Save Money with Fast Recipes as an alternative to Fast Food / Restaurants
Given the ~$15 per person minimum cost to eat somewhere, I wanted to share the concept behind our 2 minute/day Speed Cooking book.
Concept: Faster than Fast Food
Fast food takes some transportation time, order time, waiting, and further transportation time. A re-order delivery is going to beat us, but we can beat a trip to a Fast Food Restaurant ~5 minutes.
We will only count active time as most Fast Recipes take 20+ minutes to cook. You are at home during this 20 minutes of passive time, I can’t think of a better location to use those 20 minutes. Grocery shopping is also not counted in the total time, if you need to bring this time down, I suggest a 4 week schedule of recipes, pick the week you like and it has all groceries needed for the week sorted by isle(See EIE 21$/week).
How To: Faster Than 1000 Calories/Minute.
Everything is throw and go. Meats, potatoes, vegetables, nothing is ever cut into smaller pieces. If you want a vegetable cut, you will need to pay the grocery store premium(We do this for baby carrots).
Nothing is measured. Spices are added fast. Do not pick recipes or spices where slightly too much or too little will ruin it. Fewer spices is faster, however, a motivated chef can put in a dozen spices in far less than a minute.
Typically store bought sauces are used to save time, but taste and cost varies greatly. We personally have 1 exception, and that is to make a ultra massive pot of red Italian sauce. The job is quite easy, open cans of tomato sauce, add herbs, salt, sugar, some baking soda(Life Pro Tip), maybe ground beef. Let it cook and stir every ~30 minutes until it gets to boil. After it boils, turn it off, let it cool, and freeze into ~40 containers.
The big deal: Passive cooking only. Slow cookers, ovens, rice cookers, air fryers, maybe a pot of water if the pot is tall enough that water wont boil over. Nothing can be flipped or touched. Remember that its Throw and Go.
Ideas and Examples
Here are two examples, one from Speed Cooking and another from an upcoming ‘This Time The Food Tastes Good’. Note how many servings these make. Leftovers are the goal to save you time.
Two Minute Broccoli/Chicken Sesame Rice
This is my wife’s favorite. Basically pick out some sauces from the Asian isle at the grocery store. If the sauce is the name of a dish you like, its a safe bet to try it. This is a summary from the book Speed Cooking.
Steps:
- In a rice cooker, add rice and water. Turn on the rice cooker.
- Put chicken or broccoli on a pan and place it in the oven. Turn the oven on to 325°F (163°C) for 45 minutes.
- On a plate, place the cooked rice, and your choice of either broccoli or chicken. Add your preferred sauce at the table.
You may have a gigantic chicken breast on your plate. Time to enjoy conversation with family or TV while you cut the chicken breast into manageable pieces. The goal is to save you time in the kitchen, and give you more time you actually enjoy.
5 Minute Biryani
This one was so good, my surprised Dad chased people around the house telling them to eat it.
Servings: 3300 Calories, ~6 servings
You have 2 minutes to put these ingredients in a slow cooker, if you can’t find a spice quickly, move on, it will taste fine. You also might want to double the spices if you prefer extra aroma. We do not.
In a slowcooker add:
- Chicken (or Potatoes) – 2-3 breasts, and any chicken scraps you’ve been saving.
- Water – ~1 cup, ensuring the slow cooker does not dry out. Excess water is beneficial as it mixes with the rice later.
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 2 tsp garlic powder
- 2 tsp onion powder
- 2 tsp cumin
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 2-3 tbsp sugar, depending on your desired sweetness
In a rice cooker:
- 4 cups basmati rice – It’s quite important to use this type of rice for the intended flavor. Other types of rice can be used, but the taste experience may vary.
- 6 cardamom pods
- 1 star anise
- 10 cloves
- 2 tsp salt
Final steps moments before serving in the slow cooker:
- (deliciously optional) 8 tbsp ghee/butter/veg oil/veg shortening/peanut oil
- Cooked basmati rice, you can optionally take the cardamon pods, star of anise, and cloves out. Or just avoid eating it later. To save time, you can basically skim the top layer of rice, depends on how much waste you are okay with.
Now stir everything really good, you have less than 1 minute left. Serve and Enjoy.
By the way I never seem to get the salt right, I always salt a second time at the table.
Math:
8 cups cooked rice * 200 calories/cup = 1600 calories
3 chicken breasts * 250 calories = 750 calories
8 tbsp oils * 120 = 960 calories
Enjoy The Freedom
Save money, save time. These low effort meals are my personal favorite. Get excited about a future speed cooking style book, we figured out how to make Chicken Pot Pie in under 5 minutes of active time. For now, our even faster, but not as tasty Speed Cooking book.
Save Time with 1 minute races- Can you finish your task time?
There does not seem to be a direct Industrial Engineering principle or tool here, but I’d like to propose a new tool: The 1 minute race.
The concept being, take a job that takes a somewhat short amount of time, like ~5 minutes, and see what that job looks like complete after a 1 minute sprint.
This may cause you to find innovations out of necessity. Sometimes you do silly things that fail, other times you do ridiculous things that save you so much time you change your routine forever.
The Goal- Don’t lose the spirit by sticking to the letter
The goal here is to save time by finding innovation, tracking task time, and motivating yourself to work quickly(scientifically works).
When doing my own, I found myself taking 1 minute and 39 seconds to do a daily task I previously thought took about 5 minutes. This is a huge win, 3 minutes saved over the next 50 years is 912 hours saved(or visualized as 112 days working!). This was on the first try, and even if I was unable to further refine the process, I should be happy about the lessons I learned and the ~1000 lifetime hours saved.
