As we discovered on the London Google Group, I can talk at length about common pitfalls of group living, but a lot of that is based on experience rather than any kind of good theoretical understanding. Here are a few broad observations that stand out.
Coordination starts getting hard when you have more than three people in a household. Up until that point, it’s relatively plain sailing unless you have wildly different expectations.
Arguments (especially ongoing ones) generally happen because of a disparity between what people agreed to and what people think is fair. Having all “official” household agreements written down somewhere with a set renegotiation date can help to offset this.
Most disputes between otherwise-civilised people sharing living space are about cleanliness. Hiring a cleaner can eliminate a lot of resentment.
Having a regular forum to discuss the household and air grievances-in-waiting works surprisingly well. Agreeing, for example, to convene on the first Monday of every month to talk about things that need doing, repairs, issues, expenses, upcoming visitors, etc.
Organise money and payments to involve as few transactions as possible. How this is best accomplished will depend on the setup in question, but dividing up expenses between multiple parties can be a highly counterintuitive process. With multiple people paying multiple bills, you can wind up with accidental change-raising scenarios. You never want to be in the position of not knowing who any given debt or credit belongs to.
I think a running theme with these is that people often believe bonds of friendship are sufficient motivators to get everyone to cooperate well in a household. In reality, there are legitimate coordination and cooperation problems that upscale poorly, and instigating formal mechanisms for things can take the pressure off the social bonds. Some of my best domestic relationships were under mercenary convenience arrangements with relative strangers. When you don’t have to worry about showing how great a friend you are, it’s much easier to get along.
I wonder if getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder could help with the cleanliness. When I lived in a group house I found that my mate whom I shared a bathroom with had a significantly lower dirtiness threshold than I did. I don’t consider myself particularly disgusting & never even noticed the bathroom was getting dirty, but it drove him crazy. I didn’t want to be a dick & never clean the bathroom, but I never cleaned the bathroom because he ended up flipping out & doing it himself. I probably would’ve agreed to using Beeminder or some other similar system to help motivate me, had I known about these kinds of things at the time.
“Getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder” strikes me as pretty tough to negotiate, though probably less tough to negotiate in a LW-cluster household. There are lots of potential failure modes for division of cleanliness labour, and commitment strategies address only a subset of those. The beauty of outsourcing it to a third party is that it bypasses them all.
On the other hand, if your house has 3 people or fewer, living in it may not be especially interesting and people will feel relatively more compelled to go out and do fun things on their own instead of defaulting to doing things with their roommates (which is self-reinforcing to a degree). I think 3 might be a bad number in general… you also run the risk of 3rd wheel type issues.
Coordination starts getting hard when you have more than three people in a household. Up until that point, it’s relatively plain sailing unless you have wildly different expectations.
This can be extended up to 12 or so with simple aids like a chore wheel, and a community norm of “it’s okay to ask anyone to do a chore with you especially if it’s their turn.”
I’m not just talking about household chores with this point. Everything gets harder past the 2-3 person mark. That’s not to say higher numbers are infeasible or undesirable, but that it becomes a qualitatively different scenario with its own set of problems.
As we discovered on the London Google Group, I can talk at length about common pitfalls of group living, but a lot of that is based on experience rather than any kind of good theoretical understanding. Here are a few broad observations that stand out.
Coordination starts getting hard when you have more than three people in a household. Up until that point, it’s relatively plain sailing unless you have wildly different expectations.
Arguments (especially ongoing ones) generally happen because of a disparity between what people agreed to and what people think is fair. Having all “official” household agreements written down somewhere with a set renegotiation date can help to offset this.
Most disputes between otherwise-civilised people sharing living space are about cleanliness. Hiring a cleaner can eliminate a lot of resentment.
Having a regular forum to discuss the household and air grievances-in-waiting works surprisingly well. Agreeing, for example, to convene on the first Monday of every month to talk about things that need doing, repairs, issues, expenses, upcoming visitors, etc.
Organise money and payments to involve as few transactions as possible. How this is best accomplished will depend on the setup in question, but dividing up expenses between multiple parties can be a highly counterintuitive process. With multiple people paying multiple bills, you can wind up with accidental change-raising scenarios. You never want to be in the position of not knowing who any given debt or credit belongs to.
I think a running theme with these is that people often believe bonds of friendship are sufficient motivators to get everyone to cooperate well in a household. In reality, there are legitimate coordination and cooperation problems that upscale poorly, and instigating formal mechanisms for things can take the pressure off the social bonds. Some of my best domestic relationships were under mercenary convenience arrangements with relative strangers. When you don’t have to worry about showing how great a friend you are, it’s much easier to get along.
I wonder if getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder could help with the cleanliness. When I lived in a group house I found that my mate whom I shared a bathroom with had a significantly lower dirtiness threshold than I did. I don’t consider myself particularly disgusting & never even noticed the bathroom was getting dirty, but it drove him crazy. I didn’t want to be a dick & never clean the bathroom, but I never cleaned the bathroom because he ended up flipping out & doing it himself. I probably would’ve agreed to using Beeminder or some other similar system to help motivate me, had I known about these kinds of things at the time.
“Getting everyone to agree to use Beeminder” strikes me as pretty tough to negotiate, though probably less tough to negotiate in a LW-cluster household. There are lots of potential failure modes for division of cleanliness labour, and commitment strategies address only a subset of those. The beauty of outsourcing it to a third party is that it bypasses them all.
On the other hand, if your house has 3 people or fewer, living in it may not be especially interesting and people will feel relatively more compelled to go out and do fun things on their own instead of defaulting to doing things with their roommates (which is self-reinforcing to a degree). I think 3 might be a bad number in general… you also run the risk of 3rd wheel type issues.
This can be extended up to 12 or so with simple aids like a chore wheel, and a community norm of “it’s okay to ask anyone to do a chore with you especially if it’s their turn.”
I’m not just talking about household chores with this point. Everything gets harder past the 2-3 person mark. That’s not to say higher numbers are infeasible or undesirable, but that it becomes a qualitatively different scenario with its own set of problems.