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1) Daily walkthrough of house to (objectively!) assess cleanliness and tidiness of each room<br/>
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Observations and time-to-clean will be logged in a google spreadsheet on a per-room basis.<br/>
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When the house stays clean (i.e. I have time and energy to complete the optimized routine) and I can't cut any more time off of cleaning each room/area, I'll consider this done. |
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The mind builds a model of everything around it. A cluttered environment therefore produces a cluttered mind. I'll enjoy the free and clear feeling of a less-cluttered mind as the house becomes cleaner. |
Optimize House Cleaning
Created Sep 28, 2009
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Comments & Observations
Lizzy Great experiment idea! I am so curious to see what you learn. Any particular tools that will help improve efficiency?
Sep 29, 2009
Matthew Cornell Wow - seems a rigorous top-down approach. Very thorough, Brock. I'd also want to hear what your definition of "Good Enough" is. Cleanliness + lowering standards = relief, esp. for new parents. (I'm still trying to convince my wife about that one...)
Sep 30, 2009
Brock Tice This one's off to a rocky start, partly because I'm still catching up from our impromptu trip to Canada. I made some observations on a voice recorder and timed some cleaning, but I haven't made a regular thing of it yet, nor recorded my results.
Oct 01, 2009
Brock Tice Aha! Created a Jott list for 'Cleaning' and walked through the house doing a quick jott of each room. Was then able to quickly paste into the spreadsheet that you now see embedded. First walkthrough and spreadsheet creation took about 17 minutes. Should be much quicker in the future, now that I've got the structure in place. Next going to tidy a bit.
Oct 01, 2009
Brock Tice Dining room tidied and vacuumed: 17 minutes
Dishes handled (clean-put away, dirty-dishwasher or washed): 29 minutes
Ran out of time scheduled for this task today, but I think it was a good start. Nice to have numbers, to say, "Oh, I have about 20 minutes before bed -- just enough time to clean up the dining room!"
Oct 01, 2009
Lizzy [Liza] Brock I like how you are breaking this down into "time buckets", very agile. That's a great way to look at house chores "what can I do in ten minutes". I tend to see everything all at once and get overwhelmed. I am going to try your suggestion here and think of smaller tasks.
Oct 01, 2009
Matthew Cornell Quantitative analysis has been helpful to me too. Often something takes less time than I expect, and realizing this helps overcome mental resistance. Example: When I'm putting my bike away in our basement after a hard ride, I am reminded (by a flashing light, no less) that I need to empty our dehumidifier. My thought is always that I don't have time for it or I'm too tired. Actual time to do: literally about one minute.
Looking forward to more insights.
Oct 02, 2009
Brock Tice Time to sort clean basket of laundry: 2 min
Time to fold/put away: 3 min
Total time to process a laundry basket: 5min
(these times logged in the spreadsheet under the miscellaneous tab)
Could cut folding time if I didn't have to fold my black t-shirts (of which I have about 25-30 total). Hmm... I need a t-shirt-sized drawer. Already don't fold or sort socks or undies (socks are all identical).
Oct 02, 2009
Brock Tice Shaved 1 min off of dishwasher unloading time by focusing on grouping items by their destination (this cabinet, that cabinet, this drawer, etc). Not enough trials to say whether it's a statistically significant improvement. Logged in kitchen tab.
Oct 02, 2009
Matthew Cornell not folding: me too! dishwasher unloading: I batch too. I play a game where I unload as fast as possible. Speed is limited by workflow - where shelves and drawers are located relative to the washer. Grouping is a classic challenge, akin to filing: Do you prioritize storage speed or retrieval?
Oct 02, 2009
Brock Tice I (we) load the dishwasher in such a way as to optimize cleaning and capacity. Unloading is done selectively by location, binned into top rack and bottom rack runs. I could get more speed if we optimized for retrieval when loading, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the cleaning and capacity.
Oct 02, 2009
Brock Tice Baby's laundry took longer to sort, more pieces and more variety among pieces. House has remained cleaner since yesterday -- progress!
Oct 02, 2009
Brock Tice Need to create a paper rap sheet for going through the rooms. I like Jotting but unfortunately the babbling of a certain young one is both inconveniently timed and confusing to Jott. This has been holding up my regular house scans.
Oct 05, 2009
Matthew Cornell RAP sheet: Record of Arrest and Prosecution!
Oct 06, 2009
Brock Tice Matt: Re RAP sheet -- I'm cracking down! (on untidiness and dirt)
Oct 06, 2009
Brock Tice Haven't had a chance to clean much. We've kept the kitchen clean but the rest is falling behind. RAP sheet updated.
Oct 07, 2009
Dan Owen I gather the time tracking/time bucket info for all kinds of tasks, particularly when I'm trying to reinforce a new habit. One of my personal obstacles involves being intimidated by the Cloud of Uncertainty that surrounds new tasks. This involves a conviction that, on the one hand, seemingly simple tasks conceal -- like a submerged iceberg -- huge time-sucking obligations; and, on the other hand, that the opportunity cost of a task is enormous. I recently avoided putting the garbage and recyclables out at the curb for three weeks because I knew it would involve also doing a dozen contingent, time-consuming tasks (that I'd also been postponing, making them even more time consuming), and that starting in on this would involve breaking off doing an enormous emergency project that needed lots of momentum behind it to keep going (and that I'd also been postponing, make it even more of an emergency). I also find that the simple act of getting these kinds of maintenance tasks onto a checklist works wonders, and sometimes I assign duration times to the items on the checklist. Sometimes just getting out the checklist is enough to kick off doing the work itself.
30 black tee-shirts -- I love it!
Oct 11, 2009
Matthew Cornell Dan: Great comment. "Cloud of Uncertainty" goes into the IdeaMatt phrase file :-)
Oct 15, 2009
Brock Tice Suspending this for now (need an option to suspend!). I found that mainly I just need to vacuum the dining room and kitchen floors every few days (when there are too many things I'm afraid my daughter will put in her mouth). That combined with keeping on top of cleaning dishes and handling the dishwasher takes care of most of the cleanliness issues in the house. All the rest is an order of magnitude less important.
I would like to return to this a bit more empirically later.
Oct 21, 2009
Matthew Cornell Congratulations on your experiment, Brock. Thanks for sharing! I'll enter the "suspend/resume" request into the database.
Oct 22, 2009
Matthew Cornell > Suspending this for now (need an option to suspend!).
We just added the simplest implementation of this, based on your request, Brock. You can now edit an experiment's run state ("Running" and "Completed"). No more "Are you sure?" popup when you complete an experiment, too. Enjoy!
Oct 03, 2010