Wednesday

Working from home. Doesn't change much about the morning routine. What I wrote Monday is working really well. I got up pretty late the last couple of days, though. Can be traced back to going to bed late. I'll pay more attention to that.

Mondays

Another Monday. Decided some time ago to make sure my phone goes on the charger as the first thing. That makes sure I travel the length of the house, since the charger is in the kitchen. Today, I hereby proclaim that I must do my calisthenics on the way back through the house to the restroom. After I've made use of the necessary, I get up Timothy for his early-morning trip to the loo. Then, I get the towels/clothes ready and shower. Post shower, do kitchen stuff, and off I go.

Routine has been SHOT

Didn't post yesterday, almost didn't post today. Woke up late both days. Slept very poorly Sunday night, and Timothy woke me at 1:20 am this morning--i don't remember hearing my alarm. If this is going to work, I need to start enforcing my wake-up time.

Rediscovery

I used to be a cooler person, judging by the posts on this blog. A lot has changed in six-and-a-half years, and if i commit to using less than ten minutes a day, i can probably relate the relevant portions and discuss how the items in the earlier entries have evolved. Even though this is a public blog, nobody has really read it, so i am going to consider it a life-hacking journal. Sorry, dear reader; if you're not Justin Fuller, this might not be relevant to you.

Doing More the Night Before

I've discussed this topic before, but it's worth mentioning again. One of the main things that got me through the recent overtime season was an unflinching devotion to the principle of doing more the night before. This meant laying my clothes out before I went to sleep. It also meant taking care of oatmeal, as previously mentioned. Another thing that I took more seriously was getting the diaper washing completely done before going to bed. Since I didn't want to compromise going to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour, I made sure to start the diaper washing early in the evening.

One more thing: anything that I needed to take with me when I left in the morning was put in my lunch bag the night before. If I encountered an item that I knew I'd need to take, I put it in there immediately. This way, I didn't need to hunt things down in the morning. It also cut down on forgetting crucial items (like my access badge) when leaving the house.

One Improvement

One major improvement to my get-ready time has been to remove oatmeal cooking from the morning. I have four bowls to prepare for each morning, and here's the breakdown:

• My own oatmeal. I generally eat this cold. During this recent period of overtime, I would take the resealable bowl to work and eat the oatmeal there. Since it was cold anyway, I started cooking it the night before. That's about two extra minutes freed up in the morning.
• My son's oatmeal. My son recently turned one, and he eats oatmeal all day. I cook one bowl and he gets a portion of it at most meals. His oatmeal is generally cold by the time he eats it, so why not cook it early, too?
• My daughter's oatmeal. I don't cook this. My wife cooks it closer to breakfast time so it's warm. However, it is my duty to prep the bowl (put oatmeal and water in the bowl) and place it in the microwave. We've noticed no ill effect from letting this wet oatmeal stand in the closed microwave overnight.
• My wife's oatmeal. I don't cook this one, either, but there isn't room to let it sit in the microwave. So I pour the oatmeal in the evening and then put the water in before I leave in the morning.

This means that what used to be over five minutes in the morning has been reduced to less than thirty seconds in the morning. An internal element has been mostly converted to an external element. I previously didn't explore this possibility seriously; sleeping about four hours a night pressed the issue for me, though.

Peace!

Back...ish

All right, I've been buried at work, which means I've been working roughly 4:30am to 3:30pm for over five weeks. It's been crazy, but mostly good. This time has brought about some serious improvements in get-ready time (the overall process is complete in less than thirty minutes), and I'll post the routine changes in future days. Peace!

Motivational Monday - Don't Drop This

Okay, I had better not drop this.

I do think about this project often (daily, as a matter of fact), and a few developments have occurred since my last post. However, I'm rather pressed for time this morning due to snoozing, not preparing my breakfast yesterday, not folding diapers last night, etc. Sundays are difficult days, especially when we take the kids to evening service.

Not an excuse, just an opportunity to look a little more deeply at Sunday evenings. :-)

The Role of Hustle

So, Monday, I will attempt to see if I can, through a standardized sequence and a good deal of hustle, shorten the hair and scrubbing combined time from four minutes down to two. That is all.

