Monday, August 22, 2005

Doing the Laundry Agile Style Believe it or not, there's an agile style to doing the laundry and BDUF style to doing the laundry. My beautiful wife, Linda, does laundry BDUF style. The laundry piles up and until it just has to be done. Then she sorts. Every load is pre-sorted into its own pile before it can be washed. If you look at our laundry room it looks like a field of hay stacks ready to be bailed. The piles are formed by some set of rules that I have never been able to master, after 20 years of trying. When I try to do the laundry her way I can never quite get it right. So everything is well organized. We have lots of nice piles optimized into the correct size for our washer. There are no left over clothes that don't get washed. We don't have small loads, which I am told are a waste, even with our water efficient washer. What could go wrong? There are lots of piles. So many piles that they can't possibly get done in one night or even one day. Now let's add to that the remarkable ability to be distracted and very few piles actually ever get washed. So the piles just hang around, sometimes for days. What is happening while the piles go unwashed? We use and dirty more clothes. Part of the problem is we may have too many clothes, but it doesn't seem like it. Anyway, with new clothes being added all the time the piles no longer make sense. If we just added the clothes to existing piles then they wouldn't fit in the washer anymore. The piles need to be rebalanced. Wouldn't you just split the large piles in half? No. That would be wasteful. We want the washer to be maximally full because that is the most efficient way. Just splitting the piles would leave us with too many small piles. To make larger better piles we have to rethink what clothes can be washed together. Maybe the jeans and the towels can be washed together after all. Like I said, I've never been able to figure out the rules, let alone when the rules can be ignored. Which pile gets washed first? The pile closest to the washer of course! And what's happening while all this is going on? We are dirtying more clothes of course! It may seem like the process never ends, but by some miracle it does. As Linda knows how to properly fold clothes, she wins hands down, but I get the job done. It's a given that do the laundry wrong, but here's how I do it. I leave the laundry all in one big pile. I do the laundry as soon as I can so it doesn't pile up. It doesn't take much time to do one load after all, it's doing lots of loads that becomes the major chore. I wash the clothes I need first. If I need socks shouldn't I do them first? Is that so wrong? Do I sort into piles? No way. I put clothes directly from the big pile into the washer. I do the best job I can at getting a full load of all the right kind of clothes. But sometimes I miss a few pieces of clothing because they were hiding under a towel or I just overlooked it. When you make all the piles up front you don't miss clothes. They are all accounted for. With my approach I have stragglers. I'll have a few socks, a shirt, or a couple of towels that don't get washed. I figure what the heck. They'll get washed next time. What matters is I got most of the stuff I need washed now, even though it's not perfect. I am little bit agile. Linda is a little bit waterfall. What really matters is we make beautiful music together. comment[] 8:44:26 PM

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