Donna Sherriff is a New Zealand based improvement and operations management specialist. Seeing a need for simple, no fuss, improvement advice she started The Lean Minimalist blog in 2017. Donna writes articles offering advice and tips for rapid and sustainable business improvement based on over 15 years in Senior Management roles.
Passionate about sharing the lessons of over 20 years on the high performance track Donna offers coaching services to professionals. She also writes about her own personal improvement journey, minimalism, and her life long struggle against the tyranny of cookies and sugar which she overcame in 2020. These days, Donna is pursuing a journey to earn her black belt in Taekwondo after a long hiatus of 16 years away from training. On the side she is an amateur but passionate musician and poet.
My children are naturally attracted to leaving their toys, books, cups and pretty much everything on any surface or shelf in the house that’s available. The solution we accidentally stumbled across, apart from encouraging them to be less messy in the long term, was the effect of reducing unnecessary surfaces from the house.
What I didn’t expect was that I would suddenly see how I could use these same techniques to gain focus and improve the implementation of my personal growth strategic plan and figure out how to take my goals and turn them into tangible actions and ultimately results.
By setting a perfect standard we can sometimes make the standard impossible to realise. It's much better to set a realistic standard that requires some improvement to achieve but doesn't necessarily ask for perfection all at once.
As I watch our team members explain how they or their team personally changed their own work processes for the better, I am reminded both of how far the culture has come in nearly three years and of the truth that lean culture grows out of the empowerment and commitment of people.
In a previous post I talked about my family’s intention to spend more time in nature, living off the grid. Since then, we’ve spent a lot of time at our small piece of paradise and I’ve observed a number of developments in my two daughters since they’ve had ‘more of less.'
The process involved in losing furniture weight is actually pretty simple and comes about through a few easy steps:
I think the answer lies in a more minimalist and mindful approach to food like the monks in the Dalai Lama's Cat. If I begin to consider food as something that should fit in with my values and beliefs, my mindset starts to change.
If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve struggled a bit with motivation this year and have been slowly working to overcome this. Today I came across what […]
As the days passed I started to notice a pattern of the things I was using regularly in the house; bathroom, bed, dining table, couch, kettle, a plate, a few cups and so on. This led of course to realising all the things one person doesn’t use when living alone. The expression, ‘rattling around’ suddenly became real to me. I was ‘rattling around’ our downsized house
From the outside looking in, the whole concept seems simple. And yet, there I was on a recent rainy weekend, surrounded by a pile of random crockery, struggling to let it go out of my life. The reality is, handling items that have been part of your life can bring back memories and the emotions that arise can make it hard to let go.
the lean minimalist 