Ever since the boys were four and six, Chris and I have been trying to figure out how best to get them to help with household chores. We started with an Excel spreadsheet of all the chores we needed done, and a small amount of money we were willing to pay-50 cents to empty all the wastebaskets, a dollar to scoop the kitty litter, that sort of thing. It worked okay for a while, but the problem was is that after a few weeks, only the “popular” (i.e. easy) chores were getting done, because even for a dollar, NO ONE wanted to scoop the kitty litter. So the spreadsheet got abandoned, and I went back to doing most of the housework with occasional breaks to nag other family members into doing them.

Now, it’s four years later, and I had almost given up on figuring out how to get all of the chores done. Which is why I was excited to get a chance to review a new website called Chore Buster. It’s a free web site that automatically generates a chore schedule for one or more people! You spend some time filling in information on each member of your family, and what your chores are. You can either create your own list of chores, or choose from a pre-selected list that I think is based on what other users of the site have put in. Next, you fill in how often each chore needs doing, the difficulty of the chore, what day you want it to start, and how often it should repeat.

That took me about a half an hour to do initially, and then I spent time tweaking the chart. After my first attempt, I realized I had given most of the chores to Chris and I, and almost none to the boys, and that’s kind of the opposite of what I wanted to do :) Also, I had the chores clumped together so that there were days with way too many and days with not enough. So I went back and forth resetting the frequencies of the chores and who should be doing them.

The best part of the site is that it emails you with the chore lists every day or every week, so you always know who needs to be doing what. And, you can set your chore chart to public so it appears on the community list for others to see. I was fascinated by the chart created by a mother with EIGHT children-I imagine this site is a lifesaver for her! There’s also a message board where you can chat about the site and how it’s working for you.

I’m not sure how my family is going to react to this new chore chart; but I’ve got it set to start tomorrow, and even if it takes a few weeks, I’m not giving up on it. I’ve already been thinking of other uses for the chart-for example, I could put in “Pay Bills” on my husband’s paydays, I could set Sundays to be my Meal Planning Day, I could even put in a daily “chore” for exercise! This is a great organizational tool and I would love to have my readers check it out. There’s absolutely no obligation; in fact, you can log in with a demo username and password and try the site out without having to give any personal details at all. Don’t want to log in at all? You can still look at a demo of how the site works.  Let’s get ourselves and our families organized and get everyone pitching in on the chores! So that we have MORE TIME TO BLOG!!

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