Many Hands Make Light Work

Many hands make light work. The more people who are helping you, the faster and easier the task is. For many projects, this is true. Not every project is easier with more people; for instance, watchmaking is very delicate work done in a small space. More helpers would make it harder. But for large tasks such as yard work, cleaning up a lot of toys, or cleaning up at a camp, more people means lighter work.

Yard work involves clearing large patches of ground. For one person, it is quite a job to pick up all of the sticks and rake all of the leaves on an acre of land, or even half an acre. With a helper, the work is much easier. With five or six friends, the job won’t seem like much work at all. When I did yard work as part of 4-H community service, our club got together and went to a house that needed help clearing a large yard of branches and leaves or weeding a garden. We would spend several hours and have fun while helping. Having that many people made it a lot easier.


If you have ever been in charge of a group of preschoolers, you know they can make quite a mess with toys strewn everywhere. One preschooler can actually create the same amount of chaos, but that one child will have more difficulty cleaning it up. When you get a group of preschoolers to clean up together, the mess doesn’t seem as overwhelming to them and they will pitch in to help restore order. It will also get done a lot faster. Having more of them changes everything.


My youth group occasionally sends out teams of ten to twelve teenagers to go help do the dishes for a weekend at a local retreat center. When there isn’t a team to go, the councilors for that retreat have to do it themselves. They would agree that more hands makes easier and faster work. For a group of five or six people, the dishes for one to three hundred people are a lot of work. But for twelve or fourteen, it is much easier. We could finish cleaning up all of the dishes, wiping down the tables, and sweeping up within two hours or so. The extra hands made a difference.


This old adage is true for many tasks. Not every job is easier with more hands, but in general this is true. Many hands make light work for yard work, cleaning up toys, and doing a lot of dishes, among other things. The more people you have, the faster and easier it will be to do the work.