Why you need household systems
Discover more from Your House Machine
Why you need household systems
“A house is a machine for living in.” — Le Corbusier
Your House is Your Machine takes a new approach to home organization and life. Think: less buying bins, more sitting on your couch drawing flowcharts. I’m experimenting here and really appreciate your engagement and feedback! If you’d like to keep reading I encourage you to subscribe below.
The solution to clutter and chaos at home is not storage bins. It is not a label-maker. It is not anything you can find at the Container Store, marketing be damned.
The fundamental problems to solve when your house feels overwhelming are:
You have too much stuff
You need better systems
And really, you can create a system to control the amount of stuff you have, which leaves us with just one problem to solve:
You need better systems
Simple, right? And somehow the avalanche of blogs, articles, and TV shows about organizing your house never seem to focus on the systems running your house.
See, your house is a machine for living in, as the architect Le Corbusier so aptly explains. You can shine a machine, you can buy it new parts, you can put it in a plastic bin from the Container Store…but if the machine doesn’t run effectively, none of these solutions will work.
I see the fundamental problem facing our domestic woes and overwhelm at home comes down to a need for systems in the household. Treat our homes like the machines they are, and suddenly life will get much smoother. Less time organizing, sorting, cleaning, drowning in chaos.
Luckily there is a whole discipline dedicated to systems-design: systems engineering. Systems engineers are responsible for conceptualizing a complex process, breaking it into components, gathering the needs of the people involved, then designing and implementing a solution that meets those needs. Kind of reminds you of the process for packing your kids’ school lunches, right? Or is that just me?
This newsletter aims to move past bin-based solutions to organize your household and look at the underlying systems needed to run things smoothly for the long term. I hope to inspire you to start seeing systems and a need for systems everywhere you look. The problem isn’t the huge pile of laundry, the problem is what system allowed the huge pile to get there. And so on.
I hope you’ll subscribe and join me on this journey!
Image by macrovector on Freepik