How we do dinner clean-up

Sorry for the multiple comments.  Paul, it wasn't clear exactly how to post a comment.  I SAVED it once, but it didn't appear in the discussion area.  So I SAVED it again.  It still wasn't there.  So I then logged in, thinking that was the problem and SAVED it again.  Then, I saw it was posted three times.  (So then I deleted two of them.)

It feels like a significant issue is the number of people in and moving through the "red zone."  I wonder if there is a way to spread out.  Could we set up some pre wash buckets in the dining room and station 3-4 people there? Alternatively I wonder if we could do a sign up by day of the week.  Everyone pick 4 days of the week that would be their clean up days.  Ideally these would be days they were most likely to be eating at the mill.  We could look at where everyone signs up and then make adjustments so that there were roughly the same number of people on each day.  Hopefully this would give enough people on each day so that if a few people were missing or if the person that cooked was signed up to clean up that day, there would still be sufficient numbers of people to adequately cover.  I just calculated that if everyone picked 4 days we would have an average of 13 people available for each night.  With people missing supper and the cook not cleaning up, hopefully this would usually still result in at least 8 people cleaning up. One advantage of a system where not everyone is cleaning up every evening is that every evening there would be a group of people that could take longer to eat, linger over supper, talk at the table - and not need to feel rushed/pressured to join clean up.

It does feel like barely controlled chaos when all of us are there. Perhaps we could do weekly shifts. How many would the perfect size crew be? 8 adults and 3 kids every other week?  5 or 6 adults and 2 kids every two weeks? Sign up like cook chart? Also, some tasks like sweeping the kitchen floor and emptying the garbage could wait until other chores are done. Late eaters could do those.