WebCudgel.com

This LifeHack (defined here) is about Getting Things Done at home. I have a friend of mine, Dan, who makes his living as a handyman of sorts. Mostly it is appliance repair along with a few do-it-yourself type work for clients. However, his wife, Toni, has been quite frustrated with the lack of work getting done around the house.

After all, it’s a common saying: That which a man does for a living is rarely something done for home. The worst plumbing in the world can often be found at the home of a plumber. And so on.

Toni’s dilemma was that nothing was being fixed at home because it doesn’t earn money nor is it something Dan would like to spend is off-hours doing.

Enter in: Home Contracts (in the form of workorders submitted by the family)

Now, when Toni needs Dan to do something around the house, she just creates a workorder like he normally would for a client and this now sits in his stack of work to do. It makes the request more official in his mind and it actually has more importance in his daily routine.

Toni’s dilemma is resolved and Dan doesn’t feel like he’s giving up so much personal time because he can fill in dead spaces in his schedule with these other workorders. Thus, they still don’t interfere with his off-time and Toni is no longer spending her time reminding him of incomplete jobs around the house.

Therefore, the result is the more formal version of the infamous “job-jar” that I’ve heard from others before. A small jar sits somewhere in the house with slips of paper containing work that needs to be done around the house. When necessary, you reach into the job jar and whatever comes out is what you work on that day.

I’d like to take the job jar a slight step forward. Sometimes we find we may have only 30 minutes to spend on some household chore, but pulling out the slip of paper with “install new tile in the shower” can be self-defeating. In this case, develop a system of either (1) multiple job jars with “10 min”, “1 hour”, “1 day” and “big projects” labelled on them or (2) a color coded system for the slips of paper. I highly recommend the second as we really only need one job-jar, but having them divided by color helps identify stuff that can be done quickly.

I plan on implementing this as an index card box with multiple colors of cards. This means that I can then use dividers, if necessary, to group the cards by family member and still use the color to identify the expected time limit.

If my wife puts in a card for 10 minutes without realizing the request is probably an hour or a day, I just take her request and transfer it to the appropriate color.

Notice, it is probably best to note on the card the date of the request. Older stuff should really be handled first as they are probably still points of contention in how well the system is working for those who are doubtful.

Most importantly, don’t let this control your life or dictate to your spouse what you expect done in their downtime. We all need to be able to enjoy life. If the one thing you dread most after work is getting home to work on that job-jar, then you’re missing out on life. If your spouse already has a system for handling daily chores and such, try to dovetail your requests into their system instead of tearing their’s apart to make it match yours (heck, you might even find their system works well for your own).

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 11:08 pm and is filed under @Home, Family, LifeHack. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Bookmark this post: