Promoting Family Teamwork - Create your own Clean Team!
Are you looking for a great teamwork activity for your family? Few aspects of family life can expose our strengths and weaknesses in the area of teamwork like housekeeping can. Can you honestly say that every member of your family is doing their fair share to keep your home in shape? Do you want to improve your family's ability to pull together to accomplish this common goal? Read on to find out how Let’s Clean Up! provided the teamwork activity that taught our family how to work together effectively.
Several years back, our family reached a turning point dealing with household chores. Our children were 8 and 11 and our lives were quite busy. Somehow it seemed that we never had the time or the inclination to dust or vacuum or clean sinks. Admittedly, they’re not the most exciting activities in the world.
My husband was experiencing a lot of allergy symptoms because of the dust in our home, and I felt chronically guilty because I could not seem to provide the environment I felt we should have. I also felt resentful because I felt I wasn’t getting much help from family members in solving this problem.
When I asked my husband or children for help, they would only do what I specifically asked them to do and that was so much less than what really needed doing. No matter how hard they tried, they knew that somehow they hadn’t done enough. The list of chores was overwhelming and I hated delivering the news that there was more to be done.
Finally, I was myself intimidated by the scope of the task of getting our home in shape and keeping it there. I felt that my attempts to clean up were tiny in the face of everything that remained to be done. I didn’t feel much of a sense of accomplishment in completing any task, because I felt so much anxiety about all the things I hadn’t done.
After a family discussion on the matter, it became clear that part of the problem was that no one really grasped all that needed to be done or how best to accomplish it.
My husband suggested that it might help if I could come up with a list of all the chores that needed doing and we could all decide how often they needed to be done. Having spent the majority of my adult life as a professional software developer specializing in user-friendly databases, I took his suggestion one step further. That’s how Let’s Clean Up! was born, and our family, and many others, have been using it ever since.
I love the fact that I am no longer the family’s "deliverer of bad news". Our family agreed that we would all clean together once each week. When that day comes, the Cleaning Checklist tells us what to do. Let’s Clean Up! has removed "cleaning anxiety" from our home. We all know what we need to do, and what we don’t need to do. We generally don’t do any cleaning that isn’t on the Cleaning Checklist. Sometimes we skip some chores, and that’s OK because we know we won’t lose track of them. They will appear on the next Cleaning Checklist. Our family, working together as a team, has our household chores under control. It’s amazing how little time it takes now that everyone knows what to do. My guilt and resentfulness over housekeeping are things of the past, and I no longer feel like the "bad guy," who has to push everyone to contribute. What started as a teamwork activity has become a way of life.
And now we offer Let’s Clean Up! to you. It is my heartfelt wish that you will experience the benefits that it has brought to our family and many others.
Sincerely,
Lisa Way
Creator of Let’s Clean Up!