How my car changed the way I do laundry

Every time I drive my 2007 Scion tC, I find something I dislike about it. At this point, I’ve got a running list of everything I think the car does wrong: the seats are positioned far too high, shifting gears is akin to rowing a trireme, the 2.4-litre inline-four should be a 3.0L V6, body roll is awful, ad infinitum. Maybe I’m just horribly dismayed with my $17,000 car after owning a BMW 330xi previously. Maybe I’m just an endless critic.

For as much as I dislike the (not-so-) little coupe, I find driving the thing immensely inspiring. With time and money, I can re-develop the car and easily fix most of its flaws with aftermarket parts; and, in doing so, my actions reflect the very personality of not myself, as Toyota wishes to market the Scion brand, but of its original creator somewhere in Tsutsumi, Japan.

Most of my friends know that I find the Toyota Production System, as well as its core kaizen (改善) philosophy, an amazing guideline for nearly all business operations as well as life itself in some way. In fact, most of us practise kaizen in our everyday lives: we periodically stop our processes for introspection when something seems out of place, attempting to change our own life’s direction by taking small steps toward self-improvement, whether in our business or personal lives. After all, making big improvement steps is much like attempting to consistently score home runs: while every so often you’ll hit a grand slam, most of the time you’ll strike out. Mankind isn’t naturally tuned for big improvement, and if one believes otherwise, one simply needs to look at the thousands of failed New Year’s resolutions.

The kaizen philosophy also seems to be a big reason why productivity systems like GTD work: while Allen & Co. attribute its success to freeing your mind to complete, not remember tasks, GTD also has a secondary effect of braking your tasks into smaller pieces to achieve the whole. If somewhere in your daily routine you find that you need to change things up, you can stop the presses and change paths to working on something that would be more productive for you at that time. (That’s why, while right now I should be reading my Economics homework, I’m blogging – I wasn’t being anywhere close to productive reading/falling asleep to Adam Smith.)

It’s the creativity that’s missing in most of our lives. After all, my creativity has been the central reason why some employers at large corporate finance institutions rejected me from their internship positions and instead found me hired at ad agencies. It’s my creativity that’s found me failing at the completion of mundane, repetitive tasks and excelling at anything that required dynamic, dual-brained thought. Toyota’s systems are so wildly successful because of this creativity: they turn assembly lines into thinking positions, giving everyone the ability to create and think even in what could be the most mechanical of jobs. In doing so, company morale jumps dramatically. Extrapolating this to personal kaizen, stopping our own task flow to find creative ways to solve everyday problems can in turn increase our personal well-being.

Do not confuse kaizen with a tortoise-and-hare scenario: kaizen is fix-now-to-solve-later thinking at a hare’s speed. If changing your own operations on something vital in life takes weeks of introspection before action, you’re thinking far too much about what you’re doing. If changing up a task flow in a given day and completing another project instead requires thought over five minutes, you’re thinking too much again. Instead, choose the smallest available problem to eat: kaizen is about small change that leads to the bigger goal. If you’re thinking about whether to move, maybe the task should be examining transportation options in the city you want to move to. If you’re thinking about whether or not to commence development of a client’s project or work on refinancing your home, maybe you should be looking at the difference between creatively designing your project’s specification or researching innovative ways to refinance. Finding the smaller parts of the tasks and appealing to your creative side generally works on most things.

As an example that fits universally, let’s say that you’re looking for some way to do laundry. You’re amassing the equivalent of Kilimanjaro after a while, spending hours on a weekend to do your laundry. You could, as a solution to the problem, swear to do piles every few days in the long term, but the chances of keeping such a drawn-out commitment are slim. Instead, start with a smaller modification to the status quo and improve on the Kilimanjaro method: maybe there’s some way to get the mass done faster. Maybe it’s more valuable to work with multiple washing machines (which is an option if you live in a city / complex with central laundry.) Maybe you can do larger loads. By changing small parts of the process, you’re saving yourself time within each task each time, thus finding a mutual agreement in both the discovery of the creative solution and completing the mundane task more efficiently. As the small changes continue and compound with every iteration, you’ll notice that the task is much more efficient than it was some weeks prior. If you commit yourself to constant small improvement, working on everyday activities, you’ll change your own operations much faster than you could have by making big, leap-of-faith-proportion declarations of self-improvement.

It’s kind of funny how this may appear to be a very backward method at first glance, but, after a few applications of kaizen philosophy, the organic progress inherent in the methodology makes sense. Kaizen, unlike our biggest, most idealistic dreams, is much more synchronous with the evolutionary way in which our world operates: we physically grow in small steps. We accumulate wealth in small steps. Even the biggest milestones in our lives are only noticed in retrospect over lengthy time scales. Maybe that’s why I really seem to fight with my car so much now: when all is said and done, maybe I’ll look back on all of that frustration and figure out that much more has improved in my life than I would’ve expected. At least I won’t have to hike over a cotton mountain in the morning.

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