Workshop: How To Share Family Work, Part 2

To download the charts that go along with this Workshop, click here!

Angelynn Singley, who has a background in nursing, gave this great comparison to motherhood:

In a hospital, you have the floor nurses and then there’s the charge nurse, who is a nurse by education. She knows how to be a nurse. But when she’s the charge nurse, she assigns patients, she moves patients on and off the floor, she does not have her own patients. Because how can you manage workers when you’re also trying to do the job that the workers are doing?

And so that’s what I thought of. The only time you’re asked to do the work and to manage all the workers is at home. And it’s hard.

Then she said:

Can you imagine, like, at a restaurant, trying to manage everyone but also serving the food? Or also cooking the food?

—Well, wait, that IS what we do. We also you buy the food, cook the food, serve the food, and clean up the food!

Back Story

This is part two of the How To Share Family Work Workshop, and it’s time to tell you the story behind this workshop. For Part One, click here.)

It all started about 13 years ago when I was pregnant with my third baby. I had a three-year-old and a one-year-old, deep in survival mode. I needed some way to acknowledge the large, herculean amount of work I was doing each day, and the cleanliness level of my house was not the signifier I was looking for. By that measure I was failing miserably. And yet, I knew I was doing important, exhausting, and very difficult work. It’s just that, as we talked about in the last episode, the work I was doing was invisible. What’s more, the measure we use in our society to acknowledge and reward hard work—money—did not seem to apply to this, the hardest work I’d ever done, with the longest hours.

So one day at nap time, I sat among the toys and Cheerios and opened my computer. I started a new folder called Archibald Inc. Then I created subfolders with all the departments of our little family organization: Culinary Arts, Administrative, Education, Culture, Finance, etc. It was the beginning of my efforts to categorize, define and create systems for all the work that goes into running a family. I started picking one department a month to work on and created systems, one at a time.

Ever since then, I’ve kept that Archibald Inc. file on my computer. I’ve refined the list of departments, figured out systems for each one, and changed those systems as our family has grown and changed.

Through the years, I’ve periodically made lists of all the work I do, and the work other family members do, to show them exactly what it is I do all day, and why I’m so busy, usually followed by a request for them to each pick a few things off my list and add it to theirs’. But it wasn’t until last year that I realized I needed two comprehensive lists. One that shows the work of caregiving, taking care of the individual people in a family—which is what we talked about in the last episode—and one that shows the work of managing a family organization. Both are family work, and they’re very intertwined, but they’re different.

And so, the charts for this workshop were born. And draft after draft, I narrowed down the work of running a family to these two categories “Take Care of Myself” and “Take Care of My Family.” Technically, the Take Care of Myself Chart should all fit under its own caregiving category on the Take Care of My Family chart, but it’s just so big it needed its own separate chart.

So in this second half of the workshop about how to share family work, we’re going to dive into the work that goes into running a family. We’ve already talked about what goes into caring for ourselves and individual people within the family, which constitutes a large part of family work. But there’s also those communal responsibilities of feeding a family, taking care of the home itself, and all the things that go into running the organization of a family, including fun things like culture, traditions, recreation, etc.

While the discussions in the last episode were more focused on the kids, in this episode, I don’t recommend bringing the kids into it until the end. This is a discussion to have with your spouse, partner, or whoever else contributes to taking care of your family. We’re going to look at all the different types of work, the departments in your family organization, and figure out who’s in charge of what, once again designating who are the managers, workers, and helpers in each category.

This is not meant to be a guilt trip or a confrontation, although it might bring up some hard topics. It’s meant to be a practical discussion about who does what in the family. That said, it’s not an always an easy conversation. Here’s how it went for my friend Molly Liggett.

I wouldn’t call it necessarily a peaceful discussion, because it did show some areas where one of us was in charge of a lot more, especially that invisible work, like buying presence and preparing for holidays. And so it wasn’t necessarily a peaceful discussion, but it was a very good discussion. And my husband has been wrapping presence all season with me. And he’s been in charge of buying all the presents for his side of the family. So we’ve made some definite progress. And some areas where we were maybe unequal and it wasn’t even visible. We didn’t even know that that was such a burden for me. But it was very nice to be able to visually see, here’s what I’m in charge of, here’s what you’re in charge of. Here’s what we’re both in charge of. And that was very helpful.

