Tackle Your Hated Chores

How do we tackle chores we hate?  We all have certain tasks around the home that we hate doing!  Those are the homemaking items that never seem to make our daily to do list.  Then, we end up getting frustrated because they are so behind. 

What do we do about those hated chores?  They need to be done, because they are important.  But, we hate doing them. So now what?

I have four ideas for you to help you tackle to those detestable chores. 

What Are My Hated Chores?

I have a few chores that I really hate. The first is laundry. Throughout my entire adult life I have always felt behind about laundry. There’s usually a load or two in a bin ready for me to fold, or a clothes bin that is overflowing. It’s pretty funny because both of my parents are really great at laundry. In fact, when my mom comes to visit, she loves to help me out with my laundry!  

The other task I hate is cleaning my shower. We have a shower that is covered with white tile. So, you know what that means, right?  Tons and tons of grout lines to pick up dirt, soap scum, and mildew. I really don’t enjoy cleaning it, so I put it off. Then it gets really icky, and harder to clean. 

So, now that we have established what chores I hate, I’m curious, what chores do you avoid?  Before you read on, try to identify a couple of household tasks that you hate.  These are likely the ones that you will consistently avoid. 

How to Tackle Hated Chores:

1. All at Once 

The first way that I have to suggest for you is to do all of a particular chore once a week. If you’re like me, and hate laundry, the you could pick one day every week do do every single bit of laundry in the home from start to finish. 

To make this work effectively, you’ll need to make sure that you schedule time for this chore on your calendar. In the case of laundry, this is a task that is largely automated. But, if you are not home, you can’t change over the laundry when it’s finished. So, you’ll need to pick a day of the week when you are home to move the laundry over. 

Some chores lend themselves quite naturally to this type of scheduling. Gardening works well once a week, and so does bathroom cleaning. A few hours a week for those types of chores will help them stay maintained. 

I tried scheduling my laundry for once a week. I loved the idea of only needing to do that chore on one day. But, I found that I was unable to stop the rest of my life enough to be able to complete that chore completely. 

If you try doing once a week and it doesn’t work, then perhaps another option would work better for you. 

2. A Little Every Day

Another way to tackle a hated chore is to do a little every day. By doing a little every day we can prevent the chore from getting too big. I’ll bet that you already to this with some of your homemaking tasks. Loading and unloading the dishwasher is an excellent example of a chore that we typically do everyday. It doesn’t take much time, and can help our home stay running smoothly. 

You can take this idea and expand it to many other chores. If you aren’t interested in doing all of your laundry on one day, then perhaps you can consider doing a load a day. By doing one or two loads completely you can make significant progress and avoid a pile up.This is my preferred way of tackling laundry. I generally like doing one or two loads per day. It doesn’t take too much time, and I don’t get overwhelmed. 

A little every day works for other things besides laundry. I tend to pick this method with chores that are more physical in nature. I try to get out and garden a little every day. I don’t have the physical stamina to do the entire yard in one pass. In fact, when I try to do that, gardening transforms from an activity I live to a chore that I hate. If I do a little every day, I enjoy it more!

Recently, I have been using this method in the shower. I will decide of the which part of the shower that I want to clean and give it a quick scrub before I leave the bathroom for the morning. It helps to only spend a few minutes on a job that I hate. I don’t get the same satisfaction out of the chore completion that I would if I had done it all at once, but after about a week that shower looks amazing! 

So, if you don’t think that doing a chore once a week will work for you, try doing a little every day. This technique is also a great way to handle home chores if you are extra busy or fatigued. When I was undergoing radiation treatment, I was really fatigued. I would set a time for 10 minutes and do as much as I could of the dishes during that time. When the timer went off, I would relax. It was amazing how much progress I was able to make in a short amount of time. 

3. Outsource the Hated Chore

Another way to take care of a hated chore is to outsource it. Then you really don’t need to do it! 

As I wrote above, I really don’t like laundry. It is one of my hated chores. So, what I did was teach my kids to do their own laundry once they were old enough to understand how to do it. They both learned to do laundry in elementary school, even before they were tall enough to reach the controls. I had a footstool nearby that they would use to help them reach the dials on the washing machine!

When you outsource a job to your child, it takes time and patience during the teaching process. You will need to break the job down into steps and teach each step. Then, you’ll want to supervise the child doing the job, until you are convinced that he is able to do the job without your guidance. 

It is also important that you ensure that your child is old enough to understand how to be safe when doing chores. For example, you done want your child using strong chemicals to clean the bathroom. If the cleaner makes you cough, pick a different one. I’ve taught my kids how to clean their bathroom, but I make sure that the tools they are using are safe for them to use.  

Other than the kids, who can you outsource chores to?  You can also enlist the help of your husband or other adults living in the home. If you are sharing a home with several roommates, then ideally you would set up a system to take care of the cleaning and maintenance of the common areas. No one person should be responsible for cleaning up the family room!  If it is a shared space, then everyone should keep it picked up. 

Another option is to hire someone to do the work. For two years now I have been outsourcing my grocery shopping using the Instacart app. It saves me a lot of time to be able to have someone else do the grocery shopping for me. I’m happy to pay the premium for shopping because I would rather stay home and be available to supervise my kids during school. 

You can also choose to pay your children for extra work they do around the house. I have one son who enjoys cleaning. He has a list of cleaning jobs that I need done on a semi-regular basis that go above and beyond his usual duties. If he does that work, I pay him for it. I don’t have to do it, and he has the ability to earn extra money. 

As you’re looking through your hated chore list, can I encourage you to think about who your could outsource one or two of those jobs to?  Think about how wonderful it would be to permanently remove that job from your to do list!

4. Make it Fun

Sometimes we can’t eliminate the hated chores from our to do list. If that is the case, then find a way to make them fun!  

I really don’t enjoy folding and putting away laundry. But, if I am watching a tv show in my iPad, or talking on the phone, the job goes faster. I can even trick myself into enjoying the task because I like the show I’m watching!

If I decide to clean my bathroom all at once, I will make sure to put on my favorite 80s music playlist. Then I will sing in the shower as I’m cleaning it. Having energetic music going makes the time pass more quickly. 

Another thing you could do would be to plan a reward for yourself once the chore is done. Maybe you will take yourself out to coffee after you finish the weekly gardening. Or perhaps you will relax in a nice hot bath as a reward for cleaning that bathroom. 

It isn’t fun to do those hated chores, so please reward yourself for doing them!

I hope that you have been inspired and encouraged to find a new way of looking at those hated chores in your life. We all have jobs we don’t like to do, but part of being effective as an adult is finding ways to handle the unsavory aspects of our life. 

Let’s tackle those hated chores together, and then celebrate their completion!