Bonus Episode 20: Keep It Simple Summer!

Keep It Simple for Summer: A Bingo Board for the Chaos

Summer means crazy schedules, spontaneity, and letting a lot of things go, but we still have to live in our houses with everybody home. So instead of overloading the season with routines and chore charts, let’s stick to three simple tasks, broken down to the smallest possible time and effort, and gamify the whole thing so the family can have some fun with it.

How the bingo board works

Each board has 29 spaces, one for every date in a month, but the numbers are scrambled so you never know when a bingo is coming. There’s no diagonal, just straight up-and-down or straight-across lines, giving you eleven separate chances to land a bingo, plus one more if you manage to fill the entire board. Sit down with your family and brainstorm eleven cheap, easy, summer-specific rewards you’d already want to do anyway, bubble time, running through the sprinkler, popsicles, a star-watching night, s’mores, maybe a movie outing or a park trip if the whole board fills up. You can print a fresh board for June, July, and August separately, or just run one single board for the entire summer if you know life is going to be too chaotic to hit every date. Either way works, make it fit your family.

Activity one: the empty sink rule

This started during the pandemic when the constant grazing and dish-dumping made the kitchen feel like it never had a moment of peace. The fix was a brightly colored index card taped behind the sink with something like “no dishes” or “the sink stays empty.” How serious or tongue-in-cheek you make it is entirely up to your family’s personality, from a simple reminder to a full set of sarcastic step-by-step instructions aimed squarely at teenagers who are experts at finding loopholes. The point isn’t to be punitive, it’s to remind everyone that the sink isn’t a bottomless dumping ground and that keeping it clear is everybody’s job, not just yours. Mark the bingo square anytime the sink is empty at bedtime.

Activity two: the no-sorting laundry experiment

If your current laundry system works for you, skip this one. But if laundry is your personal nightmare, try assigning each family member their own dedicated day of the week, and have them handle their laundry from start to finish on that day. No sorting by type, no matching mismatched socks, no squinting at tags to figure out whose shirt is whose. If a kid misses their day because of camp or a friend’s house, they can still do a load anytime, they just have to wait behind whoever has dibs that day. Skip folding entirely for things where wrinkles don’t matter, socks, underwear, pajamas, gym shorts, straight into the drawer. Hang t-shirts instead of folding them if that’s easier. This obviously isn’t the approach for genuinely special or delicate clothing, but for regular summer play clothes it removes most of the friction. Mark the board each day a load actually gets done, and use slower days for towels or sheets to keep momentum going even with a smaller family.

Activity three: timer time

Set a timer, five or ten minutes is plenty, don’t go past fifteen, for a quick pickup of a main space or a declutter sweep of something that’s mostly under control but needs a small reset. Rotate which room gets the attention each day if that works better for your family. Mark the board whenever it happens.

The prizes, if you want to play along officially

Every completed bingo line earns an entry into a drawing for a free month in the membership community, with a full board completion counting as twelve entries. There’s also a chance to win a free one-on-one “unstuck” session, a 30-minute call working through a room or space you’re stuck on. But even without the official prizes, the real win is building your own family reward bank of eleven simple summer activities everyone actually looks forward to.

Your practical, actionable step

Sit down with your family this week, pick your eleven summer reward activities, and print or sketch out a simple bingo grid. Start with just the empty-sink rule tonight, and mark your first square before bed.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.