What agile has to do with your household chores?
I like surprising and unexpected thoughts. One such thought occurred to me while I was cleaning my apartment. Are other people having different strategies to clean their apartment? Can this series of mundane and quite straight forward tasks be improved with agile practices?
As agile is often used and sometimes abused word, here is a small reminder or introduction to it. I used the definition from Atlassian’s no-nonsense guide to agile, because I find it digestible, and also a bit funny.
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.
So, agile is focused on quickly responding to change, continuously improving through iterations, focusing on the customer value, gradual delivery in increments, and strengthening the teams.
Although agile practices started in software development, they are happily adapting and spreading more and more to different areas. So my surprising question was: what about the house chores?
As soon as I started thinking about it, ideas kept coming, so here are my 5 tips for the application of agile on cleaning up your apartment.
The benefits are twofold — you might find yourself being more inspired for household chores and at the same time gain new insights and ideas about agile.
1. Limit your work in progress
One of my initial strategies for cleaning the house was to just start and improve whatever catches my attention. I bet that this sounds familiar to some working days as well. You just open your e-mail or Slack and start to answer and do things as they come. After some time you might become aware that a few hours have passed by and you definitely did work but you have no clue what you have done exactly and what is the value that you delivered. Following the advice of a dear friend, I started to limit the number of rooms that I am cleaning at the same time. That means if I am cleaning a kitchen, I am focused on cleaning the kitchen and I don’t pick up clothes from my room as I walk by it. I soon found that there is a huge benefit to it — if I am focusing on one room I can clean it quickly and feel amazing when I step in that room. I see the direct outcome of my effort without any unfinished work and it motivates me to continue cleaning.
2. Deliver the value as soon as possible
Deliver value in iterations rather than try to make it perfect. When you are cleaning you might be tempted to focus on details. You might think, ok, I finally started so it makes sense to make up for everything that I haven’t done so far. You might notice the same pattern also when you are doing some work you were postponing for some time, like sorting out your finances or documenting learnings. This represents the “all or nothing” cognitive bias, which is luring us to bring things to perfection once we finally start them. Just to note, it is also one of the strongest drivers behind procrastination. Instead of cleaning one part of your home up to the level of perfection, ask yourself what is good enough for now? What will make you satisfied and relaxed? The focus is on delivering what matters the most to a customer, in this case probably it is you. So rather than thinking about the whole bunch of cleaning value that you could theoretically deliver, start by asking yourself what makes a difference for you. What is your first cleaning iteration for today? You can always do more of it later, once you deliver the first value. And very likely, you will do so with more motivation and satisfaction.
3. Visualize your work
If there are more tasks and especially if they will take more time, find a way to visualize your work and your progress. You can try out using Kanban board with four columns: idea; to do; doing; done. Write all the things you want to achieve in idea column (e.g. organized kitchen drawers or replanted plants). As you are ready to start with the task, move it through to do and doing column and once you finish you can move it done. This method helps you to be aware of how many pending ideas and tasks you have in progress at the moment, inspire your housemates to pair with you or take some tasks on their own, track what have you achieved and what do you still need to do.
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4. Remove waste
No, I am not thinking about getting your garbage out, although it is also a recommended thing to do. In agile methodologies waste is everything that makes a process more complex, longer, or more expensive without adding value. Is there anything in your cleaning routine that you can remove or adapt so that you are more efficient? There are many types of waste, so I will mention just a few examples. Do you prepare everything you need for cleaning to have it at hand or do you constantly need to go from one room to another? Are you ‘over-processing’ some part of the task just because you are used to it? Are you taking extra steps and doing more than it makes sense? The examples of that would involve spending a lot of time to arrange your clothes symmetrically. One can indeed argue that there is a value in that, but the question is how big is that value compared to other things you could do to generate value. Also, as you think about the waste you might discover that you are having habits in your everyday routine that generate additional work for you. Examples of such behavior can be touching kitchen elements with wet hands or leaving dishes in the sink until it is really hard to remove the leftovers of food from them.
5. Make it fun and rewarding
Although this principle is not limited to agile only, I believe that making work fun and rewarding should be part of every approach! Think of the ways how you can make it more entertaining. Maybe you want to put some music and dance, listen to a podcast or a book, or ask your roommate or partner to clean in parallel with you? If the latter is the case, make sure not to forget to organize a team event to celebrate afterward. Together or alone, find ways to enjoy the product of your work. Light a candle, make yourself comfortable, and enjoy the feeling of your neat and clean home powered by agile.
Do you have other strategies that help you in cleaning efficiently? Please let me know! Continuous improvement is not mentioned in the article, but definitely goes in! 🙂
