If you have had a chance to read Lifestyle Redesigned, you have started to get familiar with applying Lean thinking to the processes you do every day. Now I am going to let you in on a little secret that I didn’t cover in the book.

Lean thinking encourages quick changeovers between tasks. This usually comes up when you are talking about batch processing (doing one step many times or for larger quantities before moving onto the next step). The Lean gurus will tell you to keep your batch sizes small to minimize wait time and inventory, and focus on making the transition between tasks simpler and quicker so you won’t feel the need to complete tasks in large batches.

If you can avoid extra steps in switching between tasks and make that switching effortless, then you will feel freed up to break up that process however it best suits you. While I am not going to talk about batch processing today, I am going to look at shortening up a changeover between tasks.

For a moment here I am going to speak as a mom of 3 kids ages 5 and under. If you are in a similar stage of life it won’t take much imagination on your part to understand what I am talking about. If you are just someone wanting to become more efficient (or more consistent, or more effective) at your household tasks, try to put yourself in the shoes of a busy mom to grasp this concept.

As a busy mom I may not actually get more than a few minutes to do anything in the day without interruption during daylight hours. So how would I most successfully handle a task like cleaning the bathroom? If it requires taking out a bucket of cleaning chemicals, rags, and brushes, putting on gloves, and systematically scrubbing every surface, I may not actually make time to do that task very often because I just can’t bring myself to get up before the kids are awake to do it. And realistically I don’t have a 15 minute chunk of uninterrupted time during the day to make it happen.

Here is where I am going to propose a different way of doing the bathroom, for when you can’t devote a chunk of time to do it all at once. What if you could do it in pieces? If you view it as a series of small tasks that take next to no time at all, can you squeeze one of them in each time you go into the bathroom during the day?

For example, maybe on Mondays when you wake up, you give the toilet bowl a quick swipe.

A little while later when you are washing your face, you wipe down the sinks and counters.

When you get a shower in the evening, you scrub down the shower stall while you are in there.

Do you see how these little bite sized pieces don’t have to be done all at once?

You might be thinking, “Well I don’t want to have to take out the cleaning products so many times in a day. That seems like a waste of time. And if I leave them out, the kids will have dangerous chemicals within reach.”

And you are partially right. If you need different products and supplies for each step, this is really going to be a pain and it won’t save you any time at all. This is where the changeover I mentioned earlier comes into play. What if you could clean your entire bathroom with only water, a toilet brush, and two small cloths? Changeover would be almost non-existent.

You can actually clean your bathroom with only water!

A good quality cloth like Norwex that lifts grime and germs off the surface allows you to clean your entire bathroom in pieces because there is minimal setup involved. Putting away your supplies is just as easy, as it only requires you to rinse, ring it out, and hang the cloths to dry. Norwex cloths actually resist the growth of bacteria when rinsed and dried between uses (and occasionally washed in the laundry). My favorites for this purpose are the Bathroom Scrub Mitt or a Scrubby Corner Cloth, and a Window Cloth for the mirror.

Note: If you haven’t been able to make time to clean your bathroom in a while and its become really grimy, you may want to do one deep cleaning with your old products before you switch to a new water-only method. But after that, weekly cleaning really can be done in pieces with just water and a Norwex cloth.

I keep a Bathroom Scrub Mitt in each bathroom, and when I have a moment I just wet it a little and wipe down a surface. I then rinse, ring it out, and hang it to dry. Later when I take a shower, I wipe down the shower stall with it. I touch up the mirror with a few drops of water on the Window Cloth the next time I go in there. I am not pulling out strong chemicals and having to lock them up again, and I am not having to stash a bunch of yucky rags after each time I clean a piece of the bathroom. The time it takes to do a quick wipe-down of something while I am already in the bathroom is really negligible because there isn’t any prep work or cleaning up (of the clean-up supplies, ironically) after the tasks is finished.

Do you see how a quick changeover gives you the freedom to break up a process into manageable pieces? When you don’t have large chunks of time to dedicate to a single process, being able to split it to work it into your day may mean the difference between cleaning your bathroom once a week or once a month.

What are some ways you have simplified the changeover between tasks, whether cleaning your bathroom or something else you do regularly?