Okay, friends.  I think it is time to tell you about something I call Quick-Chores, which is a house-keeping tactic I’ve been playing with this year, to varying degrees of success.

First, I should say that on the spectrum of people, I am the sort of people who neither enjoys housework, nor feels strongly compelled to do very much of it.  I think I’m in a lot of pretty good company.  Never-the-less, I do prefer a clean house to a not-a-clean house.  And so finding a way to make a more-regularly more-clean house is a thing that interests me.  Also, I’ve got kids, people who I’d really like to be involved in the more-clean-house project in general, for reasons.

Anyway, a bit ago I found myself chewing on this general conundrum, and I realized something important.  Maybe it is very specific to me, but either way it was the key seed to my new system called Quick-Chores.  Key seed: I don’t actually hate doing housework when a) I have a clear, well-defined task; and b) I’m doing the work with other people.  The cliché saying is: Many hands make light work.  But for me it’s more on-point to say that I actually like accomplishing things with my family.  I like the feeling of working together, and I like my family, so working together with my family is actually pretty nice.

What’s not nice is all the cajoling and boundary-setting and ‘are we done yet’.  And honestly, that’s the stuff that isn’t nice in any sort of work, including in housework I just do by myself.  One reason I don’t like housework is because it always feels so big and never-ending.  If I decide I’m going to Clean My House, or even just Clean This Room, that opens up the question of: How well?  How much cleaning will make a difference?  What needs to be cleaned to make me feel like I’ve accomplished my goal?  When do I get to stop and pat myself on the back and feel like I accomplished something, or do I just not get to do that because I hardly ever clean and certainly sparkling is not going to happen?  (And when am I going to relent and pat my kids on the back, too?)

So, Quick-Chores works like this:

1. Make a list of chores that are all clear, defined tasks.  Write them on little cards that are good for drawing out of a bowl or some such.  (I get index cards and cut them up into quarters, but I’m a bit more in love with index cards than perhaps the average person.)  The chores should be things that:
   • Can be done relatively quickly.
   • Cover a lot of ground in terms of what needs to be done around the house.
   • But you’re okay if they happen on the order of about once-a-month.  (If you need a much cleaner house than me, then you’re going to have to modify things or really only use Quick-Chores as a supplement.)  (Either way, Quick-Chores is a supplement – e.g., I don’t recommend dishes or laundry go on this list.)
   • If you really want to, add in one or two wild-card chore cards, but these can be problematic, as I’ll discuss later.
2. Divide the list up into different regions of the house.  I’ve got 4 regions.  You probably don’t want fewer than 3, or more than 6.  As much as you can, try to put roughly a similar number of chores into each region.  Cycling through regions will let you randomize things while still having a fairly regular schedule for cleaning different parts of the house.  But this is also to help you randomize things while still letting people clean together.  That latter points means you should be careful about not making your regions too small – people too close together might clash or otherwise get in each other’s way.
3. Cycling through one region at a time, about once a day, get everybody together to each pick a chore out of the hat and then do them.

Of course, there are lots of variations on how you execute Step 3, and in my house we’re still working on what does or doesn’t work well for us.  Some variations include:

• Is there a specific time of day you do Quick-Chores?
• Can people re-draw or trade chores if they don’t like what they picked?
• Do you have a method of tracking when / how often Quick-Chores happen? (We put a sticker on our calendar.  :))
• Is there any sort of reward for doing Quick-Chores? or for doing them every day for a week, or for month, etc?
• Do you / are you allowed to do more than one round of Quick-Chores in one day?
• How much should everyone help out if one person’s Quick-Chore takes longer than the others?
• Is there any sort of time-limit on a round of Quick-Chores?

What I really love about Quick-Chores is that it’s really straight-forward and requires little to no guess work.  You pick a chore.  You do the chore.  You win.  The house is a little bit cleaner, and weird things like wiping down the slots on the banister happen on a semi-regular schedule.  You can be reassured that the effort you’re putting in does count, but you don’t have to put in too much effort.  If you happen to have younger kids, the act of working together and randomizing across a lot of different chores has the benefit of also teaching your kids that those are things that need (some) attention, and how to do them.  (For example, one of the chores on our rotation is ‘mend something’.)

But there are challenges.  I have two cards that say ‘clean a mess together’ (allocated to different regions of the house).  They’re wild cards that are meant to let you change things up and tackle something out of the usual way, and my daughter really likes them, because they can be used to say, make us sit down and get our darned cupboard organized again (cracker boxes everywhere!).  I don’t like them, because the nature of them being a wild-card means that it’s really open-ended in terms of saying ‘yes, we’re done’.  We have a hard time choosing what we’re going to work on when the wildcard comes up (and then organizing ourselves so it feels like people have contributed equally).  And, whatever we choose always ends up taking longer than what we’d really like a Quick-Chore to take.  For us, the implementation of these wild-cards needs more work.  (hmm…maybe it should be an actual wild card, for one person, rather than changing up everybody… (I do have a tendency to start out making things more complicated than they should be.))

The other big challenges for us are 1) regularity, and 2) rewards versus no rewards.

Originally, I really wanted Quick-Chores to happen every day.  During the summer, that can mostly happen.  But when school’s going, homework can really bug in and make this an extra challenge.  So, I made a rule that we can sometimes do two rounds of Quick-Chores to make up for a day that we missed.  That works okay, but it makes it harder to stick to a regular habit of Quick-Chores.  And I did pretty quickly set another rule that says we don’t do more than two rounds of Quick-Chores in a given day.  More than two rounds really just puts the whole mood back into just a big, general cleaning zone, where it’s going to take a while and it’s harder to maintain a feeling of fun and quick accomplishment.  For morale (mine too) it’s important to keep to the idea that Quick-Chores are actually quick.

For that original push for Quick-Chores every day, I originally established that we would get some sort of treat for a full month of Quick-Chores done every day.  That did keep us going for a bit, but we ran into the question of what sort of treat is going to feel like a treat, isn’t going to end up too expensive (or get boring) if we actually manage it every month, and is otherwise viable on all fronts.  Bribing my family to help out with housework isn’t actually my favorite thing either.  At the very least because it goes against the original impetus for starting Quick-Chores, which is that (I think) it’s actually nice just to all help out with the house a little bit together.

So, we’ve dropped rewards for now, and the current thing we’re working with is setting a timer once chores have been drawn.  We set the timer for 8 minutes, which means, including assembling folks and drawing/choosing chores, I can honestly say (cajole) ‘Let’s do Quick-Chores! It’ll only take ten minutes!’  We use timers a lot in our house to help keep us focused, or set screen time, or remember appointments, or whatever.  And for us this is working not too badly.  If the timer goes off before the chores are 100% done, oh-well for now.  Quick-Chores are about some cleaning, rather than all the cleaning, anyway.

Side note: I also have a small list of Quick-Chores I keep just for myself, e.g., sweep the master bathroom, put away the bills, etc.  When I remember to do it, grabbing one or two of those to-dos folds into my weekly chores really easily, and them my spaces end up also tidier and nicer.

For family Quick-Chores and my own, we still need to work on the whole regularity thing.  Maybe I’ll play with more intentionality around time-of-day next…  Wish me luck!