How to Divvy Up Housework
The more people in a household, the messier it gets. While keeping a house clean singlehandedly is a manageable task when you live alone, it's not possible once you have a spouse or kids. Use this to your advantage by divvying up the housework among everyone in the house to keep it clean. Before you divide the chores, however, you must take a number of factors into consideration: simply splitting the same tasks equally amongst all the members of your household is not always the best solution.
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Instructions
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Call a family meeting and explain that one person cannot do all of the household chores. Compare to household to an organization, explaining that household tasks are best accomplished with teamwork. List the tasks so that everyone can see how many chores exist, establishing that everyone needs to take part to get the work done. If you expect resistance from children, or expect other adults to slack off, develop consequences, such as loss of activities or privileges.
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Include jobs and school time in your consideration for splitting household tasks. Remember that staying home is as much a job as going to work or school. If a person stays home, he or she should do more chores, but not all of them. Calculate how many hours of work it takes to complete all chores in one week. Assign these proportionally according who stays home most and least, if there's a difference.
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Assign work to the kids in an age-appropriate manner. Give older children more complex chores that take more time, such as loading the running the dishwasher, and younger kids simple chores, such as making the bed. Remember to factor in the amount of time the child spends at school and doing homework. If the child has a lot of homework one night, allows them to move chores to another night or the weekend.
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Teach everyone in the household how to do all of the chores. Don't assume your spouse can do a chore correctly just because you can. After everyone has learned all the chores, let people choose the chores they like best. Assign them those chores. If any chores are not chosen, assign them to someone intentionally or randomly draw the leftover chores from a hat.
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Allow each person to customize tasks to his liking. Your child might discover, for example, that he prefers to rinse all the dishes at once instead of one-by-one before putting them in the dishwasher.
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Create a schedule for chores. Write each chore on the left side of a paper and each day of the week at the top. Write the name of each person so that it lines up with the correct chore on the day it needs to be accomplished. Require each person to highlight his name after completing the task.
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References
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