Posts from the ‘Executive Oversight’ Category

Handy Hints

While you are developing your own personal cleaning routine, here are a few handy hints to help you in the interim.

• Look for a consistent system, or routine, even in the performance of individual skills. Examples would be a pattern to follow every time you vacuum, wash dishes, or dust a room. Starting in the same place, working the same direction, doing the same things in the same order helps you become more efficient, helps you not forget something, and makes transferring the skill to another venue easier (i.e. an apprentice who knows how to dust their bedroom can be put to work in the living room as well).
• Make every job you do “disappear” when it is done. Insist on a high level of completion for every task. Put supplies away when done. If water spills, wipe it up. If trash misses the wastebasket, clean it up. Wipe laundry detergent from around the side of the washer. Put the recycling in the bin, not on the steps heading to the bin. Cover the tracks of what you have done so well that even Sherlock Holmes would not be able to retrace your steps. Allow only the glowing finished product of an empty wastebasket, a tidy drawer, or clean sink to speak for your efforts. Of course, you know all this, you are the overseer. I’m mentioning is mostly for apprentice training.
• Time yourself (and eventually your apprentices). Timing helps keep you focused. It helps you determine how to break a job down into smaller parts. It helps you determine what to combine into a manageable module. It provides a baseline for comparison. When an apprentice does something as quickly as your average, you know for certain they were not wasting time! When you take four times as long to make the bed as your own baseline, you know you are distracted or daydreaming!
• Help yourself build good habits by starting with short experiments and deadlines (I will time making my bed for the next four days and record the times on the calendar. O, perhaps: I will set a time goal for days 5 and 6 of this week. I’ll report to myself at the next EO time.) When the next EO time arrives, set a new related project, say, making the bed everyday and putting an artificial flower in a vase each day to build a bouquet for the week. The next week, time every other day and set a goal for a faster time on the in-between days. Keep giving yourself (or your apprentices)  short projects and experiments until making the bed becomes a settled habit, usually two months or so.

Building Successful Routines

If I told you that you could have a successful way to have a smooth functioning living space, clean and organized, in two months or so, would you be intrigued?

If I told you that for the next 60-70 days you were going to have to work every single day, some days spending a half hour or more of specific projects, to get a good start on having a smooth functioning living space, would you be as intrigued, or would you question 1) whether you could put in that much time or 2) whether it would really be worth that much time?

If I told you that whatever time you invested in the next 60-70 days might give you a plan that you could perhaps use for the next ten to fifteen years with only minor adjustments, would your intrigue grow?

Many things can ruin good intentions:

• Grandiose plans and ideas end up being too complicated to manage and are put aside.
• Skills are too hard to learn.
• A scheme overlooks a vital part of real life, making the theoretical great plan less useful in real life.
• Discouragement sets in after a week of sickness, or vacation, or a new job, and the good intentions get buried, never to be heard from again.
• The biggest problem (at least for me) is that a good routine usually has to include breaking some bad habits.

For all those reasons, building a successful routine is hard. For any hope of success, here are what any good routine must do:

• It must be simple to refer to and do, no matter how complicated designing the routine was, the front end must be very intuitive and straightforward. Just ask any good web designers.
• It has to have built in flexibility to hold up when the ground (and the schedule) shifts.
• It has to account for every eventuality. The more that is taken into account in the initial planning the more resilient it will be in application and use.
• It has to welcome you back after a long hiatus and still be helpful, and not make you feel like starting over is a waste of time.
• It has to help build good,  consistent habits and break the hold of ingrained, and virtually unchangeable, bad habits.

These are true for any routine. Here were my specific goals for a “cleaning plan” I could use to guide myself and train my apprentices. Yours may be different, but I worked to be successful in these design areas:

• The deep cleaning tasks had to fit on one sheet of paper for an entire year and cover everything that would need done. It had to give me enough flexibility both within the week, within the day, and within the month for what I felt like doing and the schedule.
• The routine/maintenance cleaning tasks also had to fit on one sheet of paper, mostly to help the apprentices.
• The maintenance tasks had to only take between 10-20 minutes per module, so I would never have to spend more than an hour a day in cleaning/maintaining activities, and ideally not much more than thirty minutes.
• It had to be something that would make me more objective as children worked to develop competency at cleaning routines. I wanted them to know what needed doing. I wanted them to have many different ways to practice skills and timing options. I wanted them to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing running of the home, regardless of how busy they were. I wanted them to learn how to piece together individual tasks into coordinated processes that would be helpful for them.
• It had to be something that would not require frequent redoing.

If you want to try, select a date about 3 1/2  months from now as your target date to photograph and/or video your rooms and create an inventory for insurance purposes. That’s a good incentive, isn’t it?

