How to Do a Big Project in a Big Family Part 1 - The Checklist

(See the introduction first if you haven’t!)

If you can say, “Let’s clean the house,” and your siblings will drop what they are doing, pick jobs, and just start working as hard as they can at cleaning that house, with absolutely no quarrels or fusses, then you have a pretty perfect family. You might not even need to read all this!

But normal families need a plan. They need to strategize in order to get those imperfect workers to clean that house. This is the most important way to prevent social loafing. Planning the task is the foundation of the art of warding social loafing.

So plan it out.

For example, whenever we need to scrub our house from top to bottom, typically I get the whiteboard. The whiteboard can be a weapon. Use it wisely. 

I need to know exactly what we have to do, and how we’re going to do it. These are important fundamentals in any plan.

So I make a checklist. And whenever a sib gets a job done, and I look and see it did get done, I let them check the box and sign it off. If you do this, just be careful not to overuse the checklist or it will lose its charm.

But once I took it a step further and made cleaning the house into a bingo game. More on that next time.