Living lean: The management system for your household

On her latest family holiday, Christine Manby follows the modus operandi of Eva Jarlsdotter’s book ‘The Lean and Happy Home’ – to the chagrin of her companions

Jarlsdotter suggests managing the home as companies manage an office, with organisation and planning (iStock)

As an early adopter of Marie Kondo’s KonMari method as outlined in her international bestseller The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I’ve long been convinced of the joy of Japanese lifestyle hacks. I’ve decluttered. I’ve bid whole charity shops’ worth of clothes “goodbye” with a vote of thanks. I’ve rested my socks and folded pants into tiny little packages.

So naturally, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on The Lean and Happy Home: 7 easy ways to create order in your family and find joy and calm at home by former journalist Eva Jarlsdotter. She isn’t Japanese – she’s Swedish – but the methods she espouses are based on management techniques first developed at Toyota. There’s endless jargon-filled literature on Lean but in brief it’s about creating a management and organisational culture in which every employee works to maximise customer value and minimise waste by examining manufacturing “streams”. Jarlsdotter believes it could work at home too.

She explains: “In the family and in the home, we are hard on one another’s love, trust and self-esteem; we put a strain on the environment and on ourselves, and many people waste resources – both time and money. Lean curtails that wastefulness. Persistent work with Lean can dramatically reduce waste and create a more sustainable, harmonious home – and ultimately, a more sustainable society ... Lean is about keeping an eye on every stream, and recognising what truly creates value, and what is pure waste. It’s about untangling all the knots to create smooth and easy processes.”