Yes. The basic idea is establishing equivalent tasks in a point system, and only tracking points, in a clearly visible fashion making it immediately apparent who is in the lead, and how much needs to be done to fix this.
You will need an initial investment of about 20 euros, and about 1-2 h of time with your significant other.
Obtain a surface on which you can effortlessly and cleanly erase writing an unlimited number of times. We used a small blackboard, whiteboard will also work. DIN A4 is big enough. Hang it up in a location where many chores are done (e.g. kitchen), and place a container with writing material (chalk) next to it. You can get all this stuff on amazon.
Sit down with your significant other, and make a a digital list of the tasks that recur in your household and take significant time. Make sure you capture especially those tasks that either occur very often (cleaning and cooking tasks), or take very long (e.g. fixing devices). The list does not need to be complete and perfect, you’ll likely find it needs to be adjusted over time.
Now, crucially, answer a question together. If you had to rate these tasks by how much you resent doing them, in a point system from 1-14, how many points would they get? To establish equivalency, ask yourself: If I did task A once every day, but my partner did task B once every day—would either of us feel resentful exploited? What would change about that if I did task A five times daily, while they did task B five times once? If you realise the 5:1 ratio works, the conclusion is that task A gives 1 point, and task B gives 5 points.
You will find that your feelings on this are not identical. That is okay. That is actually advantageous. Because what you are setting up is a complex trading system.
E.g. my girlfriend and I agree that taking out the trash out and emptying the dishwasher are broadly comparable tasks, so they both get 1 point. But we do not view them identically. E.g. I relatively rarely take the trash out—usually only when my gf can’t, or when I am running behind in points and therefore have to. Fucking hate it. Shit grosses me out. I would rather empty the dishwasher. My girlfriend, on the other hand, does not find taking the trash out so bad, and prefers it because it is quick, while she considers dishwasher a relatively lengthy task for the points. The great result here is that I can usually go without taking out the trash, and she can usually go without doing the dishwasher, and everyone feels like they are taking advantage of the system.
Here are some more examples for 1 point tasks in our household:
Wiping all the counters
Getting packages from the neighbours
Spending five min on in-house refills (e.g. tea towels from the laundry to the kitchen, refilling soap, bringing toilet paper to the spare bathroom)
Here are some examples of 3-7 point tasks in our household (the exact point number is determined by how long they take, and if there are special circumstances making them particularly pissy)
Cooking (e.g. 25 min of cooking with readymade ingredients is 3 points, 1 h + cooking with finicky ingredients from scratch is 7 points)
Necessary phone calls (like calling our energy provider for having fucked up our bill yet again; here time is a factor, and time you are just in the waiting time counts for less, but still counts, as you cannot fully engage with something else)
Fixing broken stuff (like a clogged sink; here apart from time factor, grossness and required focus for complex broken things count)
Necessary (!) online or offline shopping. (Points are significantly reduced if the items are needlessly expensive or only arguably necessary, with extra points for going the extra mile to the cheaper store.)
You then track points only on the blackboard. To make sure that it is visible, at a glance, how many points you respectively have, you do it like this.
Your blackboard is divided in three areas; if you have colours, you can mark the boxes containing them green, yellow and red. Anything in the top line represents one point. Anything in the second represents 5. Anything in the third represents 20.
For the point you have acquired, you write a symbol that stands for you. We just use the first letter of our respective names. So if I have done enough labour for four points, the board’s top green section reads “KKKK”. If I then do something that gains me a fifth point (say empty the dishwasher again), I wipe out the content of the top line, and just write a single “K” in the second, yellow line.
If my girlfriend does a task and wants to register it, and the line she wants to write in is empty, she also writes her initial. But if she wants to register a task she has done, and yet I have already registered a task, instead of adding her initials to mine, she wipes out the same number of mine. So if I have done four one-point-things (KKKK), and she then does two one-point-things, the resulting board reads (KK) in the green section.
If we both put in the same amount of work, and everything is fair, the board is effectively wiped clean; letters briefly flicker up n small numbers in the top green area, but are immediately countered.