You can also cut the time down further, we have a goal of getting the kids in each car seat in 30s. When that got too easy 10s.
Ideas
I apologize about the tone below, constantly asking the question. It just felt like if I wasnt direct, it wouldn’t be clear.
Morning Routine
Can you shower in 1 minute? Or at least do things like wash hair/shave/soap each in 1 minute?
Can you style your hair in 1 minute?
Can you do each makeup product in 1 minute? Or your entire makeup process?
Can you pick out your clothes in 1 minute?
Kitchen
Can you get all kitchen ingredients needed out? (This one isnt as good, because if you make a mistake you lost some time, however depending on the time savings, you might be better off going for a second trip)
Can you load (or unload) the bottom rack of the dishwasher in 1 minute? The top rack?
Can you start the rice/noodles/slowcooker recipe/passive cooking in 1 minute?
Can you add all the herbs and spices in 1 minute?(This is best for recipes where spice quantities do not need to be exact, indian and mexican food are great for this)
Laundry
Can you start the laundry in 1 minute? Including transportation time, you may need to literally run.
Move the laundry to the dryer in 1 minute. If that isnt hard enough, include the time it takes to transport yourself to the dryer.
Kids
With these, there is definitely less freedom for the kid. An uncooperative kid will have their body contorted as the parents need.
Can you get each kid dressed in 1 minute?
Can you get each belted in the car, from living room to car in 1 minute?
Cleaning
Can you clean your floor for vacuuming in under 1 minute?
Can you wipe the surface in under 1 minute? Can you get it spotless?
Pets
Can you feed/water your pet in 1 minute? How about all of the pets?
Home improvement/fixes
Can you find a solution to the problem you’ve been procrastinating on for months in 1 minute? If you already know the solution, can you find the exact first steps in 1 minute? Got that too? What about the first minute of the job? Maybe the problem was all mental. (Although, when I use this trick, I usually require myself to work on the task for 10 minute before evaluating how much it sucks. After 10 minutes, I usually think the task isn’t so bad.)
Single-minute exchange of die(SMED) Applied to life
The closest principle I found to this was called SMED. They break up this even into two types: Internal Tasks and External Tasks. Internal Tasks are those during the 1 minute when you are live working on something. Its suggested to reduce the time of internal tasks, to move as much as possible to external tasks. External tasks cover everything else. As an example, if you were trying to get your clothes on in under 1 minute, try to envision ahead of time what outfit you are going to wear so you don’t need to think about it during that 1 minute.
Only other generic tip is to remind you to use the right tools/tech and have your process/tool locations/material locations standardized.
Continuous Improvement
According to the textbook, once you have a good process, you have two possible futures: degradation or improvement. Thus the concept of continuous improvement.
However, today I’ll give an alternative take: Its probably impossible to continuously improve every 1 minute process you’ve ever done. Even if you did, you are quickly going to run into diminishing returns/pareto principle. It was easy to shave 3 minutes, its hard to shave another 20 seconds.
My advice here, go for continuous improvement, but don’t let it take energy that could be devoted to better causes. I have my 1 minute hair routine down, it would be nice to get even faster, but I’m not going to hyper analyze my 1 minute hair routine. Its already good.
Stop trying so hard and save time – Overprocessing Waste
I dedicate this article to my wife, who seems to make the fanciest desserts on Tuesday mornings at 6am, just so we can have some and maybe give some to the in-laws. The in-laws are dieting btw, their frontal lobe(thinking) doesnt want desserts, even if the hypothalamus wants it. If we just wanted to appease the hypothalamus, why not get any store bought or simple to make treat?
Overprocessing – Doing less to save more time
If you aren’t leaving home(or recording yourself), would you spend time to fix up your appearance? No, that is Overprocessing waste. You have no hair requirements, yet you are meeting a specification required when people see you.
Are you Overprocessing?
Kitchen
Meal quality. The following take time, and its debatable if they taste better than their disassembled counterparts that can be made quicker and in bulk: Perogis/Ravolli/dumplings/samosas/empanadas, homemmade noodes/gnocchi, Sushi, stuffed peppers.
Cutting food: Its easier and faster to cut an onion 5×5 into cubes than 20×20 diced. This one depends on the recipe, but the general idea is that if you can get away with doing 7 cuts instead of 8 cuts, save the time.
Slow or Traditional favorites require modern solutions: When making things like Perogis/Ravolli/dumplings/samosas/empanadas, everyone has their own rules you must abide by. I ignore this in favor of the fastest way to seal this food, which is usually my fingers, fork, or tool. No egg wash, no fancy twist. When doing slow recipes, consider what is actually important: Is it the ancient process? Or the flavors and textures of the food?
A dessert is going to taste great, why try hard: Sugar and fat tastes good, I can relent on special events and holidays. If there was some expectation(a Wedding) for fancy desserts and you are going to DIY it(save money), it should be relatively high quality(spend time). Or if you were going to spend time with family/friends making fancy Christmas cookies one time per year, its a special, pleasurable, occasion rather than something you are trying to save time on.
Bulk food prepping unrelated foods: Sometimes I’ll see videos of someone doing a ‘Sunday Meal Prep’ making like 3 entirely different meals, packing them in neat little containers, and asking me to subscribe. At home, I’ll typically just make regular dinner, but 2-3x the size the family eats. We were going to cook dinner anyway, so we get time savings from only taking out ingredients once and only cleaning up once. You still must spend extra time comes from processing the extra material by cutting and cooking. If you do insist on a ‘Sunday Meal Prep’, consider the time savings are in reducing the taking out and cleaning up, every extra pan dirtied and every extra trip to the cupboard/refrigerator is your lost savings.
