Apply concept of Kaizen in Personal life
The remarkable progress made by Japanese Industry after World War II was due to “KAIZEN”. It is a simple & rather unimpressive concept of seeking continuous improvement. Let us understand it with an example. When Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the “Assembly line” concept it was a revolutionary change affected top down. Hypothetically speaking, let us assume that the car went through 40 work stations from start to finish & spent 5 minutes at each work station. Small improvements in efficiency of labor & management (KAIZEN) reduced the time spent from 5 minutes to 4 minutes & 40 seconds, over a period of one month. This 20 seconds reduction will have a cumulative effect of raising production, lowering production cost & providing a competitive advantage to a producer over a rival continuing to take 5 minutes.
Apply the concept of Kaizen in Daily Life
We can apply the concept of Kaizen in our daily lives as follows:-
- Reducing the time to take bath and change for school, or work.
- Finish a routine assignment slightly faster.
- Read a page of book faster with greater concentration and better assimilation.
- Study your daily routine and assess the time wasting activities and reduce them.
- Fill up idle time, like travel, etc, with productive work like listening to a recorded valuable program
- If a subject you are studying becomes boring, switch to a different subject which is interesting and read it with enthusiasm.
- My team of top Boxers could do 4 sets of 40 pushups plus 40 sit ups in less than 10 minutes!
- The applicability of the concept is limited only by our imagination!
- Have clear work or study goals whenever you work, or study, with specified time allocation. If you do the work faster, then reward yourself with a break, or treat!