She is friendly, punctual and has organizational skills. JUST GREAT!
Simone Ayodele
I am INCREDIBLY RELIEVED and COMPLETELY BLISSED after Frau Ordnung has practiced her clean-up skills in my basement. It helped me a lot to make myself clear and to decide what to keep, what to give away and what to confidently knock down because I would never miss it. With her super effective system, she has managed to conjure up a veritable "cellar oasis" from a totally overloaded cellar. Now I have so much space and air in the basement that I can have a cup of coffee with my husband and 3-4 guests and enjoy a nostalgic slideshow on our basement wall from our very first vacation in Canada in the nineties :-) How cool is that?! I never would have thought that cleaning up the basement could bring so much fun, happiness, relief and freedom of movement. That must feel similar for an overweight who has reached his ideal weight again. Thank you very much, Frau Ordnung :-)!
Claudia Tan
Ms. Ludwig helps with order in the office and thus also in the head. We recommend!
Andreas Graf von Brühl
1. Edition May 2020
Bibliographic information from the German National Library: the German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographical data can be found on the Internet at www.dnb.de
© 2020 Frau Ordnung
Producer and Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt
ISBN: 978-3-7519-9030-1
To Kelvin und Kira.
Thank you!
Living with children is precious. A family is valuable. But also exhausting. In the past, but especially nowadays, parents are under enormous pressure to expect. From the inside as from the outside.
However, when parents use lean management at home, they achieve exactly the same results that are achieved in the large manufacturing companies:
more time, less costs and even less stress.
The implementation of the lean principles is so simple and trivial, and yet hardly any father or mother knows them. The basics are not taught at school and by parents. Some parents have heard of lean management for work reasons but did not come up with the idea of applying these principles in the household.
I want to help these parents!
I want to take the burden of tearing them apart. Not being able to withstand the pressure anymore. I want to show the mothers that they have the strength and above all the skills to live in a stressfree family, to be able to save money and finally have more time for themselves. I want to show the fathers that lean management in the household is not rocket science but offers extreme support to women.
To be able to remember the things that are important to you and to be able to let go of things that do not make you happy - that is my goal!
I would like to invite you to connect with me - you can find me personally on the popular social channels Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
You can also join the Facebook community "#LeanLiving" - in this group you will find like-minded people who support and enrich each other with tips and tricks from everyday life.
From time to time I give further information there and would like to make open networking possible.
You can find more detailed information on the 5S method mentioned in this book in my book "Lean in the household - mucking out sustainably with 5S".
The addresses for the individual profiles:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/frauordnung0711
Instagram: www.instagram.com/frauordnung0711
Twitter: twitter.com/Frau_Ordnung
Facebook-Group: www.facebook.com/groups/leanlivingnow
Website: www.frauordnung.de
If you always do what you always did,
you’ll always get what you’ve always got.
Henry Ford
February 1979. One of the toughest winters of weather records in Germany. I was born in February as the oldest of four children, in completely snow-covered northern Germany. My parents didn't even know at the time whether they would make it all the way back from southern Germany, where my father's parents lived, to the north. Four years later, for the first time in my life, I learned what “lean” means - but without being able to call it by name: we moved. From the north to the south.
My first childhood memory: how I had to leave behind my beloved “duck”, a yellow 2CV that my father gave me for my 3rd birthday after he disassembled it to sell the expensive pieces. My parents didn't have much money and so everything we wanted to take with us had to fit on a trailer without a tarp. I was allowed to take my rocking horse and my favourite teddy bear with me. The trailer was packed to the smallest centimetre, avoiding wasted space was absolutely necessary here.
It was only a few days before the duck was forgotten.
What I learned from that episode: good planning is essential, waste of space is to be avoided and every now and then you just have to sort things out in life. It can hurt for a while, but it doesn't have to.
I still have a photo of the duck in my photo album, which I cherish.
Daughter and big sister
Over the next few years, I learned one thing above all: a household with four children requires a lot of organization, delegation and tolerance. All family members must also abide by rules, otherwise chaos will break out at some point.
In my parents' house, I learned a lot about avoiding waste because everything was kept, repaired, reused and saved. My mother made meal plans every week so that she exactly knew what to buy on her weekly bulk buying in such a way that, firstly, the household money was sufficient and secondly, no food had to be thrown away.
The household chores were also split up and adjusted for each child according to their abilities (we were all born 4 years apart). Cleanliness and order, a lean catchphrase that we will encounter again with the 5S, often came first. Sweeping, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, laying the table, operating the dishwasher, ironing, mowing the lawn - which is just what happens in an ordinary household.