There is just so much work that goes into running a family. You could turn it into at least two full-time jobs. But few, if any of us, have the luxury—or desire—to do that. There’s always more that you could do.

That’s why a big goal of this workshop is prioritizing—figuring out which categories or departments are most important to you at this stage in your life, and which ones can take up less of your time, can be outsourced, or can even be eliminated altogether, if they’re just not important to you or don’t apply.

Other goals of this workshop are

• to make deliberate choices about how you divide labor among family members,
• to making invisible work visible
• to identify areas where you want to improve
• and to identify the individual strengths and talents of family members and how to use those to benefit the group.

If you have a parenting partner ideally, you’ll sit down together with two charts out in front of you. The first is the Take Care of Myself Family Progress Tracker, hopefully all filled out from going through part 1 of the course. The second is the Take Care of My Family chart.

The goal is to clearly designate who is in charge of what, both with taking care of the kids and taking care of the family.

This will look entirely different for each family, depending on employment situations, the strengths and talents of each partner, and the many other circumstances that differentiate every family. The goal is to find something that works for you, right now, understanding that it will change as time goes by.

Some couples will want to nudge the balance to that 50-50 mark, though it’s really hard to figure out exactly where that spot might be, since some of the responsibilities are so different. But most couples will look for not necessarily an equal division, but an equitable one. Eve Rodsky made this distinction in her book Fair Play, adding, “What’s fair is not always equal and what is equal is not always fair.”

I cannot begin to touch the research Eve Rodsky has done into the gendered history of family work, so I highly recommend you read her book, Fair Play, as you go about this process of divvying up your family work.

I loved reading it, because I realized that we had both basically come up with our own solutions to family work, and of course, we came up with different solutions. As you know if you’re a regular listener of the podcast, there’s nothing I love more than finding moms who’ve solved the same problems in different ways.

She divides work up a little differently than I do, which is another great perspective. Instead of dividing it into departments, she divided the work into a card game with four suits: home, out, caregiving, and magic, plus wild cards for those life-changing circumstances like moving, new jobs or new babies that require an extra measure of work. Then she and her husband played the game by dividing those cards between them. Such a great idea.

One of the important concepts in the book is a term she coined—the she-fault parent, meaning that especially historically, but still in our culture today, women are often the default parent, taking charge of the majority of the household tasks.

That’s one of the big goals of this discussion, going through each of the categories of family work and deciding who will manage each one, so there is no default. No assumptions. No leaving a category blank and just hoping someone will step up. Even if the majority of those tasks still fall on one person’s plate, it should be a deliberate choice, made by, agreed upon, and acknowledged by the two of you together.

Take Care of Myself: Family Progress Tracker

Let’s consider Caregiving the first category of Family Work and start with the Take Care of Myself Family Progress Tracker that you filled out in the first half of this workshop. On this chart, the first column after the categories themselves is a manager column, because until your kids are managers of each of these categories themselves, someone has to be in charge. So go through this chart and write the initials of the person who is in charge of each category and/or subcategory.

Who’s in charge of baths and brushing? Who puts the kids to bed and helps them wake up in the morning? Who makes sure they eat? Who manages their exercise? Who manages laundry and sorts through their clothes each season?

I’m not going to go through every category here, because I did so pretty thoroughly in the last episode. But you get the picture.

All of these caregiving management and worker roles make up a lot of the invisible work parents do.

As you go through them, discuss ways you could each support the other more. Talk about areas the dominant caregiver, if there is one, could use more help. Talk about what you might want to take a more active role in, and which categories you want to be more of a partnership. Talk about what you like doing the least, and maybe you’ll be surprised that your partner doesn’t mind it as much.

I talked about managers, workers, and helpers in the last episode, but we’ll add another category in this one, that of the consultant. I added this category because, especially when David was in medical school and residency, people used to refer to me as a single mom, since he was gone so much. His hours have improved a bit since then, but he still works long hours, leaving me to do much of the family management and work. This is something we chose, planned for, and expected. We married so young, while we were still in college, that we have made all of our career decisions together, both of us with eyes wide open.

