Japan 5s

Japanese 5S

The Japanese 5S system sounds a bit strange to use in everyday situations at first, it was after all developed for the automotive industry in the 1980's but became so popular that a hollywood movie was even made involving this system.

I decided to see if this system could help me at all in the one place that is the most unorganised space I know of, my laptop hard drive, so full of files and useless junk that I no longer know where anything is without having to use the built in search which can be a slow laborious process if you don't know the exact filename.

First up is Seiri or sort.

Looking at my files there are thousands and going through them all is going to be very time consuming so for a test to see if the 5S system can benefit me or not I selected 1000 files at random and moved them to a separate folder so that I know which ones I am using as the test. Even 1000 files is still quite time consuming as I found out, opening each one to see what it is, getting rid of the ones I no longer require.

Next up after that process is Seiton or straighten.

Now that I know which of the files I am keeping my next task is to make them easily identifiable, no longer will they be file 00346ffffnmg.pdf or other such unhelpful name, they all now have a name and are organized into folders as well for indexing purposes.

What comes next is Seiso or shine.

Basically this one is about having things cleaner but if you already followed the first two steps then I can't imagine this one makes all that much difference since by sorting things in step one you are basically cleaning and in step two you are basically making sure things are neat and tidy but anyway, let's use this step for cleaning out the recycle bin.

The fourth step is Seiketsu or systemize.

Basically this is getting yourself into a habit of making sure you follow all of these steps each day, making sure that you keep things neat and tidy. So I rename files now as I...