Some tasks clearly belong to the family. Some clearly belong to a hired helper. The middle is where households lose their week, because a task that takes four minutes can still go undone for a month. Before you hire anything out, sort every recurring job into three columns and test the middle column one line at a time.
Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.
Step 1: Make three columns
Column one is family work: decisions about money and care goals, conversations with the doctor, choices about medicine, approval of repairs, and any task that needs a family member's judgment. Column two is hired-help work: a person present at a set time, meals, laundry, companionship, a walk, a bath with a helper, errands. Column three is the middle, the tasks that could go either way.
Step 2: Count the middle column in your own time
For each middle task, write how many minutes it takes, how often it happens, who must be present, and what happens when it slips for a day. Do not look up a rate. Count your own hours and the hours of the people in your household, and write those down.
Task: ____________ Minutes each time: ____ Times per week: ____ Who must be present: ____________ If it slips a day: ____________
Step 3: Test each middle task for a safety edge
Ask of each middle task whether a missed one creates a problem in the house, such as a door left unlocked, a stove left on, or a delivery left outside. If yes, that task keeps a named family owner, even when a helper does the work. A helper can be the hands. The family keeps the eyes.
Step 4: Hold the medicine line
A hired or in-home non-medical caregiver may give medication reminders and pick up prescriptions as an errand. Sorting, dispensing, administering, and managing medicine stay with the family, the doctor, and the pharmacist. Write that line on your page beside each middle task that touches medicine, so the division is clear to everyone involved.
Step 5: Name an owner and a backup for each middle task
Every middle task you keep in the family needs an owner and a backup. Every task you hand over needs a line in the written plan saying who checks it. Write both names. A task with no backup is the one that will fail first.
Step 6: Recount after your first full month
After your first full month with the arrangement, count the middle tasks again. Note which ones the family still does, which have moved to the helper, and which are being dropped. Dropped tasks are the ones to bring to the provider first.
Signs to walk away
Walk away from a provider that offers to take over sorting or managing medicine, that treats the middle column as free, or that says a task will be handled without naming the person who checks it. A provider that wants to sort the list with you before it quotes is treating the middle column as real work.
The Five Steps to Hiring page shows where this sorting fits in the full order of the process.