Use Kanban to Delegate and Track Family Affairs
When it comes to household chores, it’s almost impossible to remember what you started, who should be doing what, and what remains to be done. So you end up with a half-cleaned freezer, a vacuum cleaner that coughs up lumps of dust (“Shouldn’t Bob have dumped that thing ?!”), and a general feeling that things always go awry.
You need a visual one. You need a system. You may need Kanban.
Explained in The Personal Kanban: The Cartographic Work by Jim Benson and Tonyana DeMaria Barry | Navigational Life , Kanban is a simple DOS control system. To see how it works, read our guide to using personal kanban .
The system could be implemented to manage household chores with Post-Its, which you probably have somewhere in your Terrible Drawer. (The first quest to add to your kanban: empty the horrible crate.)
First, create a chart with three vertical columns: To-Do, Doing, and Done. You can use a board or wall if it is in a location that you cannot avoid. One woman in the home organizing group, of which I am a part, hangs her stickers right on the kitchen cabinet doors so she can meet them face to face every day.
Write down one work on each sticky note and place the tasks in the To-Do column. You can always add more when you think about them later. You will always add more. Once you think of the work that needs to be done, put it out of your head and place it on the sticker.
Use different colored sticky notes for different family members or to highlight more important tasks (for example, anything that starts to smell). Move the tasks to the Done and Done sections, respectively. Feel proud. You have a system.
But wait. There is a Kanban “rule”. It’s important to limit the number of tasks you perform so that you don’t get overwhelmed. As a rule of thumb, no one should have more than three tasks to work on at the same time. You may want to start with no more than one or two tasks being performed to get a feel for the system.
Several Kanban upgrades to keep kids engaged:
Children can and should do housework and are easy to make part of the system. Give them your special color and assign them age-appropriate tasks (for example, very young children can clean toys, and teenagers can mop or do laundry).
To make things even more interesting, you can invest a dollar value in each assignment so that the child can earn extra pocket money. Or, you can offer a prize when a child or group of children makes it to the finish line. It is a way for children to see that everyone has a job and that there is always more work to be done.