How can I make the schedule fair?
Some ChoreBuster fundamentals
Each chore is worth a certain amount of points based on the Intensity / hardness that you chose for it. Over time those points are summed together for each person and used to determine who does which chores. So sometimes someone might need to do several easy chores to be equivalent to a difficult chore done by someone else. On some days a person will gain a lead on others and have few or no chores the next day.
If you sort your chores by Intensity then you can make a judgement about whether you have set the Intensity fairly relative to other chores.
How difficult or undesirable a chore is can be quite subjective so it could be a good idea to get other members of your household involved in determining what to set the Intensity to.
Rotating chores
Rotating chores ignore everyone’s past work history and always move from one person to the next.
Getting too clever
There are many options you can use to control how chores are shared out which can be combined in a huge number of ways. But if you use everything possible for all chores then the situation will get so complex that it becomes hard to know if ChoreBuster is doing what it should or not! Start simple and then gradually refine the chore settings, regularly checking if the schedule still looks how you expect. Then if something starts to look weird you will have a good guess at what caused it.
Do I need to pay for this?
Yes. After a 1 month free trial you can choose a monthly subscription costing $2.49 or a yearly subscription of $19.95.
Is there a mobile app?
Yes and no.
There is not an app that you can find in the App Store. What you can do is accept the prompt to install ChoreBuster onto your home screen while using it in your mobile phone’s web browser. This will give you an icon in your phone that you can tap to launch ChoreBuster the same way you would launch any other app.
If you previously ignored or dismissed the prompt you can reactivate it by tapping the ‘Install as an app’ button in the footer. This button will not be there if your phone does not support the technology ChoreBuster uses to pretend to be an app.
How can I control the order of chores shown each day?
When editing a chore under ‘Optional extras’ there is a ‘Time of day’ field, which can be set to Morning, Afternoon or Evening. Each day the chores given to people are sorted by the time of day and then within each of those alphabetically.
If you want full manual control over the ordering of the chores, leave them all on ‘Morning’ and put numbers in the beginning of the chore name.
How do I add a reward for my child?
Rewards are based on the chores they’ve done that week. Each of the chores you want to give a reward for needs to have a value in it’s ‘Reward / payment’ field under Optional Extras.
At the end of each week you can use the ‘Calculate Rewards’ page to determine their total reward. Tick the checkbox next to each chore they completed and watch the total calculate at the bottom of the schedule.
If the worker used the ‘Finish chores’ function to cross off chores they’ve done then there will be a small green tick next to the checkbox of the chore.
Someone is getting no chores
You have probably set a ‘chore holiday’ for that person. Edit that person and remove the dates in the last two fields. Take a look at the checkboxes above the chore holiday, too.
Also see if that person is excluded from too many chores. Turn on the 'Excluded' column to help find chores they are excluded from.
Someone is getting too many chores
You could have set everyone else to have less chores, leaving them all for this person to do. You also might have excluded everyone else from a lot of chores.
If you have chosen quite a few days when they should have no chores then they might be allocated many chores on the days they are available for work, to catch up with all the other people. You can counteract this effect by using the ‘Amount of chores’ setting above that:
Also see the “how can I make the schedule fair” question.
How can chores be done by multiple people each day. e.g. 4 people have homework mon-fri
There's a couple of ways you could do that.
You could go to Daily Chores and put 'homework' in for each person.
This will put that chore on every day, including weekends. Just tell them to ignore that chore on the weekend.
The other way, is, create 4 chores, each named 'homework'. Have them be done mon-fri and for each exclude everyone except the child you want for that copy of the chore. This should give you exactly what you are thinking of, but is a bit fiddly to set up.
Can I limit the number of chores assigned each week?
Not really as the number of chores each week depends on how often chores need to be done.
If the workload is too high then you could do any of these things:
- increasing the frequency of chores – so they occur less often.
- changing the start date of some chores so they happen at different times of the week.
- deleting or merging some chores.
Is there way to send notifications by texts as well or is it email only?
No, but there are a couple of other ways people on smartphones can access their chores.
1. Give them a link to the shareable, public (read only) schedule. Find your unique schedule address by going to View schedule → Share. Send this address to them through whatever methods you normally communicate with them (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, etc) and they can go there to view the schedule without logging in.
2. Android phones can receive popup notifications by visiting the sharable schedule in their browser and then tapping on 'Manage notifications' below the schedule. More details.
3. Add their chores to the Calendar app. Most calendar apps have a way to sync with external calendars and ChoreBuster can provide each person’s chores as such a calendar. The process varies but instructions for common apps are provided.