A Practical Guide to Handling Chores at Work

Chores are typically associated with unpleasant tasks that people have to take care of in their households. From doing the dishes to mowing the lawn. Turns out, chores don't clock out when we head to work. Chores can be found in a professional setting and be the boring part of our jobs.

I have worked in sales, project management and development teams. In each of these teams, we had chores that had to be taken care of on a regular basis. What they all had in common? They always got pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

Let me walk you through some examples from each team.

Chore examples

Development team

• Analyzing logs and taking action where needed
• Having a on-call / standby developer
• Performing backup restore tests
• Starting work earlier after releases for emergency hotfixing
• Keeping an eye on news relevant to our tech stack, especially security-related
• Updating packages, libraries, plugins
• Rotating roles such as scrum master

Sales team

• Cold outreach
• Holding sales phone when the rest of the team is unavailable
• Following up on old leads
• Updating the team's sales presentations
• Analyzing competitors
• Prospect research
• Updating data in CRM
• Collecting feedback from customers

Project management

• Logging and tracking time spent on tasks
• Updating project plans
• Writing reports
• Creating and updating project documentation
• Onboarding
• Cleaning up in Jira

This is just scratching the surface of work chores I've personally dealt with. Look around at other teams, and you'll spot dozens more. Marketing is scheduling content, accounting is chasing down unpaid invoices, customer support is updating help articles, and HR is tweaking job descriptions. Chores are the not-so-exciting reality for every team. They might be boring, but they're typically high value tasks that need to be handled.

How We Tackled Chores in My Most Recent Team

Obviously, no one wanted to willingly handle the chores. To address this, we agreed to schedule the chores on a weekly basis. We aimed to distribute these tasks fairly so we all suffered equally. How noble.

We had a very simple system for this. We created a page on Confluence where the team lead would create a schedule for a few weeks in advance. The schedule was a simple matrix with weeks as rows and chores as columns.

Problems with our implementation

Our implementation was flawed in many ways which affected our ability to deliver on our chores consistently and with high-quality outcomes:

• The system required us to remember to check the schedule regularly.
• Unexpected events such as sickness would easily ruin the schedule.
• The outcome of the duties wasn't transparent to the rest of the team.
• Fairness was quickly forgotten when it was someone's turn to handle the chore.
• And above all, chores were still boring and painful.

The solution

My frustration with handling chores set me on a small mission to solve the problem. I wanted to make these tasks more manageable and less tedious for everyone involved. I wanted a system that could:

• Put scheduling of chores on autopilot
• Automatically adjust in case of unexpected events
• Integrate seamlessly with tools you interact with frequently
• Make results easily visible
• Provide interesting statistics about the chore
• Gamify chores and introduce some fun factor to it