As I first started learning about Quick n’ Easy Kaizen, I quickly took the idea home and started talking about it with my husband. One day, I rearranged our spice cabinets by getting 2 small wooden trays to hold all of the spices. Then I labeled the lid of each spice with its name. This way, I could pull out the two trays, read the lids and quickly identify the spice I needed. Believe it or not, I was really excited! Seriously…grabbing the tarragon when I needed the thyme was incredibly frustrating, and something I experienced quite often!

When my husband came home, I was very excited to share my improvement with him. I was a little taken aback when he responded by suggesting that we separate the spices in the trays by the ones we use most often or alphabetically. It made perfect sense! Why hadn’t I thought of that? I was not very accustomed to somebody else making improvements to my improvements!

We wound up alphabetizing the spices. I quickly began to appreciate his idea built on mine. It is so much better to have multiple minds working to improve things. What one mind thinks of can be very different than what another mind thinks. The impact of the improvements built together is always much better than one!