Domestic duties; get conscious with a shared app! – The Wall Street Journal

When I hear somebody say, 'there's an app for that,' I can most accurately describe the usual feelings evoked as 'exposing'. As in, me to myself. Well here are a variety of apps with a purpose I can engage with. They're all pregnant with potential for enhancing relationships and increasing accountability; one partner to another. Can I measure the ways and tones in which my wife has queried my scheduling a doctor, or interviewee appointment without checking with her first? Well, this story extolls the virtues of sharing a single, task-scheduling app – and sometimes task-shifting as circumstances change. Empathy is not abstract. These shared domestic labour apps, wisely handled, bring equity to relationships. Tailor them to your preferences, lifestyles, and changing and evolving roles. So that you don't complain in your dotage that, "I wish I'd consulted more,' as your partner (hopefully) croons, 'it's never too late my dear!" Or not. – Chris Bateman.Goodbye honey-do list, hello shared-labour app.By Julie Jargon(The Wall Street Journal) – Christy MacGregor and Ted Iobst set aside time every Sunday evening to go over their shared to-do list. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Most of the items are tasks like scheduling doctor appointments and organising play dates for their three young children. At the top of Mr. Iobst's to-do list recently? Buy a Halloween costume.In every relationship, there's a question of who is pulling their weight around the house. Now that a majority of married-couple families have two working parents, the old "rough day at the office" excuse doesn't really cut it. Women still handle more of the household activities, spending 2.6 hours on daily home-related tasks versus the two hours men spend on them, but men increasingly are spending time on food preparation and cleanup, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.To keep things fair – or at least to avoid fights – couples are turning to technology. They are using project-management apps designed for the workplace to divvy up and track domestic to-dos and reserving a portion of their date nights to compare chore loads. In some cases, they are even turning it into a game, setting rewards for getting stuff done.The couples I spoke to say using digital task trackers has been a marital game-changer. But tech can do only so much. In some households, arguments over who does what won't stop because of an app..The imbalance doesn't always follow gender lines. In the MacGregor-Iobst household, there was a time when Mr. Iobst was in more of a "Mr. Mom" role: He was attending business school, while Ms. MacGregor was clocking long hours as a corporate litigator. "He had more flexibility than I did and he took on more of the child-care and household-management work," she said.The Philadelphia couple's roles reversed after Mr. Iobst graduated from Wharton and started an e-commerce baby-gear company. Ms. MacGregor reduced her work hours and recently left the law firm to join him in running the business. "We have had a lot of switching back and forth of who was in the driver's seat in terms of household management and have developed tools so one person wasn't too put upon," she said.They began using Google calendars to keep the family schedules straight and sharing a to-do list in the Notes app on their iPhones. Each takes on chores the other dislikes: Ms. MacGregor hates scheduling appointments, so Mr. Iobst does that. He doesn't love arranging playdates and brunch, so that falls to her. Before Mr. Iobst goes on long business trips, he records videos of himself reading stories, which his wife plays for the kids before bed.Is the household labor equitable? Ms. MacGregor said she probably has a greater number of items on the to-do list than her husband but that she gives him extra credit for dealing with all the health-care stuff, from bills to insurance, as well as making any and all appointments. "If I don't have to do those things, I will do almost anything else," she said. "He recently called to make an appointment for me to get my hair done."Megan Harper and her husband, Michael Harper, of Long Island City, N.Y., also carve out time on Sundays to discuss their to-dos. Mr. Harper sends his wife a calendar invitation for their weekly meetings through their family Slack channel. They use Asana, a project-management app that Ms. Harper had used at a previous job, to designate tasks to one another along with deadlines for completing them. Ms. Harper, a marketing executive, asked her husband, a financial controller, to fix their kids' Lego table and gave him a month to do it. He asked her to fold the laundry, a task she hates so much that she offered to pay other moms on a Facebook group to do it for her.Joshua Zerkel, head of global community at Asana, said he sees the software appearing more frequently on the home front. "Many of our customers have used Asana to manage every step of their wedding-planning process," he said."With the app, there's no question of who's responsible for what – you had this thing due and you knew it was due. It keeps our marriage from having problems," Ms. Harper said. "It felt like we were doing a tit-for-tat thing for a while: 'Well, I did this,' 'Well, I did that.' "Some of that continues, Mr. Harper said: "For us, that will always be a thing.".Take their Halloween-planning, for example. Ms. Harper gave her husband the task of ordering costumes, but because she didn't accept his theme for the family – he wanted them all to dress up as characters from "The Powerpuff Girls," but she worried no one would get it – he bounced it back to her. They ended up agreeing to be "Mario Bros." characters and splitting the costume-ordering responsibilities.Sara Blanchard and her husband, John Frederick, had been sharing a to-do list on the Wunderlist app but it went largely ignored by Mr. Frederick until his wife created a new category called "stuff that needs to get done because I see it every day and it is driving me crazy." It included cleaning the backyard cushions, scrubbing the fountain and buying new bike locks for their two daughters.Mr. Frederick, an airline pilot, admits he didn't make his wife's previous lists a priority but that her new designation got his attention. "It was not only the humorous nature of it but the emotional element that resonated with me," said Mr. Frederick, who completed most of the items the second day after he returned home to Denver following a flight from Hong Kong."I felt so loved," said Ms. Blanchard, who hosts a social-justice podcast. "But the best part was not nagging him."Priya Bhatnagar was similarly surprised by her husband, Alex Driver, after they began using an app called Labour of Love. It allows users to assign values to tasks and to choose rewards once a certain number of points have been accumulated.The gamification aspect has made some of the grunt work more fun. Over the summer they worked hard to prepare for a big trip to Maine and each earned enough points to reward themselves with massages.When Ms. Bhatnagar signed up to bring cookies to her twins' Pre-K graduation and added it to the running list in the app, her husband ended up taking on the task himself. "That was the first time he had made cookies in his life. I was like, 'I can't believe I don't have to do that,' " said Ms. Bhatnagar, a freelance book editor who works from home in Brooklyn.Mr. Driver, a teacher, said he wasn't motivated by a reward for that particular task, which wasn't assigned to either of them – he said it just had never occurred to him to bake cookies until he saw it on the list."This has helped solve the problem of the ages," he said. "It's made the labor Priya does visible to me, and the labor I do visible to her."– Write to Julie Jargon at julie.jargon@wsj.com

Domestic duties; get conscious with a shared app! – The Wall Street Journal

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