I forgot to say...

I was so busy being funny on that video that I missed making an important point:

Arrange the cards in piles, according to how often you do the chore: daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Then, spread the chores out evenly across your days that you want to do them. For me, thats Mon-Friday.

So, all my dailies go every day of course. Then I count my weeklies, divide by five and put that number in each day of the week. When I do a weekly chore on monday, I rotate it to the following monday's date. etc.

Monthlies, I decided to distribute on Mondays and Wednesdays, throughout the month. That gives me eight days to do monthlies on. So I might have one or two monthly chores on those days.

Each chore is something small and quick, so that nothing feels overwhelming, and they can be done around the edges of a much more interesting day.

Tomorrow I'll take some time to post a list of all my chores, just to show what types of things I'm starting with. I'm sure I'll add some more things, and eliminate others as I see gaps or redundancies in the system as time goes by.

The whole point is: It will be a vast improvement, build some good habits and hopefully be mostly painless.

Oh, and I went and saw that new 3-D Pocahantas, I mean Dances with Wolves movie tonight. I loved it, but the plot was predictable. I think it was called Avatar. ;-) I want to be a Dragonrider, too. Oh wait, that's Anne McCaffery....

Comments

Has said…
How do you get the children to do these? Do you just ask one of them when you pull out a daily or weekly chore card? Or do they have set chores?

Also, do you replicate your daily chores so that you have 7 cards saying the same thing, so each day of the week has one of them?

(I can't visualise the system just yet. But trying to set it up for myself without buying the book! I have the cards all written out so far.)
Alana said…
Sometimes I tell the kids to do X, and sometimes I ask if anyone wants to do X and I get a volunteer. Each chore earns them a quarter, so if they are saving up for something, they are more motivated to help out. If no one helps out voluntarily, I assign them jobs. No one has ever balked and refused to be helpful.

I use ONE card for each chore and re-file it according to whether it is labeled "daily", which goes in the next day's slot, or "weekly", which gets re-filed a week later, or monthly, which gets rotated back to the same calendar date a month later. I will have to take a few minutes at the beginning of February to reorganize slightly, so that I don't have any monthly chores falling on the wrong day of the week.

Good for you on giving it a go.