How do I approach my group about dividing up the work?

Question

I am an International Civil Engineering student. I was assigned with a project that consists of three stages for my steel design class. Although we are a group of five people, it seems that no one wants to take the lead and divide the tasks. I don’t mind doing that but at the same time I don’t know how to approach the situation. I thought it might be a good idea to email them about this. Please see what I have written below and let me know whether I need to approach it differently. Also, feel free to fix the grammar. 😅 Thank you.

Hello everyone,

I think it’s a good idea to plan ahead our steel project. Do you want to divide the phases between us so that each one or two people would work on one phase together? Or would you prefer that each person contributes to each phase? Let’s vote on your guys’s preference, so that we can start dividing up the work.

Looking forward to your responses!

Answer 1

Your approach is fine, even though I would propose a face-to-face meeting in which the assignments are made.

Tipp: Try to make the work packages independent of other peoples result, especially make sure that noone is idle in the beginning because they have to wait for a result of another one.