Welcome to part II of the Lean Laundry series! Here’s the GUF – Guarantee Up Front. Readers of this blog are guaranteed to save at least one sock marriage from divorce. 😉 And now that you’re thoroughly motivated, let’s dive in!

In the previous blog we discovered that an enormous batch size of laundry was driving the painful process of shipping software…I mean cleaning our laundry. In this blog we will discuss the practical ways we increased our laundry happiness and did some good along the way.

…The story continued

As my wife and I continued our drive home from visiting family over the holidays, I began to stew on the root cause of our laundry debacle. Our batch size was out of control. I had seen the negative side effects of large batches in software but I wondered if similar side effects persisted for something as simple as my laundry. Here is what I discovered when my wife and I inspected our laundry management practices:

1. Dude where’s my shirt?
   1. Our wait times were really long. No I’m not talking about the DMV. I’m talking about cycle time. A dirty shirt sat in the dirty clothes basket for a long time before it was cleaned.
2. We bought more clothes
   1. Because our laundry cycle time per clothing item was so long, we ended up buying more socks, more t-shirts, …etc. This only became evident after laundry weekend when it was nearly impossible to shut my sock drawer because it was overflowing with so many socks.
3. Hidden problems
   1. We never thought about our overbought clothing inventory because 99% of the time we couldn’t see it. It was literally buried in our oversized laundry baskets.
4. Mountains of unfinished laundry inventory laying around
   1. Folded but not put away
   2. Dried by not folded
   3. Washed by not dried
      1. Sometimes we would discover a load we forgot to put in the drier a day or two later. We usually had to rewash those…what a waste!
   4. Sorted but not washed
   5. Dirty but not yet sorted
5. Rabbit hunts
   1. Because we had a lot of laundry inventory laying around, all too often we went on rabbit hunts rummaging through clothes baskets in search of a clean pair of sweatpants or socks that wouldn’t clash. I’m sure we’re the only couple who has ever done this. 🙂

The Solution

It was amazing how such a simple thing like laundry was driving so much waste. So we put our heads together and came up with some novel solutions.

1. Smaller laundry baskets
   1. Since large batches were causing so much waste, we decided to reduce them by getting smaller baskets. This was the complete opposite of what we had done previously. We realized we needed to right-size our laundry baskets to the actual capacity of our washing machine. So we made a trip to the store and bought four small laundry baskets that would not exceed the capacity of our washing machine. We realized that if we right sized our batches of laundry we wouldn’t have excess laundry to manage. In order to keep our laundry loads right-sized, we decided to do laundry once a basket filled up.
2. Pre-sorted baskets
   1. To address the pain of sorting, we decided to get more baskets. One basket for each of the following: delicates, darks, lights, and towels. Assuming, we threw our dirty clothes into the right basket, we pretty much eliminated pre-wash sorting pain.
   2. *Pro-tip* – Don’t put the dark and light baskets side by side. This reduces the chance of “someone” accidentally throwing clothes into the wrong basket.
3. Stop starting and start finishing
   1. Lastly, no more unfinished laundry. We decided that once we began a load of laundry, we would work it through to completion. We would not begin another load of laundry until we finished the one in flight.

The Results

The smaller baskets have dramatically decreased the wait time for my favorite dress shirts and believe it or not, the throughput has picked up! We rarely need to go on rabbit hunts anymore, our unmatched socks have found their mates, and our overbought clothing inventory has decreased.

One of the coolest results was that our improved laundry management allowed us to do some good. After our wait times decreased, our drawers remained stuffed and we realized we didn’t need the excess clothes. So we rounded up our excess clothes and dropped off several bags at a local clothing ministry!

So how does this relate to software development? In our next blog we’ll wrap up the series by demonstrating how our real life laundry saga can improve your software project!

Happy Laundrying!