But I always objected to that comparison to single moms, because it diminished the challenge of being an actual single mom, a title for which I have the utmost respect. I also object when people compare us to military families, though there are some similarities. Working long hours is not the same as being deployed and away from your family completely for long stretches. I have so much gratitude and respect for military families.

Part of what makes the role of single parent so difficult is that even with a good support system, it’s hard not to have a partner who you can talk to about the work, about the kids, and make decisions with. I wanted a way to recognize that role of consultant. Even when David isn’t taking an active role in one category or another as a manager or worker, I know at any time I can call on him as an invested consultant.

The caregiving roles on this chart will obviously change a lot as your kids grow—super intense at the beginning with young kids, especially in the categories about basic needs, and then decreasing in some areas as they grow, while ramping up in others, like education, talent development, technology, transportation, scheduling, etc. before settling down again, as teenagers become more self-sufficient. It’s a wild ride!

In our home, I take on most of the caregiving roles, as an at-home mom. In families where both parents work in other careers as well, hopefully these are divided more evenly or, with some categories, outsourced to other caregivers.

Take Care of My Family Chart

Now let’s dive in to the Take Care of My Family Chart. I’ve listed 17 categories, each with subcategories in the first column. You can type or write the names of each family member, including each parent or caregiver, in the other columns, and on my own chart, I also put the word Outsource at the top of the last column, so I can indicate which categories we hire out. If other parents also have custody, I recommend putting them on this chart too.

Like the Take Care of Myself Chart, you first have to designate a color for helpers, workers, and managers, and then put the appropriate dot in each space. Unlike that chart, however, there will be a lot of blank spaces where the kids just don’t participate.

One important thing to remember here is that once you designate a manager, let that person manage. Don’t micromanage. Give advice when your partner or child asks, but don’t look over his or her shoulder and tell them how you would do it! Unless there’s a big problem, let them do it their way, even kids. This can be really hard, but it’s also the best way for them to learn. And who knows, their way might be just as good or better.

I’ll go category by category here. Not all of the work that goes into running a family will be shown on this chart, of course. For each of these departments, there’s a whole system with lots of logistics and moving parts. I’ve already released episodes and workshops that go into more detail for many of these categories, so I’ll refer to those as I go through in case you want to dive in deeper to any of them. Ultimately my goal is to write at least one episode for each of these categories, to show you several different approaches to managing each department.

Executive

The very first category in this chart, the executive department, is all about the strategic, big picture of your family. If you have a spouse, partner, or co-parent this is usually a category you’ll want to manage together. This is where you’ll make the big-picture decisions for your family, identify your mission and values, establish your family culture and traditions, make the rules, and hold family meetings.

It’s possible that I lost you right here. If you’re in the thick of raising little kids, the idea of thinking of your family as an organization and running it at a strategic level might seem ridiculous. You’re just making it through each day, and way to go. This is the stage Angelynn and her husband, my brother Brett, are in right now, with seven kids 12 and under, including a new baby. But they actually cancelled piano lessons one week so they could make time to hold a family meeting and go through these charts.

Even just sitting down and doing things like this with your family, running it as a as an organization—I would like to do that. But I don’t know that that’s our family culture as of yet. We’re just flying by the seat of our pants and trying to survive.

I’m finally thinking like, “Okay, once we don’t have a baby or a toddler, I can use my brain and be deliberate.”  I just feel like I’ve been surviving for 12 years.

It’s totally normal if you feel the same way. But you might be surprised that a few executive level conversations with your partner once in a while are just the perspective you need to make these survival years a bit more survivable, even if you’re just talking about what you hope your culture or values will be like in the future.

In our family, both David and I are the managers of this category—basically joint CEOs of the family. But the kids are all workers here, too. Each year, on Labor Day, we take a family retreat to the mountains and we revisit our list of family values to see if we want to add or revise anything. We vote on a theme for the year—this year’s is “All In,” last year’s was “Look Up”—and we set goals for the school year. David usually finds some motivational videos to watch together, I plan team-building activities, and then we do lots of outdoor adventures. Usually biking, hiking, swimming, etc. We go over family rules and revise those too. Then we pull out a calendar and talk about what fun things we want to do together during the year.

