Work Life Leverage is all about leveraging skills you find in the office at home.
Oftentimes, we struggle at home, particularly in times of adversity and we don’t come to the realization that the skills many of us use at work or that we see used every day at work are also applicable at home.
This blog is about just that.
When my wife and I became a foster parents life suddenly became a lot more complex for me. I wasn’t an official lead, but someone who soft lead others. I sat on the Application Review Board at the department where I worked, and I already had a complex life and a daughter.
If you’ve ever been a foster parent, you know life can change quickly and each placement can bring it’s own difficulties and complexities. A case worker could be overloaded. Your foster child can have complex medical needs or require frequent trips to the ER. Life could easily get away from you.
My wife and I thought we couldn’t have kids and wouldn’t you know, in the middle of our foster care certification, my wife was pregnant.
In our early years as foster parents, we had two placements – we specialized in babies – come and go. It was years before I could go into the infant section of a store without feeling wistful. And eventually we got my oldest adopted daughter while my wife was pregnant with my son.
So I had a pregnant wife, and two little ones to take care off. And man was my son making my wife morning sick. I worked at the Business Systems Division at a National Laboratory at the time. It was our job to come up with solutions for problems of a 278 acre facility with multiple research and support divisions, each with different needs. It occurred to me I needed to start treating our home like a little enterprise if I was going to survive.
So I started looking for real world parallels and applying business analysis to our day to day. What was killing us time, how do we recover that time.
Some things were simply. We were being overwhelmed with trips to the store, particularly diapers. Diapers.com was still around, so we started ordering in bulk. Changing was often assembly line as was feeding. We bought three identical bouncers, three identical portable seats and would just line the kiddos up for feeding. We put them all to bed at roughly the same time.
Bottles and dishes were a nightmare. We were constantly washing. I thought, how would a restaurant handle this. We were tight on money, but once we found bottles that worked for all three, later four kids, I would by them weekly. We went with cheap Gerber bottles and fancy tips because two of the kids would have issues drinking. We bought multiple drying racks. When child number four came into the house, we could literally do a full dishwasher of bottles at the same time.
We didn’t mess around. When we found a good product, we went with it every time. We bought two double strollers. I’d have a blast walking around the Bronx Zoo pushing them both and absolutely getting stared at. Sometimes we spent too much time picking a product.
And one thing that’s often missed at home AND too often at work is we knew when to settle for good enough. We knew when not to spend too much time making something perfect at the expense of forward momentum on more important things.
This blog will be about ways to organize your life using skills you might find in the business world or at the office.
