Get Home. Get Shit Done and Relax. Wrong!

There is a smarter way to get peace, calm and quiet into your life

Do you ever feel that you need to be highly effective all the time? That it is almost a requirement to continue to increase your personal efficiency at work?

Are you as stressed by tasks and goals at home as at work?

It’s not just you! The internet is swarming with articles about personal efficiency, effectiveness, and techniques to stop procrastination and get more work done. “Work smarter, not harder” is a slogan most workplaces throw around like candy.

It may not be all about LEAN anymore but has been translated into many other terms, with many of the same goals.

“To get more work done with less effort. To be more efficient.”

I have been working lean for most of my career and been working with personal efficiency for the past 12 years. I know I am extremely efficient. I can get more work done in 20 minutes (Pomodoro) than most people can in two hours.

What about your private life?

Do you take the same techniques home and build efficient routines for you and your family? I do. I can clean my house in an hour and have a morning routine so efficient that it only takes me minutes.

All with the sole purpose of getting more time to relax! If you get all your chores done in less time, there must be more time available to relax, right?

It seems you are not as relaxed and laid back as you might expect. Not lounging on the couch feeling relaxed all weekend? No, instead you stress over the many ”chores” around the house that needs doing.

You may buy appliances to help you live life more efficiently. Let’s start with the dishwasher. I love the dishwasher! I just came home from a camping trip and doing dishes by hand is not fun at all. No, I want the efficiency of the dishwasher to take care of that chore as quickly as possible.

The same goes for cutting hedges. Do you want to spend all Sunday cutting the copious amounts of hedges you have around your house? No, right? So with an electric trimmer, at least that is more efficient. And without brakes, maybe it can be done in no time?

I have about 60 meters of hedges around my garden. It takes hours to trim them with my electrical hedge trimmer. And I have to do it twice a year. Every spring I look at the hedge one weekend after another thinking about the chore of trimming it and until recently I hated it.

But that has changed!

There is another way!

It is about doing a 180 on hedge trimming. Dishwashing. Folding clothes. Ironing shirts. And much more.

Throughout most of your life, you are taught to be goal-oriented. To complete a goal releases endorphins and that feels so good. You get sh*t done.

And I am good at it. So good that my family can’t follow my speed all the time. Especially the young ones (5 & 8).

So why do we act like this?

First — let’s blame it on society

That is always the easiest. The human species seems to be working at making everything more efficient all of the time, even to a degree where we may become redundant in the workplace (AI and all that jazz). But let’s not go there.

Let’s stay small.

The workplace then. We implement lean processes and Pomodoro techniques all over the place. We work with KPI’s and say efficiency and productivity in every other sentence.

With Corona, we have learned that many office workers can get even more sh*t done when they work fewer hours from home. Great! Productivity increase and less office space needed.

But is that the problem?

Or are you like me, a bit too focused on completing goals? On getting that little shot of dopamine when you can tick off an item on a to-do list?

The problem is not society and not your workplace.

The problem is that you are taking the same tools from one arena to another.

Productivity and efficiency are really good when you are at work!

But not at home. At home, you should relax and enjoy your life with your kids and your partner, your friends, and your family.

But what about the chores, you may ask?

The dishes still need to get done. And the hedge needs get trimmed.

I know. You are right. They do.

The trick is to stop seeing them as goals to be completed.

Stop thinking about goals. You are not at work.

And stop calling them chores by the way. They are not. They are just part of life.

What you need to do is focus on the process of doing. The process of living.

Doing the dishes can be a time of quiet and relaxation.

I said I love the dishwasher. I still do. I didn’t learn this from the dishwasher. Or from a yoga course or sitting on a mountain top in quiet contemplation for a week living on roots and berries.

Nope. I decided that I like gardening and that trimming hedges should be an activity of relaxation. So I bought a new trimmer. An old-school manual scissor-like trimmer.

Instead of trimming hedges for two hours in now takes me around eight. So I do it over two weekends.

It’s ok that the garden doesn’t look perfect. That’s a goal and I don’t care about goals at home. (I have to keep saying it for a while yet, to get it under my skin).

As you may notice on the right. I am still not completely done so I have a few hours of relaxation left for the weekend.

So what is my point with all this rambling on about dishes and hedges?

Takeaway

Finding peace and quiet in your free time may not be about efficiently getting through chores. Turn it upside down. Do things slower than usual. Do some dishes by hand.

Find joy and relaxation in the things you have to do anyway by a focus on being in the process.

And stay efficient and productive at work. We still need that. ;-)