The last two years, I’ve made these little videos about our retreats:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjNXsNMOAVM

Then, throughout the year, usually on Sunday afternoons, we have shorter meetings where we plan our schedule for the week or month, discuss any issues we’re having, and usually have a short value lesson where watch a Ted talk, a religious talk, or just a discussion. We top it off with dessert and a fun activity. The kids are definitely workers here—we plan the meetings, but they participate (with varying degrees of willingness, especially our teens), and contribute ideas.

I did a whole episode about how other families manage this executive department, way back in Episode 7: How She Strategizes, and then an episode about one family in particular in episode 45, How Liesle Chung Strategizes.

I’m working on an episode about family meetings, so let me know if you have any ideas to add.

Income

The next category is another big one: income. This will be different for every family—depending on careers and stage of life. Our family has navigated many different ways of doing this. We started off for the first three years with a double income no kids situation, then I earned the sole income while he went to medical school. Once we had kids, he became the sole income provider. Maybe one of these days I’ll start making money with this podcast and our situation will change again.

Many of you are the sole income source for your families, or a joint income manager. Whatever your situation, your family needs money from somewhere to be able to function, unless you’re one of those amazing, off-the-grid self-sufficient families.

Finance

Finance is a totally different department, and could have a totally different manager. David and I are joint managers of this category, though I’m very reluctant about it. This is one of the departments I really don’t enjoy managing. The only C I ever got in school ever was in college in my Family Money Management class. You may notice I don’t have an episode about this topic yet, because I’ve been avoiding it. But clearly I need one—so if you have a great system to tell me about, or if you actually like family finance, email me, and I’ll finally get around to writing this episode.

I split this category into Investments and Budget. I read a great book called the Family CFO about family finances which suggests that couples each pick one of these categories to be in charge of. That sounds like a great way to divide and conquer. In our family, though, we both kind of manage both, with the help of a financial advisor on the investment side. So we also put a manager sticker in the outsource column for this one.

Regardless of how you divide it up, if you have a partner, it’s good to at least keep each other apprised of what’s going on, since you’re both going to be spending money, and planning for your joint future. And you both need to know how to access accounts, etc., in case something happens to one of you.

This is one of the categories that appears on both forms. I am the manager of kids’ finances, paying them their allowance, and helping them buy stuff.

As I’m recording this, I’m realizing that I probably should have made shopping another subcategory, or even its own category, with a subcategory of managing returns. You can always at that category at the end. In fact, I’d really love to know what categories families are adding to that other category, so I can continue to revise these charts. I’m sure there are several things I didn’t think of.

Childcare

Next up is childcare. Like Income this is another big category that looks deceptively small because it doesn’t have subcategories. But that’s only because you could actually think of the whole Take Care of Myself Chart as the subcategories here.

In the case of this chart though, I’m talking more about who watches the kids who are young enough that they need ‘round the clock supervision. Babysitting, if you will, though we don’t and shouldn’t refer to either parent as a babysitter.

For this category I think of when we had a family reunion on a houseboat on Lake Powell. David and I had the only kids on the boat, a baby and a toddler, Jonas. It was quite frightening to bring a toddler on a houseboat, with drowning potential all around us at all times, and in some ways, having so many adults to outnumber him made it almost more complicated. It would have been easy to assume that someone was watching him. So we came up with a lanyard system, where whoever was in charge of Jonas wore the lanyard around their neck. When they had something else to do, they’d pass Jonas and the lanyard to another adult.

That’s how childcare is. Someone always has to be in charge. Sure, you can be joint managers of chilcare, but there usually is an unspoken default here. In our family it was always me, because I’m home more, but when David was around I could pass the metaphorical lanyard to him. In other families it’s the opposite. Still others have certain times that one parent is the manager and certain times when it’s the other.

Now, I can pass the lanyard to my older kids. I actually have three babysitters now, and only two who need tending and it’s amazing. So my three oldest sons get worker stickers here, and my nine-year-old daughter is a helper here, because she often entertains her little brother when I’m at home but busy, or helps when the other kids babysit.