The best breakfast? Does it need waffles
I once read a line “>2018 >Still eating for taste”, and it was profound. Not everything you eat needs to taste good, it can taste okay, it can taste bland. During the ~50% of meals I eat at a TV, I’m more invested in the content than the flavor of food. This can also be used for nutritious purposes, instead of adding extra fats and sugars, I’ll eat something healthier and just pick out a great video.
Laundry
Is Folding/hanging necessary? My dress shirts are hung to eliminate wrinkles, this is value added. My gym shirts are quickly tossed into a drawer, I don’t care about wrinkles when working out. There may be value added in folding clothes for space saving reasons, but if you can get away with unfolded, unhung, 0 effort laundry, you should take the opportunities when they exist.
Who knows if Ironing makes a difference in your life. Will spending 5 minutes a day ironing your clothes get you closer to a promotion or getting a Significant Other? I would probably put that 30 minutes/week(25 hrs/yr) into something with a better return on investment, like reading a non-fiction book that is relevant to your life/field/interests or learning a useful skill/hobby(Sewing if you are really into appearance).
Wash clothes less. Pretty obvious here, only wash when needed. No sweat, no stains, no smells, looks good to be worn again.
wear difficult to process clothes even less. My favorite daily work shirt is a polo that is made out of some non-wrinkle fabric like a polyester spandex blend
Kids
“Who wants to get Ice Cream?” Does not need to be said in a quiet and happy house. How much work are you creating for yourself to get everyone dressed, shoes on, and transport yourself? ~10-20 minutes? What does this cost? $10-20? How much joy out of unhealthy calories do you get, ~5-10 minutes? Is it worth it
Do you need to cut your toddler’s food? Toddlers can handle eating things in multiple bites, we don’t need to feed them like babies forever.
Do you need to peel your kid’s oranges and apples? Kids are capable of peeling their own oranges (clementines), apples don’t need to be peeled.
One time my kid insisted on eating the Biryani cold, ok. She ate it all. Easier than warming it up. I’ve been curious to have cold Biryani since.
What’s for lunch? For some reason my family has the tendency to make fresh lunches instead of eating leftovers or ready-to-eat foods like carrots or granola. You can pack lunches in 2-3 minutes, it does not need to be a 15 minute activity.
Create Time with a baby
Add Time
Need 5 minutes for some reason? Tummy time, they are going to cry because its hard, but its good exercise. While my Doctor of Physical Therapy wife would not exactly recommend leaving the room for some legal purpose… Your kid is probably going to be crying for 5 minutes during tummy time, you are going to hear silence if something is wrong. For a normal baby, you can start tummy time at 2 days old. My favorite process is: Baby is crying, put them in tummy time for 5 minutes while I get the bottle ready, feed them the bottle, put them to bed. (If someone wants to be famous, do a scientific study to see how 5 minutes of tummy time, 3x per day affects SIDS rates)
Baby proof an area. We fenced off our entire living room with a baby/pet fence for our first kid. This peace knowing there was nothing dangerous they could get into, gave us freedom to do work in the kitchen. We might have overpaid for our baby fence, but it was well worth it. At 3 kids, the entire home is already baby proofed, so we don’t use fences or gates too much.
Teach your baby to hold the bottle. If our baby was in daycare, they learned this quickly. Basically when the baby is strong and coordinated enough to play with the bottle, its time to start teaching them to hold the bottle. The type of bottle you use may impact this, some bottles are easier to hold than others. Put their hands on the bottle and let go. Do this for a few weeks during feedings and bottle feedings just became recreational rather than necessary. My wife and I can attest to how much fun it is to bottle feed before bed as our usually hyper baby passes out in our arms.
Don’t rock your baby to sleep (every time). That 10-20 minutes you spend rocking your baby to sleep is time that your baby could be learning to fall asleep by themselves. I recently received a text message from a friend that asked ‘at what age do kids sleep without rocking them?’ referring to their 2 year old. I start this when the baby is a few weeks old, especially if the baby is fed, changed, and burped.
Multitask
Do chores with the baby, especially when they are fussy. A baby carrier is best if you are planning on a long session, but even one handed chores are more productive than doing 0 chores. Moving around, I imagine your baby will no longer be fussy, plus you can hand them random objects to look at.
Exercise with the baby present. Stroller running is reasonable for a mile or so on pavement. You can hula hoop, jump rope, spin bike, and lift weights all a few feet from the playroom, depending on your setup. You can even stretch with your baby on top of you. I would lower your expectations for this workout, it should be considered a supplementary workout. Babies are unpredictable and might just start balling their eyes out causing you to stop halfway.
Have some breast feeding plans. My wife sent emails, checked facebook for freebies, did online shopping, listened to audiobooks, and of course endless social media scrolling. Point being, you can have quality multitasking time that are either enjoyable or productive or you can waste it. Have a plan.
Use Technology
Use baby monitors. Between our home security cameras and all of my laptops/tech devices, I can watch and communicate with the kids throughout the house from the toilet.
In disagreement with the non-scientific World Health Organization who used opinions to form their recommended 0 seconds of TV per day, I recommend letting your under 1 year olds watch phonics and count to 100 videos. By age 2, they will automatically associate letters with sounds and can begin learning to read, they will know numbers to 100 and be able to begin adding. I throw in a Periodic Table of Elements song and similar songs into the mix. Consider this is monumentally better use of screen time than showing your kids corporate mascots(Disney/Nintendo/etc…)
Use Manpower
The Kid’s Grandparents can be a good way to soak up a few hours. On a similar note, I have cousins that love babies and will give us an hour or so of freedom.
