Chores

Chores turns your home into rooms with tasks, gives each helper a daily points budget, and plans each day's chores onto everyone's checklist. Open it from Chores in the sidebar. Chores is in beta, so expect it to keep changing.

Overview#

Four ideas carry the whole feature:

• Rooms hold tasks. A room is any bucket of chores: Kitchen, Pets, Yard, School room. Each task says how often it needs doing, how much effort it takes (1 to 3 points), and who can do it.
• Helpers have a points budget. Every student or parent who does chores has a number of points per weekday. Three points is a light day; a Saturday deep clean might be six or more.
• The planner fills each day. The first time anyone opens the app on a given day, OpenSky picks the most overdue tasks that fit each helper's budget and gives each one to a single person. Those chores appear on that person's checklist beside their lessons and activities.
• Finishing resets the clock. Ticking a chore records who did it and when, and the task is not due again until its frequency comes around. Need something sooner? Needs doing now on a task makes it due today and first in line.

The Chores page has four tabs:

• Rooms — your rooms and their tasks, with a freshness score per room.
• Schedule — the week as a grid, one row per helper, with each day's chores as chips.
• Budget — the points grid: how much each helper does on each weekday.
• History — every completed and missed chore.

Setting up#

The first visit opens the setup wizard.

1. Pick rooms. Choose from the suggested rooms or add your own. Bedroom can be added once per student.
2. Tick the tasks. Each room comes with suggested tasks, their frequency, and an effort of 1 to 3 points. Suggestions start unticked, so tick the chores your home needs and adjust frequencies as you go. You can add tasks later.
3. Who helps. Tick the students and parents who do chores and set each person's points per weekday. Three points a day is the default.

Everything imported counts as done today, so nothing is overdue on day one. Tasks become due as their frequency comes around.

Rooms and tasks#

The Rooms tab lists each room as a collapsible section. The header shows the room's icon, how many tasks it has, and a freshness ring from Fresh to Overdue with the score inside. Open a room to see its tasks: difficulty, frequency, who can do it, and a note when a task is planned today, awaiting review, overdue, or marked Needs doing now.

From a room's header you can Add task, or open its menu for Log a chore as done…, Edit room and Archive room. A room has a name, an icon and a colour. Pick an emoji for the icon, or leave it blank and the room borrows the icon of the suggested room its name matches.

For each task you can set:

• Frequency — daily, weekly, monthly and so on, a custom number of days, or As needed for jobs like shoveling snow. An as-needed task is due only after you press Needs doing now.
• Must do on — pin a task to weekdays. A pinned task is planned on that day even when the budget is full.
• Effort — 1 (easy), 2 (medium) or 3 (hard) points.
• Who can do it — any mix of students and parents.
• Use Submit for Review workflow — a student's completion waits in your checklist's Submitted for review column until you approve or return it. This is also on for every chore when the student's portal setting turns the workflow on.
• Last done — change it to backfill history or make a task due sooner.
• Notes — anything the helper should know.

Press the bell, Needs doing now, on any task to make it due today and first in line the next time a day is planned. Today's list is already set, so use Replan today or Assign chore on the Schedule tab if it cannot wait. Finishing the task clears the request.

Rooms and tasks are archived rather than deleted, so history keeps their names.

How a day is planned#

Each day, the first time anyone opens the app, OpenSky plans that day:

• A task is due when its frequency has passed since it was last done. The most overdue tasks go first, measured against their own frequency, so a daily chore one day late beats a monthly chore one day late.
• A task you marked Needs doing now is due that day whatever its frequency or pinned weekdays, and goes ahead of anything that is merely due.
• Each person's points budget for that weekday is filled from the due tasks they are eligible for. Nobody gets more than their budget, except for a task pinned to that weekday.
• A task several people can do goes to whoever has the most room left, then to whoever has done the least this week, then to whoever did that task longest ago.
• A chore is given to one person for the day. It appears on their checklist with the room as its caption.

Once planned, the day is fixed: finishing a chore does not pull another one in. Tasks that did not fit stay waiting. The room's freshness ring shows how far behind a room is, and the task comes back tomorrow with more urgency.

The Schedule tab#

Schedule shows the week as a grid: helpers down the side, days across, today highlighted. Five days fit on a desktop screen; scroll sideways for the rest, and use the arrows or This week to change weeks.

Each chore is a chip. A planned chip is white, a finished one is struck through with a check, and a chip with a dot is waiting for your review. Click a chip to change who does it and on which day, mark it done, take it off the day, or approve and return a submission.

• Assign chore puts a task on someone's day by hand, today or later.
• Replan today throws out today's untouched automatic picks and plans again. Anything done, in review or added by hand stays.

Today's chips are the stored plan. Later days show what the planner expects to pick, and a chore you move or assign there is pinned in place. Moving a frequent chore to an earlier day does not cancel its rhythm: a daily chore moved from Wednesday to Tuesday is done on Tuesday and due again on Wednesday.

Budget#

Budget is one grid of points per helper per weekday, with a week total for each helper and a daily total for each column. Type into the cells, or pick a preset (Same every day, or School days / Weekend), fill in the numbers and press Fill grid. Nothing is saved until Save changes; Reset puts the saved numbers back. The most a helper can carry is 12 points a day.

Add and remove helpers here too. Removing a helper keeps their history.

Finishing chores#

A chore is a card on the checklist like a lesson or activity, marked with a small washing-machine icon. Tap the circle to mark it done; tap again to undo. A completed chore resets the task's last done date.

When a student is on the Submit for Review workflow, the circle sends the chore to your Submitted for review column instead. Approve it there, or return it and the chore goes back to the student's Revisions column.

Forgot to tick something yesterday? Open the room's menu and choose Log a chore as done…, then pick the chore, who did it and the day. Chores nobody got to are recorded as missed in History, and the task is simply planned again when it is due.

History#

History lists completed and missed chores, newest first, filterable by person and room. It loads fifty at a time.

Need more help?#

Reach out any time at support@openskyplanner.com and we will be happy to help.