When we do not, the board begins to be taken over by the initials of one person—the person that is currently putting in more work. Not just abstractly more, but very specifically more. You can very literally see how much effort they are ahead, and they are owed. You get a very clear and transparent indication of how much you are exploiting the other person. And exactly how much you need to do to undo it.
And this is crucial. For us at least, we both go through periods where one of us cannot chip in as much as usual—bad mental health spot, or very busy at work. And it is alluring in that scenario to come back after the stress is over, fix the other person one really nice meal, hoover, and assume you are quits. And you are typically not. With the board, you have an objective way of seeing how much you have to make up for. Because of this, the person who has done more also gets less angry. Their effort is transparent, and they know they will be paid back. They can pull themselves together late at night loading away the dishes and tidying up, and think hah, together with the bits I did earlier, this means I am not the one who will have to cook.
If you have written your initial down so often that you run out of space on the blackboard to log, you are officially no longer required to do shit, and can force the other person to do whichever gross annoying task you do not want to do, and happily, guilt-free, sit in the sun and read a book as they do it alone, knowing all those annoying chores paid off because now you do not have to do the awful thing. Basically, if you are equal or on the lead, you can freely choose tasks; but if you are running behind, you cannot, you have to do the awful bits left over because you need to make up points, and they are all that is left. This makes it very, very attractive to proactively tackle tasks you find less awful.
You also track lots of little things. This is especially useful for people who tend to clean as they go, rather than in one major effort, which contributes a hell of a lot over time, but is invisible as it goes. If one of you is manic-depressive, and the other is very consistent, this enables you to even out.
And you can track major and rare tasks. This tackles the typical scenario of “why do I get guilted for not doing the dishes when I changed the tires?”. By determining the exact point at which you will have to do dishes again, because the lead you got from the tires got used up. The changing of the tire is labour. Exactly like the damn cleaning. Someone needs to do it, it is household work. It counts. It cannot be discounted, but nor will it count indefinitely. (Can you tell that we have a lesbian household?) If your partner is frustrated by being alone with the dishes repeatedly cause you changed the tires, next time they can swap the tires instead, and leave you wish the dishes instead.
And it makes invisible work visible. I’m sure you’ve heard of the finding that if you ask two people how much of the household they run in %, the collective % is way over 100. Because you remember what you did, but do not see the other person doing things. A lot of reproductive work is only visible when it does not get done. We have had countless times where one of us came home and went “what the heck, where did 10 points go?!?”, and then you tell them what you did, and realise they would never have noticed it otherwise—you do not notice an empty trash, only an overflowing one. This way, you realise the many small ways the other person is supporting you throughout the day.
And if there is a thing that really needs to get done and which both of you are dreading, you can jointly propose a tempting wanted poster with excessive points. (“14 points for whoever fixes this infuriatingly malfunctioning device”/”5 points for whoever forcefeeds the cat this pill she is not taking”/”10 points for whoever finishes this gigantic Ikea furniture, it is ridiculous how long we have been using it after only assembling the bits we really need and leaving the rest lying around”.) Again, the idea is that the person doing the incredibly annoying/gross/dangerous/time-consuming thing feels they have been well paid in points, for all the stuff they will in return not need to do. You tackle the shit thing, and in return, get to hand over other tasks later.
Obviously, this is a system that depends on you trusting each other, and both of you being willing to be fair. There is no surveillance, it would be easy to purposefully cheat. But the far bigger problem for rational, ethical actors—that we are biased to believe that we are doing more than we should, and our partner is doing less—is avoided. We started with very clear and specific task lists, but meanwhile, both have a pretty good feel for appropriate points, and usually just establish this with quick checks (“just had to do novel thing x, took this long and was bloody annoying—took x points, hope was okay) and we tend to agree. Among our circle, we are the only long-term couple I know who have gone through severe external stress and yet do not fight about housework.
That said, she is markedly in the lead, and now I am definitely the one who has to hoover and do the bathroom. Shitfuck.
Wow! I appreciate the lengthy and detailed explanation (I’ve read it all). I think this could be its own top level post.
