Minimalism – The difference between Need and Want
School is about to go back here in New Zealand and our family has been discussing covering exercise books. Now I hate covering exercise books with a passion. I’m sure […]
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.
School is about to go back here in New Zealand and our family has been discussing covering exercise books. Now I hate covering exercise books with a passion. I’m sure […]
How are you going with living your intentions so far this year? As usual, I’ve been struggling a bit as I continue to adjust from being on holiday to living […]
As part of my intentional living plan this year I am working on building some better habits. Now I’m not a huge fan of exercise. Mostly because it’s hard, uncomfortable […]
As I emerge from the fog of a couple of weeks of not thinking about anything more stressful than making it to the airport on time or ensuring that everyone got enough helpings of Christmas cake, my mind is moving back into the planning stage of re-establishing my routine for the next few months.
As the end of the year looms, I’m beginning to think about catching up with my intentions for 2018 and recommitting or re-evaluating these for 2019. Today I came across […]
Recently I was going through some old phone photos and videos. They were from a few years ago when my younger daughter was still a toddler. Taken in our old, […]
The pursuit of perfection in systems and processes has been the key theme of my career for twenty years. Now I’ve read a ton of books, lean books, theory of constraint books, books about how to combine theory of constraints and lean and don’t even get me started on books about six sigma. But earlier in my career I found that not one of those books gave me any pointers on how to move a company from one state to another in terms of culture, or how to create momentum. For sure, I knew about Value Stream Mapping, PDCA cycles and Just in Time but what I was lacking was the secret formula to making lean or any other methodology really work.
As we have gotten closer and closer to the end of the first stage, our team has started talking about what happens next and which areas of the process will be worked on next. The resulting plan is so exciting that we all feel like something wonderful is just around the corner.
I think the real lesson I’ve learned this year is that despite the obstacles, the chaos and the general randomness of life, attempting to live intentionally creates a solid, reassuring theme through it all.
For years before I started to pursue minimalism as a way of life I was a champion organised hoarder. I could satisfy my need to be on top of things by making sure that everything was labelled or in it's assigned container. Whole days were spent putting things in order when it all got out of hand, which of course it always does when you live with someone else who has better things to do than keep everything just so.