A cartoon in a recent issue of the New Yorker shows two children standing in the kitchen having just returned home from school. They notice a piece of paper posted on the refrigerator door and one kid exclaims to the other: "Hey look--Mom left us an internal memo."

Our chuckles reflect a nervous familiarity. In order to manage increasingly complex domestic lives, we are adopting the discipline and purposefulness of work into our homes.

The idea that families might be as mechanized as a business is unsettling. But there is an important distinction to be made here: families are adopting the methods of business, not the goals of business. At GVO Inc., a product development consulting firm in Palo Alto, California, our ethnographic field research--in-depth, participatory studies of people's everyday lives--has taken us into hundreds of American homes over the last several years. We see families squeezing more and more activities--hockey games, karate lessons, eating out at the Hard Rock Cafe (and getting the T-shirt)--into their schedules, seeking to fill their lives with more fun, variety, and meaningful experiences.

Their activities meet fundamental goals that are very different from work-related goals. We've identified four basic emotional goals that people strive for at home: (1) to spend time with family and close friends, (2) to create a comfortable home that reflects the values of the family, (3) to participate in a variety of enriching and memorable experiences, and (4) to do the things that have to get done (such as housework and food preparation) with minimal drudgery, perhaps even a little fun.

The challenge is to do all these things and still maintain a sense of control. People are learning that maintaining control at home is more likely if they apply the management techniques they pick up at the office. It's clear that, for most people, work-like diligence in the home is merely an effective way to achieve the four emotional goals.

Techniques that are Crossing Over

While our goals at home and at the office are different, the techniques we use at work and home are becoming more similar. This blurring of home and work has been well-documented in recent years. Stephen Covey, whose book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People influenced millions of business people, is now applying his theories to family life (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families), urging families to write "mission statements." Telephone companies report that hundreds of thousands of families are using a business mainstay--"800" numbers--as a way to call home easily. Our language is shifting too: Mothers attempt to calm rambunctious young children by requesting family "conferences." Couples improve their marriages with a series of instructional video tapes from John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus) that resemble a management seminar--lectures and workshops with inspiring stories, clear objectives, and ways to measure improvement.

In our own research, we see people using white boards and Franklin Planners to strategize and organize family schedules. The refrigerator door, plastered with dozens of notes, photographs, and lunch schedules, has become the central information kiosk of the home. Post-It notes are placed on bedroom doors as reminders. Computers are now in 40 percent of American homes and are used to entertain, kick-off family projects, and keep in touch with extended family through e-mail.

Fewer Walls, more Communication

We've seen other similarities, too. Like the office (where the use of low walls encourages teamwork), the home has become more open and casual. Homes are being built to support communication and togetherness. The trends are toward bigger kitchens (the social center of the home), more open spaces, and more decks and porches. When describing the aesthetics of their homes, most families say they are aiming for a comfortable look. Today's casual home facilitates casual entertaining: people tell us the bulk of their socializing involves their two or three closest friends "popping in."

It's a good thing that people don't feel compelled to clean the house thoroughly for those spontaneous visits: The home has become more cluttered, thanks to the rising tide of magazines, newspapers, newsletters, homework assignments, lunch schedules, and computer printouts. Office workers have been dealing with paper for many years, but families are still struggling to manage the huge flow of paper into their homes. This need has spawned an industry of home storage products from companies like Rubbermaid and Hold Everything.

Of Process Improvements and Laundry

Because women are still primarily responsible for getting things done at home, they are usually the ones who identify process improvements. Although their children still think of them as "just Mom," they have transformed their role into the Chief Operating Officers of their families as they deftly delegate tasks, foster teamwork, and outsource to contractors and consultants. We have seen mothers bring incremental improvements to doing laundry by simply encouraging all family members to deliver their own dirty clothes to the laundry room. They also break things down into sub-tasks, such as "stir the pasta" or "put the Coke in the fridge," that any five-year-old can do.

Food manufacturers already know a lot about helping moms. A six-year-old who can help herself to a juice box eliminates the parental tasks of getting out a glass, pouring the juice, and washing the glass. Families respond to these "kid friendly" foods but cooking as an activity is still very much alive, particularly as a vehicle for bringing together friends and family, one of the primary goals of domestic living.

Time Management Edges In

A frequently used time management technique is "quality time," people's term for focused activity sharing with children. "QT" is arranged and attended like a meeting. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild illustrates quality time's roots in her book, The Time Bind: "...these brief respites of 'relaxed time' themselves come to look more and more like little segments of job time, with parents punching in and out as if on a time clock...quality time actually [takes] special discipline, focus, and energy, just like work."

Even watching television is a time management technique. Our culture is quick to judge watching television as a wasteful activity but it delivers a condensed range of experiences in a very efficient manner. It is an executive summary of the expansive world of culture, commerce, information, and entertainment. Jerry Seinfeld himself has said that the essence of television comedy is "density of thought."

Watching "Must See TV" can be one of the most productive things you can do all week. In just one hour, ER takes its viewers through a weave of narrative drama that rivals some novels and two-hour movies (you can even multi-task by doing laundry during the commercials). Friends showcases the hottest hair styles, home decor trends, and it so influences speech patterns. Seinfeld has been an important cultural glue in the 90s as millions enter the office every Friday morning ready to utter the previous night's catch phrase. Television, then, is a nightly seminar on contemporary culture and storytelling.

Why Does this Feel Weird?

Using work methods at home sounds strange to us because at home we expect to unwind from the pressures of work. We want to relax and kick off our shoes. Freed from having to "be professional," we feel most ourselves at home. In the words of sociologist Erving Goffman, our "presentation of self" goes from the "front stage" of work to the "back stage" of home. In our pluralized, postmodern world, though, we express who we are throughout the day in many different settings, with each setting influencing the others. In her book Home and Work, Christena Nippert-Eng examines this point: "In varying degrees, we expect to infuse our work lives with some of who we are at home, but we do not necessarily expect to do the reverse." And Nippert-Eng quotes an essay by sociologist John Gagnon:

Naming the ways in which the events of an individual's life have influenced his or her works is necessarily a trixter's task. It requires a decision that, first, there is some work separate from the events of life and, second, that the order of effect is from life to work. How much more interesting it might be if one asked how writing a certain article affected the way the author reared children or loved friends.

TOM WILLIAMS lives in a comfortable and efficient apartment in Menlo Park, California, where he manages a staff of two dogs and a parakeet. He works at GVO Inc. where he helps his corporate clients develop culturally appropriate new products ranging from computers to diapers.