When I hear somebody say, âthereâs an app for that,â I can most accurately describe the usual feelings evoked as âexposingâ. As in, me to myself. Well here are a variety of apps with a purpose I can engage with. Theyâre 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 donât complain in your dotage that, âI wish Iâd consulted more,â as your partner (hopefully) croons, âitâs never too late my dear!â Or not. – Chris Bateman
Goodbye honey-do list, hello shared-labour app
Most of the items are tasks like scheduling doctor appointments and organising play dates for their three young children. At the top of Mr. Iobstâs to-do list recently? Buy a Halloween costume.
In every relationship, thereâs 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 ârough day at the officeâ excuse doesnât 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 wonât stop because of an app.
The imbalance doesnât always follow gender lines. In the MacGregor-Iobst household, there was a time when Mr. Iobst was in more of a âMr. Momâ role: He was attending business school, while Ms. MacGregor was clocking long hours as a corporate litigator. âHe had more flexibility than I did and he took on more of the child-care and household-management work,â she said.
The Philadelphia coupleâs 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. âWe have had a lot of switching back and forth of who was in the driverâs seat in terms of household management and have developed tools so one person wasnât too put upon,â 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 doesnât 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. âIf I donât have to do those things, I will do almost anything else,â she said. âHe recently called to make an appointment for me to get my hair done.â
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 kidsâ 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. âMany of our customers have used Asana to manage every step of their wedding-planning process,â he said.
âWith the app, thereâs no question of whoâs responsible for what – you had this thing due and you knew it was due. It keeps our marriage from having problems,â Ms. Harper said. âIt felt like we were doing a tit-for-tat thing for a while: âWell, I did this,â âWell, I did that.â â
Some of that continues, Mr. Harper said: âFor us, that will always be a thing.â
Take their Halloween-planning, for example. Ms. Harper gave her husband the task of ordering costumes, but because she didnât accept his theme for the family – he wanted them all to dress up as characters from âThe Powerpuff Girls,â but she worried no one would get it – he bounced it back to her. They ended up agreeing to be âMario Bros.â 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 âstuff that needs to get done because I see it every day and it is driving me crazy.â 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 didnât make his wifeâs previous lists a priority but that her new designation got his attention. âIt was not only the humorous nature of it but the emotional element that resonated with me,â said Mr. Frederick, who completed most of the items the second day after he returned home to Denver following a flight from Hong Kong.
âI felt so loved,â said Ms. Blanchard, who hosts a social-justice podcast. âBut the best part was not nagging him.â
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 twinsâ Pre-K graduation and added it to the running list in the app, her husband ended up taking on the task himself. âThat was the first time he had made cookies in his life. I was like, âI canât believe I donât have to do that,â â said Ms. Bhatnagar, a freelance book editor who works from home in Brooklyn.
Mr. Driver, a teacher, said he wasnât motivated by a reward for that particular task, which wasnât assigned to either of them – he said it just had never occurred to him to bake cookies until he saw it on the list.
âThis has helped solve the problem of the ages,â he said. âItâs made the labor Priya does visible to me, and the labor I do visible to her.â
– Write to Julie Jargon at [email protected]