My wife is solidly a paper person.
She’s written three books of fiction totaling about three quarters of a million words. Most of her research and drafts for these books are in binders, journals, folders, notebooks, and photocopies.
I’m more of a technology person.
I have some notebooks but I store a lot more in computer files, databases, and apps.
I love the automation and templating aspect that computers and software bring. Unfortunately, that part doesn’t translate to paper very well.
Housework reminders without judgment
Getting the housework done is a challenge for us. Our daughter is off to college most of the year and our dogs that used to shed a lot have passed on, so the state of the house doesn’t crater quite as fast.
But every once in a while we go ewwww at something and we realize the cleaning has snuck up on us.
So we realized we needed some kind of system to help us keep up.
Housework reminders system requirements 🙂
Here’s what was important to us as we went through some iterations:
- The list of chores shall be printable. My wife is a paper person so this was her highest priority.
- The list shall be easy to keep current. This was my highest priority. I wanted to spend as little time as possible maintaining this thing. A shared Google spreadsheet would have worked for me but that wasn’t going to work for my wife, so some process design was needed.
- The list of chores shall be granular. My wife prefers to “get behind herself and push” to get a big chunk of things done at once. I like to have something I can do in a few minutes here or there. Having things granular allows both.
- The list of chores shall be sortable. I wanted some way to put the high-priority cleaning things at the top.
- The list of chores shall fit on one printed page. The paper for me was a compromise so I didn’t want any more of it than necessary.
- The status indicator shall be non-quantitative. (This indicates how urgently a chore needs to be done.) My wife didn’t want to see a number and have to translate that to urgency.
Here’s what we’re using now
A picture is worth a thousand words:
What is shown
The columns that show are the general area of the house, the chore, when it was last done at the time I printed it, what the status was, and an estimate of how long the chore takes (in minutes).
The writing on the sheet is us indicating when we did the chore so that I can go back to the spreadsheet and update it. This works for my wife and is all she does in maintaining the list.
The process
The process at this point is easy.
- I print out two copies of the current spreadsheet. One goes in our bedroom and the other goes on a whiteboard in the hallway on the main level.
- Over some period of time, we get a few things done and note directly on the paper when we did them.
- My wife asks me to update the sheet, which involves me opening up the sheet and updating the dates in the middle column. That’s usually it. Everything else just works.
- Go back to Step 1.
Great, Good, OK, Meh, Yikes
This was the scale that I came up with for the status. It’s non-quantitative even though there’s a calculation in the background that is very quantitative.
It’s also mostly positive and non-judgmental. I really wanted to avoid “due dates” here because neither of us need any more self-inflicted reminders that we’re failing as human beings. (We manufacture enough of those reminders on our own, don’t we?)
It’s very, very easy to update now
When we decide that we want to update (it can be a while) then all I need to do is collect the printouts and update the Last Done column with the correct answer.
Everything else updates on its own automatically.
This kind of thing makes my heart sing and reduces the barrier to actually doing the things. That’s the whole point for me.
Want the spreadsheet?
Head over to Gumroad and get it!
Thanks for reading!
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(header photo by Crystal de Passillé-Chabot)