Applying Six Sigma in Your Daily Life Helps Reduce Stress

Despite all the negativity surrounding stress, it can actually be good for you. It can motivate you to succeed, build resilience, boost immunity in the short term and even make life more meaningful. However, it needs to be managed. 

Unmanaged stress can contribute to many health conditions, including hypertension, insomnia, depression and anxiety. It can also degrade your personal relationships and make you less productive at work, leading to more stress.

While there are many ways to alleviate stress, not many people know that Six Sigma can help. Here’s how.

Increases Your Efficiency

When you have too much to do in a day, you can barely find time to destress. Being efficient means completing tasks on time and with the least amount of effort. Six Sigma has a tool called DMAIC that can optimize processes in your daily life by eliminating efficiencies.

DMAIC is an acronym for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. From cleaning the house to bathing the kids and taking them to school to doing your shopping, you can apply DMAIC to these processes and optimize them. In the end, you have less to stress about. 

In a nutshell, with the DMAIC, you can identify unnecessary steps in each process and eliminate them. The beauty is that once you improve one process, you can follow the same steps to optimize others.

Organizing Your Space

Clutter leads to stress because it can be tough to relax when your living space is in a messy state. Every time you sit down, you’re reminded that you have so much to do. The low-grade stress this creates can gradually drain your energy, making you less productive in other areas of life.

When it comes to organizing spaces, whether at work or home, Six Sigma has 5S, which stands for Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize, Sustain. Suppose you wanted to make your home a more organized space for relaxation. Here’s how 5S would help:

• Sort: Go through all your belongings, including furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes and other equipment. Find out what needs to remain and what needs to go.
• Set: Find a logical arrangement for the remaining items. For example, you can arrange them by type, how often they are used and where they can be stored to reduce unnecessary motion.
• Shine: This step is about putting everything in its place and then cleaning the house.
• Standardize: With everything in its place and the house in a clean state, keeping things this way needs to become a habit. For example, you can create cleaning schedules and a list of tasks, along with instructions
• Sustain: Sustain is maintaining order. The idea is to involve everyone by communicating that 5S is long-term and motivating them to get involved and keep it going.

Conclusion

Making you more efficient by streamlining your life processes and organizing your living space are just some of the ways Six Sigma can help you manage daily stress. As you can see, the methodology isn’t just for the workplace, but everywhere there is a process, including your everyday life.