Siblings are going to be teammates for life, get them into it early. Most kids can attempt a ‘shake the rattle/be silly for the baby’ and confuse the baby into being calm for a moment. This only needs to work once before the bond is formed. The bond of course being the selfish relationship that ‘playing with baby = crying stops’. I think your goal as an efficient parent is to facilitate the kids enjoying each other so playing is automatic.
Baby Waste
Transportation Waste
Clothes, keep clothes close by rather than in closets in far away rooms. We have 4 (stylish) little bins per kid that hold shirts, pants, underwear, and socks and they fit under the tv stand in the living room.
Diaper changes are close by, preferably with everything from the changing mat to baby wipes out and accessible. The main diaper change station is about 3ft or 1m from the tv in our living room. We keep a small trash here. Depending on where you spend time, you may want additional/multiple diaper change areas with essentials only. We have a station in each kids room for bedtime. As a reminder, having to open drawers or cabinets is inefficient, we leave our diaper stuff out. Your baby will be a kid soon enough, I think its okay for a few months/years.
Trash is close by, especially for daily diapers. We keep our extra trashbags/grocery bags under the active trash bag inside the trash bin. Between taking tags off clothes, diapers, and daily living, a living room trashbin can reduce frequent walks across the house.
From 1st kid waking up to last kid loaded in the car for daycare/school, this process could be relatively similar enough to process flow it. Everyone needs to eat, get dressed, and have their backpacks ready for school. There may be some chaos with humans, but if you follow an efficient process, you will make up for chaos with process time savings.
Making Baby Formula should be fast. Bottles, formula, and hot water should all be located nearby.
Might seem obvious, but wherever you plan to do your baby bathing, keep your bath supplies close by.
Before the toys take over your house, it might be good to have a bin for the toys. This makes it easy to pick up the toys as you can carry the bin around. Once the toys take over your house, all walls are covered in facade bookshelves/organizers/bins/baskets to store toys. This makes it easy to clear the floor for company or vacuuming.
Movement Waste
When loading the car seat or do a diaper change: Count. This way you are always racing against yourself and holding yourself accountable for performance. The added benefit is that your kids will like to hear the numbers. While this isnt the same level of quality as recording the process and finding waste, its a 0 time cost alternative that will cause you and your kid to be attentive to the process. (Of course, you can always use process flow to save time as well)
Streamline regular processes(diaper changes) by having materials(diapers and wipes) and tools(diaper change pad) in consistent locations. By always knowing things are in the same location, you will be faster at your process and will avoid errors looking around. Consider other frequent and regular processes. Here are some multiple times per day processes that would be worth standardizing: Preparing a baby bottle, dealing with spitups, putting the baby down to sleep, and anything breastfeeding related. After you have those down, consider daily things like dressing, putting in a car seat/carrier, etc.. (This methodology is called Set In Order and is part of 5S.)
Overprocessing Waste(Working harder than you need to)
Rocking them to sleep is waste, they don’t need it. I understand situations where its the right thing to do, however this is a bigger strategy. Deal with a few minutes of fuss while the baby figures out how to fall asleep alone. (Bonus points for making their sleep occasionally uncomfortable, this will set them up for a life of being able to nap in loud areas, bad beds, bright lights, etc…)
Getting up before 6am is a waste. After they are 3 months old, I believe we are cleared for sleep training which up to me, should be done on that 3 month birthday for our own sleep’s sake.
Holding the bottle is a waste. You/Daycare will teach them to hold their own bottle.
Easy for me to say, but ‘Don’t care about clothes’. This means getting free/used clothes when possible or buying stuff as needed. The goal here is to save time, not have cool outfits.
Don’t buy Toys ever. I’d doubt we spent more than $50 on toys for our kids and our house is filled to the point we give toys away. No need to think about them either.
I don’t think you need a nightly bath. Circumstances like spaghetti night change everything, but a few times a week is plenty. Any reduction is savings. We have a shower time for kids that need help, it is during the time I need to shower a few times a week. I needed to soak for a few minutes anyway.
Do you need to interact with your kids? The Montessori method says no, if they are focused, let them be. Being focused on drawing is desired, being focused on Phonics videos is fine, being focused on baby shark is hedonistic waste.
Overproduction Waste
Make too much formula? It can be reheated later. This means not having to measure anything or scoop formula. Alternatively if I have 2oz of cold formula I might add 4oz of hot formula. This saves from having to wash a bottle.
Make too much food for your kid? Either save as leftovers or eat it.
Waiting
Unless you are spending quality time with your kids, are you just ‘watching’ them? Cook, do laundry, clean, play/teach the kids. Of course chaos stuff is going to happen, but deal with the problems as they come.
Driving them to daycare/school/sports? (Nonfiction) audiobooks. Get some ROI on your time driving, get the books you have been meaning to read. Pro-tip from an avid reader: If you aren’t interested within 1 hour of listening to the book, you can move on, its okay. If you are worried you are going to skip something, I’ve found that important things are repeated by different authors.
Inventory
Outside of baby shower gifts, it may be best to wait until you need something. Marketers are trying to push their products on you, you’d be surprised how little you need to buy to raise a baby.
Clothes should be bought on a need basis. Free clothes and hand-me-downs will reduce the need to buy clothes but season dependent weather may cause you to buy some anyway. Buy as needed, no need to buy ahead of time.