I’m hoping you also have a go-to person or two—or more—to outsource childcare to. Before we could rely on our own sons, we had some lovely babysitters, so we could go out on dates once in a while.

HR

The next category is Human Resources. HR. This may seem funny to have in a family organization, but I needed a name for the jobs of assigning work and overseeing behavior, and that’s what a corporate HR manager does. As you could guess, since I created these charts, I am the HR manager over job assignments, and I also oversee the kids’ work. Both David and I are behavior managers, making sure the kids mind their ps and qs and teaching them manners. I do more of the hands on work of behavior management, but we consult each other frequently and try to be on the same page about consequences, etc.

In addition to this episode about assigning work, I also have episodes about teaching kids to clean, episode 11, to be tidy, episode 13, and How to motivate them to work, 15. All of these fit under the HR department, managing your work force. Of course, they’re more than your work force, but the work still has to get done!

Administrative

Now we come to the administrative department. I divided this into routines, shedules, and paperwork/mail. I have an entirely separate category for school communication, because that’s such a big job.

Some of my kids are managers of their own routines, which I divide into morning, after school, and bedtime routines. My 11 and 9 year old are especially into this right now. I helped them each come up with a master checklist, divided into those three different routines, and they love carrying their clipboards around and checking off what they finish. I barely have to remind them to get their stuff done these days.

I periodically do episodes about my own family’s routines, and all the experimenting I try with my kids. I’m do for a new one soon. You can find past ones in episode 14, 27, 33, 37, 55, and 67. If you’re planning on looking into any of the episodes I mention here, don’t worry, the full transcript will be up on my Website, so you can just link to the episodes I mention. Or, you can search through my beautiful new website to find them. I’m pretty excited about it!

I’m also the manager of the family schedule, and I run weekly calendar meetings to figure out where everyone needs to be. Those of us with phones share our calendars, just on iCal, so we can see what everyone is up to during the week and coordinate rides, etc. I actually really like managing this, for some reason, especially when I get to plan for when to have fun adventures, vacations, etc. I used to adore piecing together my class schedule in college.

Paperwork and email is another story. I manage these, but not very well. I always have a billion unread emails and I hate getting the mail. I think it’s just because it usually means more work to do. But somebody has to do it. And I can usually talk someone else into getting the mail for me, even if I have to sort through it.

Food

Food. This is a big one. I divided it into three steps, but it could be more. For example, I probably could have made shopping separate from food inventory, but I just kind of put knowing what food you already have and shopping for new food in the same food inventory category. The other two categories are planning the meals and cooking. In our house, I do all three, but of course you could divide this up and have one person plan the meals and shop and another one cook.

This is a great category to involve your kids as either workers or helpers, or even managers. One of my sons’ main chore is to cook dinner for the family once a week. He’s the cooking manager for that night. He also plans his weekly meal and adds the ingredients he needs to our online shopping list.

How she takes the fight out of food, in episodes 31 and 32, and I have a whole workshop about meal planning. For now, I just put the whole workshop up for free on my Website, and you can  buy the workbook that goes along with it.

Technology

Technology is another big one. This is one of the few categories that show up on both charts, because each person needs to learn how to manage technology, but there are also family level responsibilities. Online safety and manage screentime are on the Take Care of Myself chart, because even though it takes a lot of parental management initially, it will eventually be an individual responsibility. I am the parent assigned to manage these two aspects of tech. We mostly use Circle and the Screentime app to manage screentime.

I put device management and network management under technology on the Take Care of My Family Chart, basically to cover the ever evolving and all-encompassing world of home IT. From time to time we have to outsource some of this, mostly when things go wrong. In our family, David cares much more about having the latest devices than I do, so I’m happy to hand over device management to him. He buys any new devices, and gets them up and running. We kind of both manage the network, though it skews more to David, trying to get it up and running when it goes down, etc. but we outsourced the initial setup of our routers, etc.

