Making the rota is the easy part. Keeping it alive past week three is the part nobody plans for — so that is what most of this page is about.
Every shared house starts the same way: a table on the fridge, one day each. Week one is fine. By week three someone is on placement, someone is ill, and someone simply forgot — and it turns out the rota has no answer to “what if it does not happen”. From then on, whoever minds the mess most just does it, and becomes the person who nags.
So a rota has to do two things a paper table cannot: work around when people are actually in, and remember who is behind.
Walk through the house together. Not just the obvious ones (dishes, kitchen, bathroom, toilet, hallway, bins) but the work that currently sits with one person by default: buying toilet paper and cleaning supplies, emptying the dishwasher, taking the glass out, unblocking the sink. Those invisible jobs are usually the real reason someone feels hard done by.
A bathroom that is cleaned twice a week on paper and once in practice is a rota that lies from day one.
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether the split is fair. Let everyone write down, separately, how many minutes a job costs them. The numbers will be further apart than you expect: one person does the bathroom in 25 minutes, another needs an hour.
If you count jobs instead of time, you are not splitting fairly. Four ten-minute jobs is not the same as one hour-long job, however tidy it looks in the table.
Not when they would like to, but when they can. Lectures, placement, shifts, sport, weekends away. A rota that gives someone the bathroom on the evening they always work will not be carried out — and that is a planning mistake, not laziness.
Make this agreement before it happens, not after. The only version that works without an argument is that it counts: whoever skips does a little more over the following weeks. Not as punishment — because otherwise it quietly lands on someone else.
In a house with international students, half the problem is that the rota lives in a WhatsApp group not everyone follows comfortably. Whatever you use, make sure everyone can read it in their own language and can see the same thing — a schedule people cannot read is a schedule they can honestly say they did not know about.
Rather not keep score every week?
Beurt does the working-out: everyone enters when they are available and how much time each chore costs them, and the site splits the week as fairly as it can, around everyone’s timetable. Free, no app to install, no ads, six languages.
Beurt · free for shared houses · info@onzebeurt.nl