The system seems quite good. I wonder how would you include kids in it (as they would reasonably be expected to do less chores than their parents, when young.) Perhaps a bit like your bounties you could have things you want them to do (like practice) count as points. Or, now that I think of it, the way the system works the kids can just get more points for every task, and it would even make sense because they would probably “resent” the tasks more.
If you think this sort of thing could be its own top level post, I think I have been severely abusing the the idea behind the shortform function with what I have poured in there in the last two days. (Mostly because I could not find the button for actual posts, and liked the low pressure scenario of not needing to edit, because I loathe loathe loathe editing text, to the degree where telling myself I need to first often means I publish nothing at all.) I feel my thoughts there on civil disobedience for AI safety, an open letter on AI funding, thoughts on recurrent feedback and sentience in AI vs. biological systems, and tactical concerns on recruiting AI researchers were more important than how I ensure that my girlfriend and I do fair shares of housework. - Can one retrospectively upgrade shortforms into posts without having to edit them?
Haven’t read your other posts, but sure, if you think they’re in a fitting form for a top level post then just copy paste them and republish. I’d just add a note that it was previously published in shortform and link to that.
I think as you post you’ll intuitively get a feel for what fits where (and it would also depend on your own standards, not just the standards of LW readers).
But about the shortform—it was kinda meant to be a LW twitter. So small things, unfully formed thoughts, etc. If you have something substantial, especially something that people might look for, link too, or that you’d want them to find through the frontpage or through tags, then regular posts are the way.
There is unfortunately an inherent difficulty with the system as is in adding a third party. If I erase my girlfriend’s points because I did the same amount of stuff, the board is empty, because we are on equal terms; my labour counters hers. That is part of why I love this system—as you add points, you do minimal math on the fly in seconds (if the top column (1 point) reads KKKK, and the second (5 points) reads K, and you do four one point things, you erase on the top to KKK and add at the bottom to KK), but you always end up with a board which instantly establishes the status quo, there is no additional task where you need to sit down with a lengthy piece of paper with scribbles and interpret it too make sense of it.
But if you add a a third party—if she erases my point with hers, this looks equalised, but my girlfriend hasn’t contributed zilch.
If you find a hack that addresses that, I would be curious to hear it. We won’t be having kids, but we are poly, so we might end up having an application for it.
If you want to use this system as is with your significant other, you could still employ the essence of the point ideas for kids. E.g. say they have to contribute x household points per week (tracked separately on their own tracking system), but let them chose which tasks they take, and when they do them, respecting their own talents and time and trusting them to choose wisely and plan. If by the end of the week they have not done them, well, they did not choose wisely, and you get to pick the shitty tasks for them that everyone else carefully avoided, and your kids being lazy becomes the excellent scenario of them having to do the shit you don’t want to. (Within safe limits of course, but kids can take out the trash or clean the toilet.)
Another aspect I like about this system is that it encourages you to be proactive. Basically, if you slack, and end up with someone else needing to assess the todos and tell you what needs to be done, this is never in your interest. That is how end up having to pick up the packet from the crazy neighbour who wishes to tell you about our saviour Jesus Christ. Or to spend an hour listening to maximally infuriating jingles on the health insurance hotline while being routed in circles. Or to set up the solar panels on the roof. (Okay, I guess the kids will be spared that last two.) But this will inevitably happen if you are not proactive. If you play this right, it will have kids hopping into tasks they would like to do that would help you to avoid such a scenario later. My gf and I have literally had scenarios where we were trying to beat each other to the non-sucky chore.
There is an often untold but annoying amount of labour women in families often end up having to do, where they basically coordinate everything, tell people what needs to be done, keep in mind that the birthday presents for the kids party need to be bought and that the clean laundry is running out and that there is nearly no cat food and that someone needs to call the plumber, and where they want others to do tasks, having to remind them, nag them… constitutes mental load and is also just a shit job to have that everyone hates and which people loathe you for. This job effectively vanishes, or, in the rare scenarios where it is still needed, it becomes a rather gleeful activity because the person you are ordering around knows they have lost all right to complain or request delays, and you get to push a thing you really do not want to do onto them without any feeling bad on your end. Payback.