Since we’re talking tech, it’s a good time to talk about this episode’s sponsor, Better Screen Time. I’ve already come up with courses to help you create your own laundry system and to create your own meal-planning system, and I’m planning to create more. You can find those on my web site if you’re interested. But one course I’m not planning to create is one about how to manage screen time and technology in your home.

This is because my friend Andrea Davis, who I featured in episode 68, among others, has already created the online course I wish I would have created: Creating a Tech-Healthy Family. I became an affiliate because I love it so much, and I wanted to get you a discount, so you could take the course, too. My family is actually in the middle of taking this course and it’s been such a great experience. To give you a little taste of what you’ll learn in the course, for the next several episodes, I’m going to share some of the most influential tidbits we’ve learned. One thing I like about it is that the entire first two modules are first, about you—as the parent—and evaluating your own relationship with tech, and then one about your relationship with your partner and tech—before even getting into the kids or the family as a whole.

It’s sparked a lot of soul searching and self-evaluation on my part. And my realizations haven’t always been flattering. The concept I want to share today is a term that Andrea introduced me to—solitude deprivation—as defined by Cal Newport: a “state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.” Whoa. Talk about finding the words I never knew I needed.

If there’s ever a group that experiences solitude deprivation it’s moms. And yet, when we catch those rare moments to ourselves, we often fill them with scrolling our phones or listening to podcasts (even though I love when you listen to my podcast), instead of in solitude with our own thoughts. Anyway, one of the goals I set for this first section of the Better Screentime Course Creating a Tech-Healthy Family is to find a bit of time with just my own thoughts each day. If you want to take this course along with my family and I, just go to betterscreentime.com and use the code howshemoms at checkout for 20% off in January 2022.

Housekeeping

Oh boy, now we’ve come to the Housekeeping category. This is probably the most visible of the invisible work in a family, but it’s only visible when it’s not done. So unfair. It’s also a category that traditionally has been erroneously tethered to motherhood. One of my favorite articles about this is called Housekeeping is not Mothehood by Rebecca Brown Wright. I’ll link it here, or you can Google it. Definitely worth a read.

I decided in this housekeeping category to break it down into the common areas of a house. I left plenty of empty spaces so you can add in the specific rooms of your own house. This is how we usually divide cleaning responsibilities. If this is not how you do it, you could also use those extra spaces for specific tasks, like vacuuming, dusting, clutter pick-up etc.

I really could have divided housekeeping into two separate categories: Cleaning and Organizing. Or even three parts, if you count tidying and deep cleaning as separate tasks. This is the category in which we assign our kids main chores. Each one started off being in charge of one common area. This is a system we’ve used for a while, periodically rotating who was in charge of which room.

However, as I mentioned earlier, one of my sons asked if he could cook dinner one night a week instead of being in charge of cleaning a room. That was a quick yes from me. So he is exempt from this category, though he still has to clean his own room and bathroom. My daughter liked this idea, so sometimes we work out a trade where she helps me cook, or she cooks something simple by herself for the kids on our date night, and I clean the area she’s usually in charge of.

This is another area we also outsource. So once a week, my friend cleans our main floor, while the kids each have assignments to clean parts of the basement and the upstairs hallway.

As for organizing, I’m really the manager over the whole house, but I often enlist the kids’ help for the work, sometimes paying them a bit for help with big organizing projects, unless it’s helping me organize their own rooms, which they definitely don’t get paid for.

Facilities

Next up is facilities—taking care of the home itself. This includes maintenance, improvements and décor. I usually end up being the maintenance manager, fixing basic plumbing issues, etc., and managing any contractors we need. David and I are joint managers of improvements, making decisions together. And I’d say that he is the décor manager and I’m the worker, though we make a lot of these decisions together too. But he’s the one with the vision. He’s very artistic and has a good eye. Which is a very important talent in his field of facial plastic surgery. It’s also great for our home. I love his taste.

This is a great example of choosing responsibilities based on talents.

Education

Education is another of these big categories that appears on both charts. Yes, all the kids will ultimately be in charge of their own learning, but until then, there’s a heck of a lot of work for parents. Like the meme that’s been circulating about parents having to quit their jobs to read school emails full time suggests, it’s a huge job to keep up with school events, school policies, registration, communication with individual teachers, etc. Especially when you start a new school, you have to get to know the systems, communications channels, and even the culture. Not to mention volunteering.

