Just-in-Time management and other great parenting tips

You might not think it to look at me, but I spent a year in business school.

At least, that's what I call it if talking to Americans. To a fellow Dubliner, I would more disparagingly say that I did the DBS after my degree and it was the most boring year of my life. That's a Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Studies, which you can use to convert a non-business primary degree so that you can then go on to an MBA or MBS, or simply use to get you into some more business-y line of work than your degree in archaeology or history of art might have prepared you for. I didn't want to do a master's in one of my primary degree subjects - though in hindsight I should have, because I turned out to get a scholarship for one in Spanish, which I didn't know about at the time of plumping for the DBS; and because over here it seems that everyone has a master's and it's very infra dig to just have a bachelor's without following it up with a few years of grad school.

The system is very different here/there. In the US, everyone [who goes to third-level education] does a primary degree first and then goes to med school or law school or business school or grad school for something else, quite possibly holding down a part- or full-time job the entire time. Everyone also leaves home to go to college - many (most? all?) schools require students to live on campus for their first year.

In Ireland, the majority of third-level students continue to live at home and go to a college or university near their parents' house. They don't build up an unholy amount of debt because college fees are either free or at least far below American standards, and so they don't all have to have a job during term time. If they want to go into medicine or law or architecture or engineering, they go into that course from the beginning, and if they want to go into business they do Commerce and from there can go straight into an MBA programme. Of course, there are routes by which you can get into professional courses from a BA or otherwise unrelated field, and the med students share a lot of classes with the students studying for a BSc and so on, but that's mostly the way it works.

There isn't really such a thing as grad school per se - if you do a master's you probably just do it where you did your undergrad. PhD programs are a little different, of course, and people might travel further afield to find the right supervisor or the right discipline, but again, many people just have the one alma mater for the whole however many years it may take, and the line between when you were a student and when you became staff and started wearing your sandals with your socks (I may be skewing towards some of the sciences here) seems very blurry.

But I digress. (If I ever have another blog, I should probably call it that. Here I am doing it again.)

So, after my degree, I studied business for a year, because (a) it was funded by the EU and therefore free, (b) I didn't want to do the HDip and become a high-school teacher, which was my other obvious option with a liberal arts degree, and (c) my best friend, who had done a law degree but would have to wait a few years for a place in the professional course to become a solicitor and wasn't sure she wanted to go that route anyway, had decided to do it, and egged me on. Also, it was a handy 10-minute train journey from my house with a quick walk at either end.

My more laudable reasoning - perhaps - was that while a master's would plant me firmly in academia, which I loved but seemed impractical, a business course might boot me out into the real world and give me a bit of a clue about getting a real job. What the business course in fact did was (a) bore my socks off for a year, giving me a great capacity for boredom that would probably stand to me in the following nine months of unemployment, and (b) convince me that the world of business, whether it was in Marketing, Accounting, International Business, or any of the other Incredibly Boring Courses we had, was not for me. I got excellent grades but it all seemed completely pointless. The one useful thing it did was provide me with my first ever e-mail account and expose me to the still-fairly-fledgling Internet (this was 1995, after all). My best friend and I took great delight in sitting next to each other while exchanging insulting missives electronically. I like to think we haven't really changed in the interim, as our birthday cards are still addressed to Fish Face and Gorilla Features.

My point - are you still there? I do have a point, I swear - is that at some stage during this long dark teatime of my intellectual soul, we learned about a Japanese-piloted management technique called Just-In-Time manufacturing. This was based on the principle that instead of having lots of inventory stored in your warehouse, you ordered what you needed just when you needed it, thus saving on storage space and time loading and unloading to different places and so on. A breakthrough, I'm sure.

ANYWAY. I find that my method of running a household falls under the Just-In-Time category too. I might (maybe) think about the things that I will do in the future, I might even plan them and make sure I'm not leaving anything too late, but I basically do what needs to be done just exactly before it needs to happen and not a moment sooner. (Even if I had the time sooner and I won't have it at the last minute.) Which is why I will be packing for our trip to NY tonight, or possibly tomorrow morning immediately before we leave the house. It is also why so far I have done nothing more than issue invitations regarding Mabel's birthday party next weekend - I could have baked things to put in the freezer, and maybe I still will, but mostly it comes under the heading of things to worry about next week. As for my mother-in-law's visit the following weekend, well, every time I clean something I muse that this might be the last time I get to do it before her visit, but I don't think you can really call that actively preparing for it.

I suspect this is how most people function, in fact. I think only those with far too much time on their hands or even more obsessive-compulsive tendencies than mine can possibly manage to think - and then act - beyond the next thing into the thing after that and the thing after that. There are only so many balls we can keep in the air, and the more you have, the bigger the crash when they fall. Minimize the number of balls, and you can keep this trick up indefinitely.

Which brings me back to thinking, as I did in 1995, that everything I learned in business school was so blindingly obvious I was constantly surprised that you could write it down, get it published in a book, and find people gullible enough to be willing to pay you for it.