When I was 12, I was introduced to the great art of ironing men's shirts - in such a way that the shirt was ironed perfectly in the shortest possible time. If you have ironed the laundry mountain of a family of six for several years, you know that any unnecessary movement, reworking and ironing is a waste of time.
With a large amount of knowledge in housekeeping and manual work (I could still build a concrete wall today), my parents released me to Stuttgart at the age of 19 to study at the University of Applied Sciences for library and information technology.
University
A small 12 square meter student dormitory was waiting for me. Not a lot of space for all the things you had accumulated in your childhood and youth. But I had the fixed idea that I really wanted to put everything that was mine in this room. And so I looked for and collected every thing, every book, every single memento from my parents' house and stuffed it into my own little room. I had never had an own room before and just wanted to know what really belongs to me alone. With three siblings you are used to sharing everything.
Back then I became painfully aware of the problem of having “too much of everything”. Determined not to want to live in a lumber room for the next three years, I automatically applied the first “S” of the 5S lean tool: I sorted out. After that I put the remaining things properly, cleaned the whole room until it flashed and was happy about my new, fresh and tidy home.
I also mastered my studies with lean criteria: the time you have as a young person does not want to be wasted. Right from the start I set up a structured plan, which courses had to be completed when and where and with what result. I did not attend courses that were not useful. Since I was - by the way - one of the laziest students of the whole semester, this was REALLY necessary. Because if you want to receive your diploma in the given time, you need to know exactly what the goal is and what is leading you there. Wasted time is out of place here.
Mother
A few years later I got a new role in which I was able to apply my entire lean knowledge again: in 2009 and 2012 my children were born. The father: a successful management consultant specialized in lean management.
For the first time in my life, some ways of life suddenly got names. I heard about “5S” and the “Continuous Improvement Process”, read books about “Value Stream Oriented Process Management” and “The 7 Forms of Waste”. I had intuitively implemented a lot of lean things, now I realized why some behaviours were good for me. I finally understood that my constant questioning "Why?" in lean management is a successful questioning technique, extremely purposeful and effective.
Life as a family manager in a lean-led household is relatively stress-free and pleasant. However, I often admired friends who turned out to be true improvisation artists because again something was not planned right to the end, the children were missing some things and they remained so calm. And I assumed that everyone just made more money than I did because they apparently had the budget to buy some things double and triple.
… and my personal crisis
One day, as a successful family manager, I had to admit that living in a golden cage was not my goal in life. I had everything you could ask for except a man who was there for his family. Often alone at home, not random from Sunday evening to Thursday night. Plus two small children. No childcare options, but also no pressure to go to work.
During this time, I was heavily involved in volunteer work, managed children's crawling groups, helped other mothers who were in need of care, sewed nice things for a small online shop, took care of our private renovation - shortly after the birth of our son we bought an brand new “old” apartment that needed to be renovated - and tried to be as efficient as possible to find half an hour for myself at the end of the day.
Which just got too much at some point.
This episode was followed by a short and painless moving out of the shared apartment and one year later the successful introduction of the switching model for the children. Since then, our children are changing apartments every Sunday evening for one week.
And it works.
And the lean principles also helped me from the start. Focus on the goal, avoid potential waste types, clear communication, standardize many processes and above all work on continuous improvement. The children are getting older, situations are changing and thanks to Lean, this hurdle has also been overcome.
It has been the biggest crisis I had faced so far.
Corona
And then it was Friday, March 13th, 2020. The COVID-19-lockdown in southern Germany. Right in the middle of my weekly business network, we get the message: schools will be closed till the end of the Easter holidays. Three long weeks of home schooling, two weeks of Easter vacation. And with a little note: maybe.
A virus almost is bringing the world to a standstill. Millions of people are sent to their home offices and are no longer allowed to go to work. From now on, pupils and students have to learn at home immediately and receive new school assignments from the teachers every day. Couples who normally only see each other in the evening now have to get along with each other every day, share their home office and living room table, and at the same time discuss who cares for the children.
In such crises, lean management at home really proves its worth.
Stock purchases? We don't need it. We buy everything once a week, exactly the quantities that are needed. Thanks to the weekly meal plan, we know exactly what we need. Food is not wasted, nor is the space in the kitchen.
Home Schooling? The children created their own timetables. With breaks, favourite subjects, less-loved subjects, long and short school days and everything that goes with it. The numerous e-mails with school assignments are printed out immediately, sorted for the children and dealt with accordingly the next day.