And that’s if you’re sending kids to school. If you’re homeschooling, that’s another category of its own. I did one episode on homeschooling, kind of, in episode 35, how she covid schools, but I definitely need to explore that world in more episodes.

Another part of managing kids’ education these days is figuring out extracurricular camps, lessons, sports teams, etc. One of my friends splits this management responsibility down the middle with her husband. Each one takes half of the kids and signs them up for things and drives them to practices. David and I definitely decide together about what to sign our kids up for, but I do the driving, communication with teachers and coaches, etc.

I talk more about this in episodes 69,70, and 72 about discovering and developing kids’ talents.

The other subcategory I included here is basically character education, teaching kids values and spirituality. David and I share this category, and trade off teaching when we gather most nights before bed to read scriptures, pray together, and have family discussions. Many families do this less formally, which also works great.

Transportation

Next is transportation. The family the first two subcategories are about maintaining and purchasing family vehicles. David and I both maintain our own cars, but David is definitely the purchasing manager for both cars and bikes. I’m basically car blind. I’ll drive whatever anyone gives me to drive, and I hate the thought of having to go out and test drive different cars and make such a big purchasing decision. Lucky for me, David likes cars, and is happy to take over management of this category.

I don’t consider cleaning the cars as part of this category—I added cars to the housekeeping category on my chart, with me as manager and my kids as workers.

Then there’s chauffeuring, which some weeks feels like just about all I do. With five kids, there is a lot of driving around. I’m about to get a worker in this area, since my son will get his license in March, so I’m pretty excited about that. We’re new to this, so we’re still figuring out if we’ll want an extra car for the kids to eventually share. Our plan is to just see how it goes and share until it gets too inconvenient to share.

Health

I’m lucky in the health department too. Although I manage most of the everyday treatments when the kids are sick or injured, and I take them to all of their appointments, David is a doctor so I rely on him to make most of the major decisions, although this is usually a team effort. The exception is a very notable one. I’m usually the one who has to make the call whether to keep kids home sick from school. I hate this one! It’s often so hard to tell if they’re sick, or just extra sleepy. Obviously these past few years I just err on the side of caution, but I’ve definitely had a few fakers take advantage of that!

I didn’t add a subcategory for surgeries or procedures, but I’m lucky enough that David is the manager of that too for our family. We were just in his office last weekend to remove my son’s mole, and he has stitched up many a laceration. Mostly on that same son.

For some families, especially those with chronic conditions—mental or physical—this can be a really big category, which is why I split it into three subcategories. Sometimes appointments alone can be a full time job. I thought about having separate subcategories for physical and mental health, but the two are so closely intertwined and the three categories I included really apply to all health. Just know I’m talking about all kinds of health.

History

I added the history department because documenting our lives as a family is both important and a lot of work. David and I divide and conquer in this department too. For a long time, his phone had a better camera, so he became the default photographer. But as I mentioned earlier, he’s much more visually artistic than me, so he takes way better pictures anyway. This means we have to make an extra effort to get him in some of the pictures too.

We both take charge of sorting through the pictures we take. He’s really disciplined about doing this at the end of each day. I’ve been known to wait a whole year. He also posts pictures to our digital frame, one of the best Christmas presents he’s ever given me. Keeping it updated as well makes it a gift that keeps on giving!

I’m the one who puts photo books together and who keeps a written record of our lives, partially through this podcast, really.

Episodes 73, 77,78, 79, and 80 all talk about recording your family history.

Recreation

The next category, Recreation, seems like all fun and games, but I think it’s actually one of the most important categories for families. Having fun together is so important to family health and culture. It’s part of the glue that holds us together. I divided this into vacation, entertainment, and adventures. David and I are both managers and the main workers in all three categories. And this category definitely requires a lot of work, especially on the planning side.

The first subcategory is vacation—pretty self explanatory. In our family we have to plan these pretty far in advance, because David has to find someone to cover for him with his patients, and his schedule is booked out pretty far, so we usually discuss the next year’s vacations at our family retreat. The kids are definitely workers in this planning stage. They are also workers when it comes to packing. I print out a custom packing list for each trip and then expect them to pack themselves. Sometimes they end up having to buy underwear on the road, but that’s a good learning experience.

