My Experience with KaiZen

When my apartment was flooded and I had to move out (with everything I owned) while it was being repaired, and then move back in, that was bad enough. On top of that, I had two unexpected long-term houseguests who left a mess behind them that took me months to recover from, and several people with whom I was working on projects decided to go in a different direction. That left me with so much unfinished stuff that I was completely overwhelmed and ready to give up.

Then I decided to give KaiZen a real try. KaiZen is a Japanese term meaning "continuous improvement." While ordinarily the term is applied to business, I decided that I would try to apply its principles to my business and my living space. On the theory that I use or mess up fewer than twenty items per day on average, I decided to clean, put away, or organize twenty items per day.

If I started to feel overwhelmed with the rate of change, I moved on to a different room for a while. In ten weeks I had cleared out more than twenty boxes of stuff (without all the drama and emotional purging that you see on the television shows). I kept everything I wanted to keep, and even happily accepted a few presents from a friend who was also organizing her office and apartment.

In addition, I had another goal, which is to organize for the life I want, not necessarily the life I have now. This meant rethinking a lot of things and a lot of imagining what kind of life I want to have, but in the end I kept a lot of stuff I hadn't touched for years, with the goal of using at least 50% of everything I kept and hadn't touched within a year of getting the organizing done.

Of course, I started to rethink how I used storage and space as I did my reorganization, and I found new ways to store spices, table linens, and many other things. And I had to have help for a few things: I am five feet tall, and live in a space with nine-foot ceilings. And yes, I still have a lot more to go: transferring DVDs to hard drives, and many other tasks. But I can rest secure in the fact that in organizing just twenty items a day, eventually I will be done and happy with my space and my life!

I had literally thousands of database entries to construct and record for my business, but I made it a goal to enter 100 per week. I had originally quit at 1750, but by pressing on, I am now well over three thousand entries, and almost halfway through my current stack of data at ten weeks.

After three months of hard work, I had to quit because several people in my family had illnesses and needed care. Everything was completely stalled out. But when the crises were over, I started again with my twenty items per day. And it's still working.

Some days I can put away twenty paper clips and that's all I have energy for that day. Some days I can do more. Right now I'm looking at an empty shelf in the closet, an empty shelf on a bookcase, an enormous pile of empty boxes, and an almost-cleaned-off passthrough. Yes, everything is still a mess, and yes, I end up reorganizing things I've already organized several times, and yes, I still have a long way to go. But I've found things I forgot about or had lost, I can see the differences in my space, and I have to believe that eventually, after handling/organizing 600 things a month, I will one day be done!

Yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train. By picking a small task each day and sticking to it, you can make significant progress even on enormous tasks in just a few months.

If you take my goal of accomplishing twenty small things each day, that is six hundred tasks per month. That's seventy-two hundred tasks per year, and you have to admit, as you look around you, that that would make a big difference in your life a year from now!