The rota quota
Wednesday 8 February 2006
If you live in a student or shared house, the chances are you'll be asked to take part in a rota for the cleaning or cooking.
Here, we put the case for and against living your life by a list, so you can decide for yourself whether it works for you.
Rotas can help
Rotas can help to evenly distribute the work on jobs that need doing around the house. How closely you want to follow a rota is up to you, and depends on what sort of tasks are being divided between the housemates.
Cleaning up your act
The most common kind of rota is for the cleaning. Usually, each housemate is assigned a different task to do on a particular day. To add a bit of variety, each week, or every few weeks, housemates switch tasks.
Why they work
- It's a surefire way of making sure that the cleaning is done regularly.
- It means that everybody is taking part in the cleaning.
- It's a good way of picking up good habits.
- You'll learn all you need to know about keeping a house shipshape pretty quickly.
Hannah, a student at Leeds Uni, says: "We share all the housework equally between the five of us. If somebody can't do it for whatever reason, we agree on who's going to cover and then get it done. The person who missed their turn then agrees to cover the next time."
Why they fail
- There's nearly always somebody who doesn't want to contribute.
- If one person lets their task slide, others soon follow.
- They can cause arguments if others are having to cover the work.
Ben, studying Physics at Reading, tells us: "Every rota we draw up lasts no more than a week. When it comes to doing their task, there's always someone who can't be bothered or is out all the time or doesn't do it properly."
Getting round it
With things like washing up, you could try a system where everybody just washes what they've used. If you think your housemates would be willing to take it in turns, then give a rota a try.
With the cleaning, the quickest thing is if you all do it at the same time. Set aside a time to do it- Saturday morning for example- and all get together and agree who's going to do what that week.
If you all muck in together, it'll be done faster and mean that your house is totally cleaned at the same time, rather than done in dribs and drabs by resentful housemates.
Ripping up the rota
Michele, who shares a flat with two others, explains how her system works: "Since we ripped up the rota and stopped letting a wall chart rule our lives, we've been much better off. We do the cleaning once a week, on a Sunday, and if someone skives, it means that one of us can have a weekend off from it the next weekend.
Sometimes it causes a bit of friction, but at least it gets done and we're not arguing all the time because somebody cleaned the sink but wouldn't do the toilet."
