# Household Work Inventory

For the method in
[Making Invisible Household Work Visible](/articles/invisible-household-work-visible).
Each person fills in their own lists separately before comparing.

## Not for

Tracking or timestamping each other's compliance. This is a conversation tool you both look at
together, not a surveillance log.

## My task list (fill in alone)

Physical tasks I do, grouped loosely:

- Meals:
- Cleaning:
- Admin:
- Kids / pets:
- Home maintenance:

## My noticing list (fill in alone)

Things I keep track of without being asked — appointments, supplies running low, whose turn it is:

-
-
-

## The combined inventory

Fill in together, one row at a time. Definition of done first, then agree on owner and backup.

| Task | Owner | Backup | Definition of done |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |

## Before assigning owners, check

- [ ] Is the current default owner based on who's best positioned right now, or just habit?
- [ ] Did we avoid assigning by gender, personality type, or "naturally better at this"?
- [ ] Does every task have a definition of done, not just a name?
- [ ] Does every task have a backup, not just an owner?

## Two-week check-in

- Tasks that got missed:
- Was the miss about the definition of done, the owner assignment, or something else?
- Any task nobody actually owned before this list existed?

## The three prompts to reuse

**1. Organize the task list**

```text
Here is a rough, unorganized list of household tasks I could think of:
[paste your list]

Turn this into a clean, deduplicated list, grouped loosely by area
(e.g. meals, cleaning, admin, kids, pets, home maintenance). Do not
add tasks I didn't mention, and do not assign anyone to do them yet —
just organize what I gave you.
```

**2. Organize the noticing list**

```text
Separately from tasks I physically do, help me list the things I keep
track of without being asked — appointments coming up, supplies running
low, whose turn it is for something, things that need replacing soon.
I'll give you a rough list; just organize it, don't add to it.

My rough list: [paste]
```

**3. Build the owner/backup/definition-of-done table**

```text
For this list of household tasks and noticing-jobs [paste combined
list], help me build a table with four columns: Task, Owner, Backup
(who covers it if the owner can't), and Definition of Done (a short,
concrete description of what "finished" looks like for this specific
task). Leave the Owner and Backup columns blank — that's a decision
for us, not the model.
```

## If this surfaces a bigger fairness problem

If one person is carrying most of both the doing and the noticing, and raising it leads to
dismissal rather than a real conversation, see
[Prepare for a Hard Conversation Without Making AI the Referee](/articles/prepare-for-conflict-not-ai-referee).