And, if the cleaning routine building goes as planned, in two months you will have eased yourself into a routine you designed for your situation. You’ll have a cleaning schedule that might serve you for years and will provide flexibility to do a little every day, a modest amount once or twice a week, or allow for a major cleaning extravaganza. You’ll know how you want things done and how long it should take to get to that point. Finally, you’ll be prepared to train someone else how to do the jobs well, eliminating the need for you to do them at all! Doesn’t that make a couple of months of mostly brain work seem worthwhile?

Apprenticing Ourselves

So just how do we apprentice ourselves to ourselves? These general principles will serve you well whatever your chosen “improvement area” is, but since we are thinking about living space maintenance (fancy for cleaning, chores, honey-do lists and the like), the specific suggestions will address that area.

First, arrange design, practice, and evaluation times. Improving yourself in any area is going to take time. The great advantage to the weekly Executive Oversight time is that it is an already scheduled, guaranteed-to-happen slot of life in which to design projects and then evaluate them after their test run. Only the actual doing part has to fit into your schedule.  

Second,collect some reference tools on your chosen topic. Cookbooks, science books, home repair manuals, gardening, cleaning: whatever you need to know, the information is available somewhere. Websites, the library, friends, well, maybe “experts.” Just be careful with human input to spread specific questions around a large array of people. Act like you are interviewing others for an article on the topic. This may help keep your ignorance level somewhat disguised!

Hiding my ignorance level may account for some of my love of libraries: I could start by accessing a broad range of helpful resources to at least find out what I didn’t know! Seriously, reading many sources helps us can think through the ideas presented. If you find a particularly effective resource, you can buy it for your own home reference library. The book that became my housekeeping reference is Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping Home by Cheryl Mendelson, usually available from Amazon. Pleasant to read, encyclopedic in content, the book communicates an honorable value to lowly housekeeping, just as the Joy of Cooking does for the world of food preparation. Speed Cleaning by Jeff Campbell, available from the Speed Cleaning website or from a library provides cleaning system information. Both are straightforward and tell you point blank what they think is best, no leeway for your own precious idea. A dogmatic friend may serve the same purpose.

Third, consider what you learn, but make it your own. This is the balance point to number two. When you don’t know much, it is so helpful to have concrete, defined steps to follow. But maturity demands moving beyond robotic adoption of another’s method for yourself, to a nuanced self-designed system built around your needs, experiences, and research.

Do not think someone has the very best and only answer just because they wrote a book, have a self-help business, post blogs, do workshops on their topic, or make a lot of money consulting. You must design what will work best for your situation. Do give others’ ideas a careful experiment, though. And when you modify or discard their options, don’t forget them. They may become the ideal advice for someone else combined with your enlightened insight. For example, Speed Cleaning recommends (and sells) a cleaning apron to wear while cleaning. I have never really done that but I know why they make the recommendation because of applying principle number four:

Fourth, look for principles and systems, not gimmicks, gadgets or hints when evaluating what you read and learn from others.  Re: the apron. The principle is to have at hand everything necessary for a range of cleaning tasks. A second principle is being focused on the task at hand, whatever you are doing. Putting on that apron means you are focused and ready to attend to cleaning. You aren’t likely to run to the post office or grocery with bottles and brushes clanking around your waist! Chatting on the phone with the apron still on won’t let you forget what you were intending to do! If you have some other way to effectively accomplish those two principles (right tools assembled and focused on task till completed), you may not need to make or buy an apron. If an apron gives you a fighting chance of consistently building those two principles into your life, it will be thirty dollars well spent. If an apron sends your apprentices into self-motivated success, it will be worth its weight in gold.

Fifth, no regrets for a failed experiment. No experiment is a failed experiment, unless you did not experiment. When you make a careful selection and it ends up not working well for you, chalk it up to research and development. Innovators EXPECT false starts and unsuccessful attempts and make better future decisions because of them. There will be dinners no one likes–but you may learn a cooking technique or a new food item you will use in the future. There will be meals you ruin–but you can analyze whether you were distracted, not trying your hardest, need to learn a different technique, or need to PRACTICE a skill a little more. Perfect gizmos may be poorly made–but you will have learned the design and construction trouble spots to watch for in the future. There will be books you’ll never finish–but you’ll know something to pass along about its content to someone else. There will be good ideas that just don’t work for you–but your advice to someone else can include what didn’t work for you as well as what was worthwhile.

Don’t act like you are a failure, a short-sighted nincompoop, or a miserable executive. You are simply a person moving forward in your life making careful choices and learning both helpful and less helpful things from those choices.