As mentioned elsewhere, toys will fill your home even if you don’t buy any.
Reevaluate if your kid plays with toys anymore, if your future kids will be playing with it, and decide if it can be put away or given away.
Defects
Forget to buy/pack something and need to make a special stop at the grocery store? You may be able to apply logistics to your diaper bag. Push method would be adding things before each trip, pull method would be making a note to replenish the inventory as you get low on materials. If this still becomes an issue, send me an email and it might be worth doing diaper stats to know how many diapers need to be packed.
Dirtied clothes. I’m not sure if I’ll ever learn the lesson myself, always use bibs for eating, you can get away with wearing the same clothes longer and with less washes. In a few cases when the shirt is already dirty, a bib can be forgotten.
Skill Waste
If you are able to work and make over ~$20,000/yr per kid in daycare, it makes sense to send your kid to daycare. I already included the buffer for taxes, consider that your experience with work will grow your resume.
If you have family that would love to spend time with the kids, it’s a form of free babysitting. This can reduce monetary costs or reduce workloads.
Separate Laundry By Person (Or By Category)
My wife hated this idea. My friend’s wife hated this idea.
But they weren’t doing the laundry. I love this, my friend loves it too.
By separating your laundry by person, you reduce the categories of sorting. If you want to believe me, you can skip the rest of this article. However if you want to understand why, I will go into detail.
Less Categories Allows Batch Processing
Imagine two scenarios:
A pile of you, your SO, and your children’s freshly cleaned clothes. ~6 categories each x 3 people= ~18 categories
and
Your clothes. ~6 categories
With a smaller number of categories, you may be able to grab all of your shirts without digging, eliminating a category instantly. Next you grab all of your pants. Down to 4 categories. At this point you may have to begin sorting by largest items and most frequent items (as recommended by our ergonomic laundry study). You only have 4 categories, which means you can keep the piles close-by. When there are only 2 categories left, elimination of 1 category necessarily sorts the last category. In the worst case, you sorted 5 categories.
With a larger number of categories, you may have shirts hidden deep into the pile behind your SO’s shirts. Instead of doing all shirts at once, you reasonably can only get the ones on the top layer, you continue to have 18 categories to be sorted after your first round. As you continue you create 18 piles, each with distances separating them, at some point you may have to throw clothes because there are too many categories to fit within arms reach. Maybe you have 2 kids around the same ages and genders, you may have to check the size on each to know which pile they go in. The cognitive load to sort 18 items is greater than 6 items.
This is also commonly done with towels or bedding. You can also separate by category.
A Counterpoint, Transportation Waste
Suppose you have 3 family members, this would involve 3 different loads of laundry. Each time you need to walk to the laundry machine, add detergent, fabric softener, and start it. Later you would return to dry it. Each of these has transportation and operating waste from doing it 3 times instead of 1.
My best advice here is to have plenty of dirty clothes before doing the laundry, this way your laundry machine was full anyway. It depends on a tradeoff between sorting time and how long it takes to walk to the laundry machine. My solution is to do laundry before my bedtime or the kids bed time, our laundry is near our bedrooms so I would be passing by the laundry room anyway.
In the event that there is urgently dirty clothes, which is a near daily occurrence with kids, it makes more sense to do 1 load for all of the kids. Otherwise I’d be making many small trips to the laundry, only to get a few clothes clean each time. By doing these more frequent loads, this also reduces categories as not every category will have been made dirty.
Whatever you do, look to eliminate waste and continuously improve!
In-Control Bedtime: Save Time on your Bedtime routine, for you and your kids.
By taking a few measurements, you can get you (or your kids) bedtime ‘in-control’, saving you time and increasing the consistency of getting to bed on time.
Feel free to skip to the section labeled “Application” if you want the ‘too long didn’t read’ version. Things get somewhat technical in the Theory sections. Mrs. Efficiency says the theory sections are hard to read but the application section had good ideas.
(Theory) Out Of Control Processes Are Unnecessary
Being in-control or out-of-control is defined by you. You can choose to have a narrow band(1 standard deviation) that would increase your chance of a processes getting out-of-control, or you can have a wider band that guarantees(3 standard deviations) 99.7% of the time you would stay in-control. The purpose here is to identify non-random causes of variation quickly so you can eliminate them or compensate for them.
In a factory, you may have a customer specification to make a minimum of 50 parts per hour. This is not necessarily your Lower Control Limit, this is a lower Spec Limit. (Note: In this article our bed time specification and our control limit will be the same value.) Based on collected data, you have found your factory can produce 74 parts per hour on average with a standard deviation of 3 parts per hour. If you want to stay within the control limit 99.7% of the time, you’d set your Upper Control Limit to 83 parts per hour and Lower Control Limit to 64 Parts Per Hour. Now suppose a robot starts breaking more often and you only produced 30 parts. To get your process in control you might buy a redundant robot that could be turned on during a breakage. You might monitor the robot closely and do maintenance. You can even expand what you consider ‘in control’. This could be acceptable and you can opt to run the robot for 2 shifts instead of 1 shift.
Standard control chart:
Simplified control chart:
At home, you may set your spec limit and control limit to have dinner ready at 6pm, but an extra long recipe or surprise visit from a friend could cause dinner not to be ready until 6:30pm. For these, you may consider starting dinner earlier, coming up with a plan if you have a future surprise visit, or removing long recipes from your regular list.
The benefit of control limits are to catch when your variation is increasing, and most importantly figuring out root causes and solutions to major (non-random) variation.