Yes. The basic idea is establishing equivalent tasks in a point system, and only tracking points, in a clearly visible fashion making it immediately apparent who is in the lead, and how much needs to be done to fix this.
You will need an initial investment of about 20 euros, and about 1-2 h of time with your significant other.
Obtain a surface on which you can effortlessly and cleanly erase writing an unlimited number of times. We used a small blackboard, whiteboard will also work. DIN A4 is big enough. Hang it up in a location where many chores are done (e.g. kitchen), and place a container with writing material (chalk) next to it. You can get all this stuff on amazon.
Sit down with your significant other, and make a a digital list of the tasks that recur in your household and take significant time. Make sure you capture especially those tasks that either occur very often (cleaning and cooking tasks), or take very long (e.g. fixing devices). The list does not need to be complete and perfect, you’ll likely find it needs to be adjusted over time.
Now, crucially, answer a question together. If you had to rate these tasks by how much you resent doing them, in a point system from 1-14, how many points would they get? To establish equivalency, ask yourself: If I did task A once every day, but my partner did task B once every day—would either of us feel resentful exploited? What would change about that if I did task A five times daily, while they did task B five times once? If you realise the 5:1 ratio works, the conclusion is that task A gives 1 point, and task B gives 5 points.
You will find that your feelings on this are not identical. That is okay. That is actually advantageous. Because what you are setting up is a complex trading system.
E.g. my girlfriend and I agree that taking out the trash out and emptying the dishwasher are broadly comparable tasks, so they both get 1 point. But we do not view them identically. E.g. I relatively rarely take the trash out—usually only when my gf can’t, or when I am running behind in points and therefore have to. Fucking hate it. Shit grosses me out. I would rather empty the dishwasher. My girlfriend, on the other hand, does not find taking the trash out so bad, and prefers it because it is quick, while she considers dishwasher a relatively lengthy task for the points. The great result here is that I can usually go without taking out the trash, and she can usually go without doing the dishwasher, and everyone feels like they are taking advantage of the system.
Here are some more examples for 1 point tasks in our household:
Wiping all the counters
Getting packages from the neighbours
Spending five min on in-house refills (e.g. tea towels from the laundry to the kitchen, refilling soap, bringing toilet paper to the spare bathroom)
Here are some examples of 3-7 point tasks in our household (the exact point number is determined by how long they take, and if there are special circumstances making them particularly pissy)
Cooking (e.g. 25 min of cooking with readymade ingredients is 3 points, 1 h + cooking with finicky ingredients from scratch is 7 points)
Necessary phone calls (like calling our energy provider for having fucked up our bill yet again; here time is a factor, and time you are just in the waiting time counts for less, but still counts, as you cannot fully engage with something else)
Fixing broken stuff (like a clogged sink; here apart from time factor, grossness and required focus for complex broken things count)
Necessary (!) online or offline shopping. (Points are significantly reduced if the items are needlessly expensive or only arguably necessary, with extra points for going the extra mile to the cheaper store.)
You then track points only on the blackboard. To make sure that it is visible, at a glance, how many points you respectively have, you do it like this.
Your blackboard is divided in three areas; if you have colours, you can mark the boxes containing them green, yellow and red. Anything in the top line represents one point. Anything in the second represents 5. Anything in the third represents 20.
For the point you have acquired, you write a symbol that stands for you. We just use the first letter of our respective names. So if I have done enough labour for four points, the board’s top green section reads “KKKK”. If I then do something that gains me a fifth point (say empty the dishwasher again), I wipe out the content of the top line, and just write a single “K” in the second, yellow line.
If my girlfriend does a task and wants to register it, and the line she wants to write in is empty, she also writes her initial. But if she wants to register a task she has done, and yet I have already registered a task, instead of adding her initials to mine, she wipes out the same number of mine. So if I have done four one-point-things (KKKK), and she then does two one-point-things, the resulting board reads (KK) in the green section.
If we both put in the same amount of work, and everything is fair, the board is effectively wiped clean; letters briefly flicker up n small numbers in the top green area, but are immediately countered.
