My family went on a mini vacation a few years back which included a stay
at a very nice hotel. During our stay, I admired how clean the room was
and wished my home could be that clean. We had a long drive home and I
thought about how I could start keeping my home that clean or close to
it. The reason my house wasn’t as clean as I liked was because I didn’t
do everything that needed to be done when it needed to be done—in other
words, I didn’t have a system.
What I came up with was a chore
schedule list. I started out by writing down every chore that needs to
be done for each room in the house, then I labeled them with either a D
(for daily), a W (for weekly), an M (for monthly) or 1-3 x a year. Then
I went to the computer and opened up 4 new documents and saved them as
Daily, Weekly, Monthly and 1-3 x a year. On each of these documents I
listed each chore that needs to be completed in that time frame and left
an area for checking off each chore on each day, week or month when
completed.
It has been a while since I created these chore schedules and since
then, I’ve come up with an excellent way to get my family to help.
Here’s what I did: I made the chores schedules into tables with spaces
to write in whoever’s initials completes the chore. At the end of the
week, we tally up initials and we come up with 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th
place winners (4 people in my family). First place is the one who has
the most initials and so on. We give $10 to 1st place, $7.00 to 2nd,
$5.00 to 3rd and a giant candy bar to 4th. To even be considered for a
prize, a family member must have at least 7 chores completed.
This method has members of my family racing to get as many chores
done as possible within a week trying to win 1st place! The house has
been much cleaner and my kids are learning housecleaning skills while
having fun trying to win. Of course it has been much less work for me so
it is well worth the money paid for prizes. If you don’t agree with
paying money for chores, then you could give other types of prizes such
as time spent with mom or a day at the park, etc.
