (offer valid to August 29, 2019, p&p free on orders over £15), call 0844 571 0640.