When we do not, the board begins to be taken over by the initials of one person—the person that is currently putting in more work. Not just abstractly more, but very specifically more. You can very literally see how much effort they are ahead, and they are owed. You get a very clear and transparent indication of how much you are exploiting the other person. And exactly how much you need to do to undo it.
And this is crucial. For us at least, we both go through periods where one of us cannot chip in as much as usual—bad mental health spot, or very busy at work. And it is alluring in that scenario to come back after the stress is over, fix the other person one really nice meal, hoover, and assume you are quits. And you are typically not. With the board, you have an objective way of seeing how much you have to make up for. Because of this, the person who has done more also gets less angry. Their effort is transparent, and they know they will be paid back. They can pull themselves together late at night loading away the dishes and tidying up, and think hah, together with the bits I did earlier, this means I am not the one who will have to cook.
If you have written your initial down so often that you run out of space on the blackboard to log, you are officially no longer required to do shit, and can force the other person to do whichever gross annoying task you do not want to do, and happily, guilt-free, sit in the sun and read a book as they do it alone, knowing all those annoying chores paid off because now you do not have to do the awful thing. Basically, if you are equal or on the lead, you can freely choose tasks; but if you are running behind, you cannot, you have to do the awful bits left over because you need to make up points, and they are all that is left. This makes it very, very attractive to proactively tackle tasks you find less awful.
You also track lots of little things. This is especially useful for people who tend to clean as they go, rather than in one major effort, which contributes a hell of a lot over time, but is invisible as it goes. If one of you is manic-depressive, and the other is very consistent, this enables you to even out.
And you can track major and rare tasks. This tackles the typical scenario of “why do I get guilted for not doing the dishes when I changed the tires?”. By determining the exact point at which you will have to do dishes again, because the lead you got from the tires got used up. The changing of the tire is labour. Exactly like the damn cleaning. Someone needs to do it, it is household work. It counts. It cannot be discounted, but nor will it count indefinitely. (Can you tell that we have a lesbian household?) If your partner is frustrated by being alone with the dishes repeatedly cause you changed the tires, next time they can swap the tires instead, and leave you wish the dishes instead.
And it makes invisible work visible. I’m sure you’ve heard of the finding that if you ask two people how much of the household they run in %, the collective % is way over 100. Because you remember what you did, but do not see the other person doing things. A lot of reproductive work is only visible when it does not get done. We have had countless times where one of us came home and went “what the heck, where did 10 points go?!?”, and then you tell them what you did, and realise they would never have noticed it otherwise—you do not notice an empty trash, only an overflowing one. This way, you realise the many small ways the other person is supporting you throughout the day.
And if there is a thing that really needs to get done and which both of you are dreading, you can jointly propose a tempting wanted poster with excessive points. (“14 points for whoever fixes this infuriatingly malfunctioning device”/”5 points for whoever forcefeeds the cat this pill she is not taking”/”10 points for whoever finishes this gigantic Ikea furniture, it is ridiculous how long we have been using it after only assembling the bits we really need and leaving the rest lying around”.) Again, the idea is that the person doing the incredibly annoying/gross/dangerous/time-consuming thing feels they have been well paid in points, for all the stuff they will in return not need to do. You tackle the shit thing, and in return, get to hand over other tasks later.
Obviously, this is a system that depends on you trusting each other, and both of you being willing to be fair. There is no surveillance, it would be easy to purposefully cheat. But the far bigger problem for rational, ethical actors—that we are biased to believe that we are doing more than we should, and our partner is doing less—is avoided. We started with very clear and specific task lists, but meanwhile, both have a pretty good feel for appropriate points, and usually just establish this with quick checks (“just had to do novel thing x, took this long and was bloody annoying—took x points, hope was okay) and we tend to agree. Among our circle, we are the only long-term couple I know who have gone through severe external stress and yet do not fight about housework.
That said, she is markedly in the lead, and now I am definitely the one who has to hoover and do the bathroom. Shitfuck.
Wow! I appreciate the lengthy and detailed explanation (I’ve read it all). I think this could be its own top level post.