(Theory) Signs of Process Getting Out Of Control
Some rules of thumbs that signal that a process is getting out of control:
Any time a process falls outside the control limit
If you had ~6 consecutive points that were trending in the same direction, your process might be becoming out of control. (Ex: 15,17,19,20,22,23)
Eight consecutive points on the same side of the average
Fourteen consecutive data points alternating up and down.
(Application) Get your process In Control
Your goal is to figure out what time you need to start your bedtime routine, to ensure you get to bed on-time. In this example I’m going to use my kid’s bedtime because they are highly variable compared to me and the wife. This can be used with your bedtime routine as well.
The first and most important step to getting a process in-control is to measure and record the important metric. Without any measurements, you can’t be sure if you are hitting your targets. You also can’t determine what is an acceptable amount of variation if you have no measurement history.
For a bed time routine its probably best to measure the ‘Time In Bed’ metric. I would start the kid’s bedtime routine at 7:45PM each night and only track of the finish time.
After 3-6 measurements, you can get a general idea of what kind of variation between nights can be expected. The important thing to me was making sure my kids were in bed before 8pm. Taking your average Finish Time plus Variation, you can reliably get to bed within your ‘Control Limit’. As I realized the kids were often in bed at 8:01PM, I pushed the start of the bedtime routine back to 7:40PM.
You can also find causes of variation. If you had a measurement that was an outlier, it would be worth analyzing it and seeing if there are ways to eliminate it or prepare for it. We had an issue with kids wanting misplaced stuffed animals in their bed, but since this caused minutes of looking for toys, we removed stuffed animals from their bed. We got into a habit of giving the kids ice water before bed so I could keep the Air Conditioning at a higher temperature, now they only get it if there is extra time or I prepared ahead of time. The amount of time they get listening to/reading a book before bed can vary depending on how long they take performing their other bedtime tasks – some nights they only get a page of a book and other nights they can easily finish a whole book. These Inputs, including Start Time, will determine the Finish Time.
Finally you can further improve by honing in your process. Process flow diagrams may be a bit too rigid, but as you eliminate variation, you will be more likely to find ways to streamline the process. Trying to hit our goal time, I found myself multitasking by doing one of the steps(going through phonics) while we are walking to the bathroom. Another way to streamline is to perform a task for two children at once. Read a book that two kids like together to reduce time spent doing the same task with each child.
(Optional) Calculating Upper Control Limits and Lower Control Limits
For my personal home application, I did write down the times, but I didn’t actually calculate the standard deviation. I used feelings. Want to use something other than feelings? Calculate it:
Take some data points, at least 3 points, more is better. For instance 17, 19, 14 minutes.
Take the average so you can center your chart. For instance 16.6 minutes
Take the standard deviation(use a calculator/excel/google sheets). Multiply that standard deviation by 3 if you only want 1 failure per every other year. Only multiply by 2 if you want ~8 failures per year. For instance, 2.5*3=7.5 minutes or 2.5*2= 5 minutes. (single tailed normal distribution)
Take the average and add the standard deviation you calculated. 16.6 minutes + 7.5 minutes= Start the bedtime process 24.1 minutes before bedtime. (or I’m less critical, and will use the 2 standard deviation, 16.6 minutes + 5 minutes = 21.6 minutes.)
Trying to get the kids to bed by 8pm? Start the process at 7:38pm. It will work 357 days per year.
Process changes
Don’t expect a process to be in control forever. In a factory its common for changes to occur. Maybe you got a faster robot, maybe your customer wants an additional piece of foam glued on. These would involve getting the process back in control.
At home, you might have gotten injured and decide to include a round of physical therapy exercises in your bedtime routine. After a few measurements you can decently decide what time you need to start your bed time routine to get to bed on time.
The big take away here is that by having your process in control you can quickly spot non-random variations and make adjustments.
Low Time/Effort Parties
You could pay someone else to cook, clean, or use someone else’s venue, but I will discuss some DIY options. I will also not include potlucks in these suggestions.
On Cleaning
Decide what matters, can you keep people outside? This could eliminate the need to perfectly clean counters, tables, dust, etc… However people will still need to use the bathroom, so consider what routes will be traversed. I personally focus on picking up items off floors and counters, then if I have extra time, dry wiping counters and vacuuming the floors. If I have way extra time, I’ll scrub stuck on stains. I basically don’t deal with dust until its terrible, not a major focus for a summer party. The winter or an apartment party will have different quality metrics.
Do things need to be organized, or merely hidden? Picking up toys and putting them all into a bin is quicker than sorting between different uses.
Table cloths make it easy to cover a dirty table, it also makes it easy to clean up later.
While a robot vacuum requires pre-cleaning to remove items from the floor, it can do most of the job, leaving only hard to reach places, a fraction of the task.
Decorations
Does it really matter? My wife would say yes.
Use chatgpt to skip the brainstorming step. For instance, describe your theme, describe that you want it easy, 0 effort, and take (almost) no time.
Can you enjoy it? There is something I love about decorating cakes. I am not talented, but I have vision and get in the zone as I apply frosting. I suppose this doesn’t actually save any time, but you might be able to replace other hedonistic activities like watching TV/Playing video games/endless social media scrolling with this more productive activity.
Streamers/ribbon are easy and cheap but change the color of your home. Worthwhile if you are trying hard on decorations.
Mrs. Efficiency Tip – piñatas can be both a decoration and a party activity, very versatile!
On Food
Bulk cook. I probably didn’t have to tell you that. One of the easiest parties we threw had a taco bar. 1 Meat, pinto beans/refried beans, Spanish rice. Everything else was cold and just needed to be set out.