My sister-in-law Angelynn liked that this was part of the discussion. When they talked through this list as a family, her oldest daughter Isla started making a bucket list of potential family vacations.

We talked about how she has six more summers until she goes to college. So we should plan out our summers and not just kind of just say, “What would you like to do?”

And then I said, “Yeah, your last summer, we should go to Hawaii.”

 And her eyes got big because it’s just like, we can barely even get to the grocery store. She was like, “Do you think we could do that?” And I said, “If you plan for it, why not?”

So then she started writing down things she wanted to do and places she wanted to go. And Isaiah was helping, and it was really fun to hear them dream.

The next category is entertainment. We’re live music enthusiasts, so we always plan out a pretty full concert schedule each year. We usually give our older kids concert tickets for birthdays and sometimes Christmas, and we go to the symphony as a family several times a year. For your family this may be more about going to the movie theater, sporting events, etc.

Then we have adventures. I think more of local adventures here and leave other adventures in the vacation category. For us this includes local ski trips, rock climbing, hiking, mountain and road biking, etc. This is another category that changes a lot in different stages of life. Here’s what Angelynn has to say about adventure with seven kids 12 and under.

It’s funny, because I’m always with a baby. Even when we go to visit your parents, a lot of times, they’ll go do something, and I have a lot of memories just being at that house. And then my kids have memories of doing stuff. And I’m like, “Oh, I wasn’t even there.”

But I did say, “If there’s ever an adventure that you guys go on, it’s because I said, ‘You go on that adventure with your dad.’”

So when they think of event, they don’t think of me because I’m never there. But rest assured, I’m the one that got us to go to Utah in the first place. Or I’m the one that sent them to Magic Mountain with their dad. Because I don’t I want them to do those things. But I can’t go with them. I’ve been so long in the baby stage, like haven’t been out of it.

But even for Angelynn, the time will come when the adventure scale tips from being mostly work to being mostly fun. We eventually got there, even with skiing—most of the kids can get themselves ready for the slopes, and they can all ski on fun runs now. It will come!

Check out Episodes 74, How Maria Makes it Fun and 42, How She Plays with Her Kids (And How She Doesn’t) for more on this topic.

Events

A related category is events. This is split into celebrations, like birthdays and holidays, and hosting. Obviously like any of these categories, you could divide these into many different subcategories, like buying gifts, decorating, etc. But you can figure those out within the systems for this department. Or you could make gift giving its own category at the end of the chart, since it can get pretty big.

I’m working on an episode about celebrating birthdays, and episodes 22 and 43 are about celebrating Christmas.

Outreach

The last official category is Outreach, with subcategories service and community involvement. This can be individually or as a family. Before you dismiss this and think you don’t have time yet, you probably are already doing it within school or church communities. And if you’re not there yet, the time will come when you can talk with your family about who in your community or outside of it you can help with either charitable donations or acts of service. Even just attending neighborhood, school, or community functions counts as community involvement.

One of the big ways my family is involved in our community is with music. We have just arranged to sing regularly at a local retirement home, which we started at Christmas time, and we put on a neighborhood concert each summer.

What unique interests or talents can your family contribute to your communities?

For ideas, you can check out episodes 21 and 23, How She Serves Family and Friends and How She Serves Her Community and Beyond.

Other

The Other category is where you can put categories that are specific to your family or that I may have missed. I’d love to hear what you put here!

So that’s it! I hope these lists help you think more strategically about how you divide the huge amount of work it takes to run a family and take care of your kids. Maybe it will also expose areas where you just need help, and inspire you to go out and find someone who can support you in some of these categories. And hopefully, like for my sister-in-law, Kelli Archibald it can help you just think about all this work a little differently:

It helps you visualize that mental load. All the mental chaos, I should say, because I feel like that’s what it is in my head. It’s just mental chaos. Like my brain is scrambled. And now this kind of puts it down in a spot where I can see logically, where everything goes and how everything’s organized. It organizes the chaos.