The system seems quite good. I wonder how would you include kids in it (as they would reasonably be expected to do less chores than their parents, when young.) Perhaps a bit like your bounties you could have things you want them to do (like practice) count as points. Or, now that I think of it, the way the system works the kids can just get more points for every task, and it would even make sense because they would probably “resent” the tasks more.
If you think this sort of thing could be its own top level post, I think I have been severely abusing the the idea behind the shortform function with what I have poured in there in the last two days. (Mostly because I could not find the button for actual posts, and liked the low pressure scenario of not needing to edit, because I loathe loathe loathe editing text, to the degree where telling myself I need to first often means I publish nothing at all.) I feel my thoughts there on civil disobedience for AI safety, an open letter on AI funding, thoughts on recurrent feedback and sentience in AI vs. biological systems, and tactical concerns on recruiting AI researchers were more important than how I ensure that my girlfriend and I do fair shares of housework. - Can one retrospectively upgrade shortforms into posts without having to edit them?
Haven’t read your other posts, but sure, if you think they’re in a fitting form for a top level post then just copy paste them and republish. I’d just add a note that it was previously published in shortform and link to that.
I think as you post you’ll intuitively get a feel for what fits where (and it would also depend on your own standards, not just the standards of LW readers).
But about the shortform—it was kinda meant to be a LW twitter. So small things, unfully formed thoughts, etc. If you have something substantial, especially something that people might look for, link too, or that you’d want them to find through the frontpage or through tags, then regular posts are the way.
There is unfortunately an inherent difficulty with the system as is in adding a third party. If I erase my girlfriend’s points because I did the same amount of stuff, the board is empty, because we are on equal terms; my labour counters hers. That is part of why I love this system—as you add points, you do minimal math on the fly in seconds (if the top column (1 point) reads KKKK, and the second (5 points) reads K, and you do four one point things, you erase on the top to KKK and add at the bottom to KK), but you always end up with a board which instantly establishes the status quo, there is no additional task where you need to sit down with a lengthy piece of paper with scribbles and interpret it too make sense of it.
But if you add a a third party—if she erases my point with hers, this looks equalised, but my girlfriend hasn’t contributed zilch.
If you find a hack that addresses that, I would be curious to hear it. We won’t be having kids, but we are poly, so we might end up having an application for it.
If you want to use this system as is with your significant other, you could still employ the essence of the point ideas for kids. E.g. say they have to contribute x household points per week (tracked separately on their own tracking system), but let them chose which tasks they take, and when they do them, respecting their own talents and time and trusting them to choose wisely and plan. If by the end of the week they have not done them, well, they did not choose wisely, and you get to pick the shitty tasks for them that everyone else carefully avoided, and your kids being lazy becomes the excellent scenario of them having to do the shit you don’t want to. (Within safe limits of course, but kids can take out the trash or clean the toilet.)
Another aspect I like about this system is that it encourages you to be proactive. Basically, if you slack, and end up with someone else needing to assess the todos and tell you what needs to be done, this is never in your interest. That is how end up having to pick up the packet from the crazy neighbour who wishes to tell you about our saviour Jesus Christ. Or to spend an hour listening to maximally infuriating jingles on the health insurance hotline while being routed in circles. Or to set up the solar panels on the roof. (Okay, I guess the kids will be spared that last two.) But this will inevitably happen if you are not proactive. If you play this right, it will have kids hopping into tasks they would like to do that would help you to avoid such a scenario later. My gf and I have literally had scenarios where we were trying to beat each other to the non-sucky chore.
There is an often untold but annoying amount of labour women in families often end up having to do, where they basically coordinate everything, tell people what needs to be done, keep in mind that the birthday presents for the kids party need to be bought and that the clean laundry is running out and that there is nearly no cat food and that someone needs to call the plumber, and where they want others to do tasks, having to remind them, nag them… constitutes mental load and is also just a shit job to have that everyone hates and which people loathe you for. This job effectively vanishes, or, in the rare scenarios where it is still needed, it becomes a rather gleeful activity because the person you are ordering around knows they have lost all right to complain or request delays, and you get to push a thing you really do not want to do onto them without any feeling bad on your end. Payback.