(See the introduction and first post if you haven’t!)
Competition is social loafing’s worst enemy. Social loafing is when everyone tries to the least possible, while competition is when everyone tries to do the most. If everyone keeps a competitive spirit, I can guarantee you won’t have social loafing.
So make it competitive.
Instead of the normal house-cleaning checklist, one day I made a chart. Columns for jobs — picking up, sweeping, mopping, etc. — and rows for rooms — living room, kitchen, hallway, etc.
Once I had came up with many rows and columns, I had many unique boxes. “Mop kitchen,” “Sweep hallway,” “Pick up in living room.” Each box you sign is a point, and each completed row or column you help with is three points.
The ingenuity of this was that not all tasks were equal. This created a race to do the easy things. Even the most slothful kids wanted to get the easy tasks, so they finished each one quickly to go to the next one. Thus, they weren’t slothful anymore!
When I saw which few bigger tasks people shied away from, I wrote a generous amount of points the doer of this chore would get. And hence, workers raced for the hard jobs!
At the same time they raced to complete rows of chores (e.g. sweeping every room) and with all the racing, everything got done! It was super competitive and efficient, and everyone was proud of the checked boxes at the end. Even the younger kids worked hard to get more points than each other. It was beautiful.
Applying competition to weeding also produces much efficiency, as you will see in an example next time.
Great idea! Who won? =)
Selah did. For the first half Mikey and Danny had been giving the dog a bath, so they had a disadvantage. But Selah did get a really crazy amount of points. Sammy and Elijah worked hard too, but they mostly just saw each other as their competition because Selah was way up there.