Managing a home, raising kids, maintaining a relationship and progressing in your career, hobbies and other areas of life can be a lot to manage these days.
The pressure to do everything perfectly and extremely different expectations now compared to previous generations coupled with less of a community to support creates a plethora of issues.
So how can you make life easier? Insource!
Below I cover:
What is insourcing?
What you can insource
How to insource
How to get people excited about helping
Something to Keep In Mind
When it comes to insourcing, it cannot be “my way or the highway”.
Meaning, done is better than perfect when it comes to most things. And your way isn’t the only way.
Having people willing to do tasks, provided they are doing them well enough is the goal. Not having everyone do everything exactly how you want.
Just because you have always done something a certain way doesn’t necessarily make it the only right way.
For example, there are different ways to fold laundry and put it away. Does it really matter if it is done exactly how you want or does it matter if it’s done so you don’t have to?
As long as the laundry is clean, dry, folded or ironed and stored so it doesn’t wrinkle, it should be fine.
If they choose to store it in a way that means their clothes get wrinkled, then they need to be responsible for ironing it when they want to wear it.
Pick your battles.
Some things do need to be done a specific way and in that case, explain exactly why you want it done that way e.g. the order dishes are washed in if hand-washed or loaded in the dishwasher does impact cleanliness.
What Is Insourcing?
Insourcing is one way to reduce mental load and get done in your home whatever needs to be done.
For my home and that of many of my business owner friends, this included our business when our kids were old enough, which I will explain further down.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, insourcing is “the practice of using an organisation’s own personnel or other resources to accomplish a task that was previously outsourced.”
In the context of your home, this means having everyone who lives there participate in what needs to be done.
The previous outsourcing was you. Everyone defaulting to you and leaving it all to you was them “outsourcing”.
Teaching your kids how to do things to enable them to become confident, independent and capable adults.
Working with any other adults in the home to achieve whatever needs to be done within your home and life.
This doesn’t mean offloading everything to everyone else or making kids do things beyond their years.
Instead, it is applying the concept of we all live here, we are all responsible here.
Responsible for cleaning, organising, scheduling, gardening, maintenance, everything but at age appropriate and ability* appropriate levels.
A note on ability levels
*Ability levels include 2 ability types for me:
1 – Have they been taught the skills and have the ability to do the job? Or is that a work in progress that needs supervision and mentoring?
2 – Do they have the physical, mental or emotional ability at the time to complete the task? E.g. Our home has a mix of neurospicy people plus I have a few recurring health issues. What we are capable of can change based on numerous factors such as overstimulation so we put in place what we can to help but also allow grace for those times we simply cannot function. Communicating that or knowing how to recognise that is important.
What Can You Insource?
The chores or tasks you choose to insource within your home is up to you, the ages and abilities of everyone within the home.
What you insource depends on what you need in your home.
Fair Play is a book and card game that helps outline what needs to be done in the home and shows the load each person is doing. It can help you plan and divide tasks more evenly.
Life Admin Hacks teaches you how to reduce the mental load of life admin such as appointments, all the things for the calendar, paying bills etc.
In my home, as soon as my kids could, they were started on age appropriate tasks so that by around 8 they were capable of most things.
They could plan meals, cook and clean up. Clean the bathroom, sweep or vacuum and mop the floors, wash windows, identify and pull weeds etc.
Use something such as Fair Play or keep a list of everything you do to see what you can have other people in your home start doing.
How to Insource/How to Get People to Help Around the House
For example, as soon as they could, my kids wanted to help load the washing machine, get the clothes out, pass pegs then eventually hand the clothes.
The same went for vacuuming. One of my kids was obsessed with the vacuum from 18 months.
Dishes, they enjoyed helping rinse them and place them in the dishwasher, pick them up for me to put away and then when they were old enough, they could put things away themselves.
I chose to teach my kids everything so that if anything happened to me, they would be ok.
My mother passed aged 37, I’ve had various health issues over the years, so a fear of mine was my kids would be left without a mother in their teens like I was.
I am now 40 and my eldest is 18. If I passed today, I am confident my 18 year old and almost 17 year old could take over everything right down to my business, booking travel arrangements and managing the household.
The key is balancing their life, wants and needs with teaching them the life skills to be independent.
When it comes to other adults, it can be trickier as some don’t realise they aren’t helping, others willingly participate in weaponised incompetence.
For those who are less enthusiastic, find out what motivates them.
Do they want to learn to cook their favourite meals? Are they saving for a car and need to learn to take care of it? What are their goals, interests and motivations and how can you use them to get them to participate in home chores?
My kids were motivated by the desire to be capable adults and by our family goals such as travel. We can’t travel if I can’t work and am burnt out from doing everything at home.
If they contribute as members of the household, we all have more time, energy and fun.
How to Deal With Weaponised Incompetence
This is going to sound harsh but if they won’t change, you can’t make them. Never again would I live with someone who deliberately makes my life harder.
In my home, we all live here and are expected to contribute to cleaning, cooking, household and car tasks, within our abilities.
If someone within the home is being manipulative, not doing their part and doing things to make it so you take over instead and so on, that is abuse.
I won’t dwell on it too much but I highly encourage you to do some research on it and refuse to tolerate it.
