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. She also writes about her own personal improvement journey, minimalism, and her life long struggle against the tyranny of cookies.
Suddenly I was looking at the things I’ve been holding onto in a different light. Now these things were getting in the way of the path I’ve chosen. It became easy to make the choice to let them go. I stopped seeing things in terms of how much I spent on them, or how an item was useful once and might be again. Things I thought I could not let go of have suddenly become little more than an obstacle on the path to a more intentional life.
It’s ironic that when you’ve publicly declared as a follower of minimalist principles, the second you make a purchase people say…”Oh, well that’s not very minimalist.”
It’s both encouraging and motivating when the people around us support our vision and goals and want us to succeed on our path, even if it differs from their own. It reinforces our own commitment and can actually help in solidifying our determination to succeed.
In reality, it’s very simple to build a waste elimination culture. The principles are not difficult to grasp, the process is low cost and doesn’t require years of training. The most important principle to remember is that building a waste elimination culture is more about the culture than the waste elimination.
When we focus exclusively on specific results as the measure of success we rise and fall on those results alone
Clutter is the cause of many unpleasant side effects whether it’s in our homes, our minds, our schedule or our work processes.
I recently wrote a guest post for Stoke, an amazing home and garden page on Facebook, on some great ways to simply your life this year. If you’re looking for […]
In that moment I realised that I needed to reconsider things in a different light. What I was looking at was not gym equipment clutter but actually physical proof that we were living our priorities.
Becoming a successful leader in a lean organisation relies heavily on the support and buy in of the people in your team
Anyone who has been involved with lean for any period of time has had experience with one of the most powerful and also one of the trickiest lean tools around. […]
It’s easy to over complicate the solution to a problem. Try a more minimalist approach to lean improvement
Today is Saturday. I know this because I was shocked yesterday to find out that it was Friday when we thought it was Thursday. That is the effect of the […]
It’s 8 pm on Monday night, its cold outside and I’m staring at the packed sports bag on my bed. If I leave now, in 20 minutes I’ll be sliding […]
A leader does not need to convince a team that has found waste in a process to reduce that waste. It just comes naturally.
It suddenly became clear to me that in order to continuously improve my own development process and increase my chances of success in achieving my vision, I needed to apply the PDCA process.
The reality was that we were just moving stuff around. We hadn’t changed anything so nothing had changed.
I like to organise things. I am one of those people who will straighten the few pieces of paper on my desk and the pen alongside so that everything is, […]
