Every Day, Little Up

We get asked the question “How do you do it all?” any time someone hears the list of things that we have done/are doing/will be doing soon.  It is quite true that we have a lot going on.  We have two kids who each have activities and play dates.  We both work – me for 55 hours a week including commute and Jeremy varying amounts by season.  I am active in the local Transition group promoting sustainable living in a variety of ways in Lawrence.  I teach workshops on canning, food storage, localizing the economy and a variety of gardening topics.  I co-organize a community garden for the Ronald McDonald House in Kansas City.  I teach childbirth classes one day a week for 2-3 hours.  And we grow food – lots of it.  We’ve also managed to build a greenhouse, a barn, a cob oven and a variety of other projects over the last few years and now we’re building a farm.  With all that, we manage to have a little bit of a social life and occasionally even talk to each other.

Are you tired yet?  We are too, so don’t feel bad. 

So how do we accomplish all this?  At work, I do a fair bit of Lean Manufacturing stuff.  For those of you not at all familiar with what “Lean” is in an organization, it’s the management/problem solving philosophy that pushed Toyota to the #1 carmaker spot a few years ago and is responsible for many fortune 500 companies managing to revolutionize their businesses.  It centers around continuous improvement and solving the real cause of problems.  If you’re wondering why this has anything to do with this blog post, hang on – I’m getting there!

One of the stories I read as part of learning about Lean really struck me.  There was an older Japanese man who was a lean consultant to an American company.  He spoke English but not perfectly.  As the plant manager and the consultant walked around the manufacturing plant for the first time, the consultant was dismayed by the lack of regular, continuous improvement activities happening.  Every change had to be approved, debated, discussed and modified by several levels of management before it could move forward.  This resulted in very few changes happening and a workforce that was completely dis-engaged from doing anything to improve their workplace.  In other words, this company was losing out and getting nowhere.  After trying to convey the idea that continuous improvement must be a way of life – change and progress must be normal, everyday occurrences – the consultant became frustrated.  Finally, he told the plant manager “Every day, little up”.  Every day, do something to improve.  Every day, lift yourself a little higher.

That phrase has taken a life of its own for us and really embodies what we try to do.  Each day we try to do something that moves us forward.  Some days it’s really small – I managed to hang 2 sets of blinds Sunday, for example.  Some days it’s huge like when we move 10 cubic yards of dirt in a day or plant 100 strawberry plants and 350 onions.  The important thing is there’s something every day.  The quote doesn’t say “Every day change your entire world”.  It says make a little change every day.

We weren’t always this way.  We used to think that if we didn’t have at least half a day to devote to working on something, it just wasn’t worth taking the time to start.  We used to think that if we couldn’t finish the whole project in a day, we should wait until we could.  It’s no surprise that if you wait until you have a whole day with nothing at all going on, you’ll be waiting a long time.  We also used to get paralyzed thinking about all the things that we needed to do.  It can get really overwhelming. 

Then came this quote and a convergence of other factors (read “super stressed out time”) that made us reconsider our perspective.  We started breaking things into smaller pieces.  We gave ourselves permission to put something down today and pick it back up again tomorrow.  We started looking for the opportunities to use the extra 10 minutes we have here or there to do something to move us forward.  Where I used to think “I have 10 minutes before I have to leave for work, there isn’t anything I can do in just 10 minutes.”  Now I have a whole list of things that I know I can do in 10 minutes.  I can weed a small patch of garden in 10 minutes.  I can knit or crochet a row or two in 10 minutes.  I can work on a blog post for 10 minutes.  I can clean the counters or fold a load of laundry or harvest lettuce for dinner in 10 minutes.  If I don’t have enough time to finish a whole project, can I at least do half?  A quarter?  10 percent?  Something? 

So that’s all there is behind being able to do lots of stuff.  You just have to do it, and keep doing it, and then keep doing it some more.  Eventually, you’ll look back and be amazed.  “Every day, little up” adds up to a lot in less time than you think!