On Falling off of Wagons

I said I couldn't guarantee that I'd post again until Tuesday; well, it's Thursday...so did I break my word? The argument could be made that I never actually guaranteed anything, just clarified what I couldn't guarantee...is anybody buying this? Is anybody reading this?

Some observations:

Cooking oatmeal takes 2 minutes. This is not negotiable at all. Perhaps cooking my oatmeal the night before won't be such a bad idea...

Shaving may not be the best first target for cutting down shower time. Maybe hair and scrubbing...

Taking clothes, hangers, book, etc. back to the bedroom after showering takes a bit of time, and I think it disturbs my wife. Maybe I can eliminate this step?

These are just some ideas I got this morning, thinking again about morning routine time reduction, and trying to get back on the wagon.

Shower Shaving II: The Retiming

Shaving in the shower takes 4 minutes, according to new information released June 20. Tulsa resident Justin Fuller stated, "I thought it wouldn't be longer than shaving at the sink." This revelation comes after a day of intense internal debate regarding the efficiency of shaving at the bathroom sink after the shower or in the shower during the shower. "Shaving at the sink also left me with some dried blood on my face that I didn't realize was there until I returned home in the evening. And I was in a three-hour meeting with a corporate vice-president! Shaving at the sink really let me down," Fuller said before returning to folding diapers.

In a related matter, vacation starts tomorrow. I can't guarantee I'll update this at all until Tuesday. Peace.

Surprising Results

I missed Tuesday. At this point, my readership is nothing more than automatic webcrawlers, so I think I have only offended myself.

Shaving at the sink? 4 minutes. That is very surprising to me. I'm going to measure my shaving time in the shower again tomorrow, and see if the time really is 5 minutes. I would not have expected that being able to see my face would cut the total shaving time, even with the additional time of wetting my face again, cleaning up the sink afterward, etc. I hope to report again tomorrow.

Motivation Monday?

Sorry I missed the post on Friday; I was operating on about four hours of sleep, combined with only four hours of sleep the previous night. But Father's Day weekend was awesome! My wife let me sleep nine hours, and she gave me a 24-hour period with no chores!

So, I'm a little refreshed, ready to hit this a bit harder.

But I keep finding myself unable to imagine that shaving at the sink will take less time than shaving in the shower...

One Thing at a Time

It's best not to change multiple things at once. I understand that there are some advanced "Design of Experiments" concepts that allow you to statistically attribute causes even when you change multiple things at once, but I'm a simple man.

Last night, I went grocery shopping. Then I came home, put away groceries, ate dinner, and helped clean the house in preparation for having some friends over for dinner tonight. I got to bed after midnight and got up before five am. BUT I STILL FOLDED AND PUT AWAY THE DIAPERS BEFORE I WENT TO BED. VICTORY.

What do those two paragraphs have to do with each other? Well, I bought new razor blades last night. For the first time in probably five years, I'm shaving with a new blade. If I started shaving at the sink this morning, too, how would I know which change to blame for any improvements? Also, my wife just put a lot of effort into cleaning the sink and I don't want to mess it up.

Tomorrow, though, I fully intend to shave at the sink. And, for the record, I noticed no real difference in the amount of time it took to shave with the new blade, but the process felt better and I think the shave is closer. VICTORY.

Imagination

All right, so I am resolved not to spend money on reducing time. Unless I know that I can spend the time creating income, I have to imagine that there is no net gain economically, only in time. Thus, there is no monetary savings from which to purchase supplies like Tilex.

So what am I to do? The cool kids at LEI with their Lean Thinking talk about how it's generally preferred to attempt to reduce costs without spending a dime. Fancy software? Rarely justified. New tooling? Only considered after Lean principles have been implemented as far as they can go. So, it's time to get imaginative.

Or formulaic. Either one works. Let's return to the SMED steps!

So, the first step was to identify elements of the shower routine I could eliminate. There are none; I need to do all of these. So now the idea is to identify internal and external elements, and see if any internal elements can become external ones.

Since all of the elements have to be done in the morning, it doesn't really matter in terms of my goals whether the elements are internal or external.

This leaves us with optimizing the steps that exist. The biggest target is shaving. I wonder if shaving at the sink will be faster than shaving in the shower. (It'll probably be more accurate and less bleedy.)