Another idea, we did Pasta and Soup. Soups can be bulk cooked and require almost 0 stirring (Speed Cooking‘s Cream of Broccoli soup was a hit). Red Sauce Pasta was easy, make a large pot of sauce and moments before the party begins, you cook noodles. This means you have more time to socialize and less time cooking.
Slowcookers are great, but I feel like they have been a bit overdone. I’m not saying that slowcooker pulled pork sandwhiches are out of the question, this is a near 0 effort meal, but in our social circles it got overused. I still use this to cook soups and keep things warm.
On Snacks
Always have peanuts (assuming there are no deathly allergic people coming). These are easy to put on a table, they are a top nutrient per dollar choice as well.
Chips and Salsa can be a hit, but I’ll suggest that if you do salsa, pick a ‘different’ salsa. Everyone is used to generic red salsa. Try green or try one with weird ingredients.
Whole fruits are healthy and take almost 0 prep. This might get expensive depending on the fruit, but consider that most people wouldn’t be grabbing too much. In-season fruit tastes better and is cheaper. If the fruit requires prep, its not getting served at our parties.
“Can I help with anything?”
Often people will offer to help, I have some ideas for that:
Stirring meats/foods.
Blowing up balloons.
Something that takes almost no brainpower and can’t be messed up.
On Sending Out Invites
Left this for the end, because I don’t have a great solution.
Mass text messages have been blocked by Tmobile, I suppose I was inviting like 20+ people with the same message. Simply changing the first few words ‘hey *name*’ seemed to get around the block. That means copypasting the rest of the invite. This seems reliable. I’m faster with a mouse and keyboard and found there is an app called Link to Windows(Android to Windows) and KDE Connect(Android to Linux).
Email might be best, going to give this a try for family parties were I can BCC everyone.
Letters. This is expensive, but assuming you have up to date addresses in excel, it can be easy to print labels. The upfront work is real, but now I can easily send out Christmas cards too!
Final Thoughts
Don’t start cleaning days before. Things get dirty quickly, and you are probably going above and beyond.
We had food catered once, and I realized I was equally as stressed, cleaning areas that would likely go unnoticed until moments before guests arrived. The mentality that you can always improve seems dangerous for parties. See if you can cut corners – guests will likely not notice, or not care.
Reduce Transportation Waste During Cleaning, save 500 hours in your lifetime.
If you have to walk for 10 seconds to a room, and 10 seconds back, that is 20 seconds of necessary non-value added time. Do this 5 times a day and in 50 years, you’ve spend 500 hours walking back and forth!
Here are some ways to either half that time, or nearly eliminate it.
Opportunistic Cleaning
This is where you clean wherever your body is currently located. If you had to take a cup from the living room to the kitchen, instead of returning to the living room, you’d begin cleaning the kitchen.
If you had to bring a rag from the kitchen to the laundry room, take the opportunity to either clean the laundry room, or whatever room is closest. (As a note, we have a laundry basket located between our kitchen and living room, it makes it so we can make a single trip when the basket fills up.)
Opportunistic Cleaning is the best for when you generally need to clean your home. If you need to clean only a kitchen or living room because company is only going in those areas, opportunistic cleaning that takes you to your bedroom would be ‘overprocessing waste’. It may be best to drop bedroom items at a central location and do that round in bulk. This gets into the next suggestion, using carts to move objects.
Use Carts To Move Objects
I don’t see too many carts in people’s homes, but they are all over workplaces, factories, and schools. While the distances traveled are not as extreme, they will save you time walking back and forth with individual objects as you can load up a cart with objects for different rooms, and move them all at once.
For an example, suppose I start in the living room with a cart. I can put cups, trash/trash bags, and outgoing paperwork/mail on a cart and move it to the kitchen. As I pass by the dinner table, I can pick up dirty dishes. I can unload the cups and dirty dishes into the dishwasher and put trash/trashbags into our larger kitchen trash. Now that I’m in the kitchen, I can add the random kids toys that somehow made it across the house to the cart. I can continue cleaning the kitchen, adding anything else that might need to be moved around, mail to go into a filing cabinet, dirty kids clothes from daycare, dirty rags, etc… I can stop by the garage door and leave the outgoing mail. I return to the living room, dropping off toys, putting the dirty clothes and rags into our laundry basket. Finally taking the cart to my office where paperwork is filed.
This would have been numerous trips back and forth, but with a cart, it was only a single loop.
The downside of a cart, is that it requires touching things twice. You must pick up and item, set it in the cart, and later transport it later.
For a single item, a cart isnt worth it, but as the number of items grows to exceed the number of items you can carry, it begins to save time.
Here is an affiliate link to a cart that I think is ‘just okay’. Its small, has 3 shelves, and a somewhat tall railing to prevent items from falling off. I think I’d rather have a cart that primarily has a top shelf, a shorter railing, and is larger. This way I am not spending time bending over to pick up objects from a lower shelf. With a smaller railing, you don’t need to lift as far vertically before moving horizontally, hypotenuse is a shorter distance! As an alternative idea, each of the three shelves can be designated as a room (top shelf is things to be put in the laundry room, middle shelf for kitchen, etc). That way you don’t have to spend time remembering where each thing belongs in your cleaning journey and eliminate second trips for drop-offs.
