5S

2025-09-26

Sneha, my wife, offhanded said ‘do you want to kanban our life?’ Keep everything in a place, label everything. I think she was joking or making fun of me. But I thought about it and I think I would love it. I do have some mild OCD for sure and I would love to buy a ton of plastic boxes, label them, and keep everything in a place. I think that it would work really well for a bunch of stuff, toiletries, cleaning stuff, cooking stuff.

I really want to put all of our spices in identical glass bottles, put them in a drawer, and label them. Right now they are kind of a hodge podge of shapes and sizes. I would love for them to be uniform and well labeled. I would love to only have unique bottles, a single bottle for ground cinnamon (instead of two or three) etc. I think uniformity helps my brain.

Also one thing that would be wonderful is to have a uniform set of dishes, so if one breaks we can buy another identical one. We could stack them really nicely, keep all of our places in one place and all of our bowls in another. We could have a single shelf for cups (instead of the three or so we have now). We could have one set of formal dishes for guests and one set of every dishes for us.

I think these are pie in the sky ideas, we are both pretty cheap and dont want to throw away our dishes and buy new ones. Also I think Sneha loves variety, fun tea cups for drinking tea, mugs for coffee, mickey mouse glasses for something (I dont know). We also have gotten dishes as gifts, which is nice, but it adds to our bohemian dish variety and dont match any set.

So I dont think we will implement any lean manufacturing principles in our house. But it was nice to think about, it would be fun if everything had a place and was labeled.

-Gary