$3.15 Seems Astonishingly Low

I was thinking about the $3.15 an hour price tag and how this seems low to me. But then I started to figure that if it costs me $3.15 an hour, I would need to make $75.60 every day to keep my family going. For an eight hour workday, this would be $9.45 an hour, if I worked 7 days a week. For a 40-hour work week, I'd need to make $13.23 an hour. This works out to a little less than 28 kilodollars per year.

All of a sudden, $3.15 an hour seems a little high.

So, spending additional money, say, $7.50 every three months for Tilex, is just additional burden. It would raise the overall figure of $3.15 an hour by almost half a cent, and it wouldn't bring in additional income unless I come up with some task that will take up those two minutes and earn some money. Making money is not really what I intend to do with my morning.

Be it hereby resolved that I do not wish to spend an additional dime to accomplish the 10-minute morning routine. At least, I want to squeeze the routine for every last drop before I resort to spending money.

Motivation Monday! Time is Money!

So, the startling revelation that, if I save an hour of my time doing a task, I effectively make that task cost me $3.15 less (appropriating the cost of keeping my whole family alive for my tasks alone; I don't think there's a big problem with that approximation), gives me something to ponder. The whole concept seems to have a hole in it somewhere, which is exciting.

I'm the kind of guy that loves solving problems, mainly because it leads to understanding. Deming talked about "profound knowledge," and I think I'm a profound knowledge junkie. So, when I see a model that doesn't quite work, that means there's more knowledge to go and get. Exhilarating!

The part of the model that doesn't quite work is how to handle opportunity cost. I know, I presented that it was such a big breakthrough for me to determine the rough estimate of my time cost independent of my income. However, what else am I going to do with the time I save? That time still has the $3.15/hr price tag, but what if I generate income with that time, so that I have a net gain?

I think the model has to be on a task-by-task basis. If I know that a task will have a specific income attached to it, I can figure for that. I think this calls for a holistic schedule with price tags on it!

Thrilling. And I mean that. :-)

$3.15 an hour

Apparently, our cost of existence, for the whole family, is $3.15 an hour.

I figured this by taking all of our monthly expenses (not counting savings, tithe, etc.) and dividing them out over the month. $3.15 an hour is about 5.2 cents a minute. So, if I reduce a task by 2 minutes, it better not cost me more than 10.4 cents to do it. This means that a $7.50 bottle of Tilex would need to last over six months if it saves one minute per day, over three months if it saves two.

This is paradigm-shifting information. I need to think about this for a little while.

How much does a minute cost?

How can I evaluate the cost of a minute?

It's tempting to think of time in terms of how much money I could make if I were working with that time. I could divide out my salary over the course of my year and then know how much my time is worth if I spend it "productively." But that's not really accurate, in my opinion. If I free up a minute, I'm not really using that minute to earn a paycheck. What am I really doing?

I'm reducing the cost of the tasks I'm optimizing. Rather than think about how my income should change if I free up minutes, I should consider that I am paying money to keep myself alive. This amount is somewhat independent from income. I'm not saying that every minute I free up is now billable per my regular pay; I'm saying that each minute I'm alive costs me X dollars and that the task of, say, showering, now costs me less.

So, if I go to Tilex or some other spray to prevent soap scum and mildew, rather than use a squeegie and a towel, I need to quantify the costs of the task for either alternative. Time costs money. So does Tilex. So does infrequent squeegie replacement and regular towel-washing. Let's assume that the squeegie is replaced twice a year and that washing the towel costs nothing. How much does Tilex cost?

$7.50.

Tomorrow I'll try to figure out how much a minute costs, which should be useful for all kinds of things in the future.

Showering

Showering. It uses up a considerable amount of time each morning.



So there's your proof. 16 minutes out of 41 were spent on the "Showering" category. What are the elements that comprise a shower?

I don't want to get too...um...technical, but here's a quick breakdown of how my morning went, including shower details:



So, what's the first step? Eliminate unnecessary elements. I would challenge "washing the wall," which is a process involving squeegie-ing the tile walls, then wiping all of the walls with a towel. This is to prevent the buildup of soap scum and/or the development of mildew. The cost is 3 minutes a person a day. Is there a faster way? And, if so, is it worth it?