Final Thoughts
The previous two methods will reduce your cleaning time significantly. This article would be incomplete if I didn’t mention ‘making triangles’. Instead of walking back and forth, do things in-between (or close to in-between). For instance, if you need to walk from the kitchen to the living room, and your bathroom is mostly in-between, maybe a few steps away, you can save on transportation by going to the bathroom before making it to the living room. It requires a bit of thinking, so its more ideal than reality. I highly suggest the other two methods, but you should know this tool as well.
Remember: No pointless actions!
Save Time With An Industrial Engineering Study On Wiping Counters
Using path studies, motion studies, equipment options, quality metrics, and more, we find ways to save time cleaning counters.
Optimal Path
Try not to wipe back and forth over the same spot. Wipe in big strokes, not overlapping, hitting an area only once. Start in one corner, go across, move up, and across a not yet touched area. This is under the category of Coverage Path Planning.
Some best case optimizations is to start and stop in the same place, assuming that same place is the end destination. For instance, I need to wet a rag at the start and rinse a rag upon completion. It would be best to start and finish near the sink. It would be inefficient to start that the sink and end at the other side of the room. Sometimes this is unavoidable based on the size of a surface.
An important factor can be the shape of the surface. Theoretically a spiral motion reduces the number of times you decelerate, however if you don’t have a round table, you will be wasting time doing the corners that were not covered in a spiral motion. For a square/rectangle table, I found long motion across the table was more efficient.
For more reading about optimal pathing, here is a link to a study I found interesting:
http://retis.sssup.it/~giorgio/paps/2018/RAL18.pdf
The right equipment
Small sponges can take longer to clean a surface than a larger towel. The idea of using a larger towel seems great, you may need extra soap but you can accomplish more, quicker.
Use the right cloth, absorbent with some abrasion. Microfiber or cotton could work, but each cloth will be woven differently. Waffle Weaves are popular for cleaning because the ridges can help apply extra pressure on surfaces that would otherwise be spread out with a flat weave.
Environment
Good lighting will help you see dirty spots and will save you time and effort from straining to see these spots.
On a similar note, the quieter the area, the less distractions and higher focus you can have.
Do you need to move items out of your way to clean under? It might be worth finding a permanent spot for those items to avoid freqent cleaning underneath them.
Consider the placement of rags/towels, cleaning supplies, trash/disposal areas, and laundry baskets. They should be easily accessible and preferably along the path of your workflow.
What quality is needed? Perfection, good enough, or damage control?
If you can only use one section of your counter, you won’t need to clean the rest.
It may be worth letting things soak for ~3-10 minutes, bonus points for soap and hot water. My personal process for perfection is,
- Hot water and soap round
- Wait a few minutes
- Wipe with a mostly dry water only rag, soaking up lots of the old dirty water and scrubbing any spots that need it
- Final round where in one hand I have a lightly watered clean rag, then a completely dry clean rag(or paper towel) that soaks up that water
However, if you are only trying to prevent newly dirtied surfaces from getting messes stuck on: don’t get your rag too wet. Too much water will require extra wipes to dry. It might not be worth using soap which would require an extra round of wiping to remove the soap.
Finally, if you are ultra efficient and rarely clean, you could use a dry rag and wipe only solid objects off. This is a ‘debatably good enough’ quality.
Motion
Some Therbligs. To turn on faucet water, you release a latch/use a faucet. You search for a rag and grasp it. You use the water or rest, waiting for the water to get hot. You may also search and grasp for soap that you will use with the rag and water. Mixing the rag, water, and soap is assembly. Then you transport the load to the counter. Finally you use the rag on the countertops. Upon completion you disassemble the water, rag, and soap by releasing the latch/use the faucet and rinse the rag. Finally you may throw the rag in the laundry, releasing empty.
To make this process more efficient, we look at all the Therbligs. Here are some opportunities for optimization and elimination.
- Ensure rags/towels are visible and easily accessible. We keep ours in an open bin on the counter.
- Do something useful while the faucet water is heating up. Fill up nearby empty water bottles to increase your Water Per Second, pick up items that might be covering the countertops, load/empty the dishwasher, etc..
- Ensure soaps are visible and easily accessible. We keep ours on the counter.
- Don’t spend too much time mixing the water, rag, and soap, it doesnt matter much. Ensuring a perfectly lathered rag is Over Processing waste. A quick mix is good enough.
- Upon completion, rinse the rag, but only as much as needed to get large debris off. If you are putting it in the laundry, no reason to ensure all soap and dirty water is gone.
AI suggestions
Clear surfaces ahead of time, to prevent setting down towels/rags/sponges to get to necessary surfaces. I might disagree, you could multitask lifting surfaces and wiping.
Potentially using a bucket/spray bottle to prevent trips back to the sink. This personally wouldn’t work for most of my messes.
Use a spray bottle.
Use microfiber
Challenge yourself to get under a time
Alternative Ideas
Trade favors with roommates, have them clean the counters in exchange for you doing something else. For instance, you could bulk cook food and trade that. Bulk cooking benefits from reducing the number of set up and tear down actions, win win win.
Hire someone.
Use a disposable cleaning wipe. This eliminates a few steps such as turning on water, waiting for water to warm up, and doing laundry. This would be dependent on how dirty the counter was, if you are cost conscious, and if you are an environmentalist.
Use a vacuum cleaner.
Attach a handle onto a rag/use a kitchen mop, this will let you push further without taking steps.
You could use a towel to push everything on the floor and have a robot vacuum cleaner clean the mess.
Conclusions
This was a first step into Efficient Cleaning. While this wiping counters/tables task might only take a minute or two, the ideas about quality, motion waste/Therbligs, optimal equipment, and optimal pathing might help influence other cleaning activities to help you save time.