Family Task Sharing Spreadsheet

Family Task Sharing Spreadsheet

You know how you read those articles about relationships and happiness. Besides money, the hottest-topic in long-term relationships tends to be chores-- or more simply who does what and am i being taken advantage of. I think like 98% of most American families, I do more than JT when it comes down to it. There are some (recently written about in a NY Times article) that absolutely won't stand for any inequality. I'd say honestly the rest of us are just trying to find something that feels "about right" without having to discuss every last detail of cat box duty.

That said, we recently had a conversation about household duties around our homestead and rejiggered our tasks. Of course i made a spreadsheet, and in an attempt to share all of the organizational resources i can't resist building-- i'm adding this task chart to the public domain. It's a simple spreadsheet that one could modify at will in excel. Tasks run down the first column, and the frequency with which each partner performs each task is noted in the subsequent columns. It's only slightly complex in that instead of just checking off who does what, it ask partners to rate the frequency with which they do a task, i.e. multiple times a day, weekly, or just periodically. The idea being that it's not much of a balance if partner one does 10 tasks periodically and partner 2 does 10 tasks multiple times a day. It doesn't get in to assigning hours to tasks because i don't think many couples have two partners that would willingly agree to that exercise.

The formulas give you a quick overview of how many tasks each partner does, as well as the breakdown in task frequency. You can add columns as the number of household members increased that were doing chores, i.e, once the boys can mow the lawn, and you can change/add/delete the actual list of tasks.