Dividing responsibilities at home

Organizations often use frameworks like “RACI” or “RAPID” to manage complicated projects. In a workplace, this spells out

• Who is responsible for actually doing the task
• Who signs off / needs to agree with the general approach
• Who is consulted about whether / how to do it
• Who is informed about what’s happening

There’s a lot of writing about “invisible labor” or “cognitive labor” about the planning, relationship-managing, and such that go into running a household (disproportionately by women). I think using more explicit division of responsibilities can often be helpful here. Especially once you have children, a lot of areas can accidentally fall to one person, like:

• Keeping the kids in clothes and shoes that fit
• Storing and organizing their stuff
• Interfacing with childcare and schools
• Medical and dental care: getting them to appointments, working out what kinds of care are needed
• Social: arranging times for them to see their friends, interfacing with other parents, arranging transportation to activities

A project manager couldn’t do a good job if they didn’t know what work teammates already had on their plates and who has most capacity to take on tasks. Likewise it’s hard to allocate household work well if you don’t know what the total amount of work looks like.

One episode between Jeff and me was when I felt frustrated that I owned the emotional work related to interfacing with our childcare provider, and Jeff wasn’t tracking things like her birthday. So we spent a while tracking time, and found that each of us spent a similar amount of time on home responsibilities. I was indeed doing nearly all the work related to arranging childcare, but he was doing work in other areas like fixing broken stuff at our house. It helped when both of us had more knowledge and appreciation of work the other was doing.

Dividing an area 50/50 rarely makes sense. Some other ways to divide areas:

• By timing: Jeff owns getting the kids ready in the mornings, and I own getting them ready for bed. 
• By rotation: Jeff, I, and our other adults housemates each sign up to cook dinner once a week. On nights when no one signed up, Jeff or I work something out based on our availability.
• By interest: I decided swim lessons were worth it, so I worked out how to get lessons and am responsible for getting them to swim lessons by default and coordinating with their teacher. Jeff is more interested in music, and he’s responsible for the kids’ music lessons and coordinating with their fiddle teacher.
• By relationship: there are more crossed wires when two parents are interfacing with the doctor, teacher, babysitter, etc. We’ve sometimes explicitly divided this up (like when we realized our childcare provider had stolen money from us, Jeff took the bad cop role in talking to her about it, and I was good cop continuing to interface with her about the kids). Maybe you should each be responsible for work related to your own extended family, like making travel plans to visit them and handling drama related to them.
  

Some things that help:

• Explicitly say who’s responsible for various areas. 
• A culture of watch team backup, where it’s ok to speak up about possible problems you notice.
• Assume that each of you is covering some areas that the other doesn’t notice. If you each try to cover more than 50% of what you perceive as the total work, you have a chance of balancing it pretty evenly.
• Express gratitude for areas the other owns, and especially if they cover something that’s not their assigned area. 
• Don’t micromanage or complain when the other person doesn’t do it your way. If it’s an ongoing problem, have a conversation about it later, but don’t pick at each other during the busy part of the day.
• Treat each other as competent people. See maternal gatekeeping / “Oh I’ll just do it, you don’t know how to do it right.” Help each other upskill.
• Try to be reasonably competent.
  • In some cases this means outsourcing. Jeff is much handier at home repairs than me, and when our front door broke while Jeff was away, I had a locksmith deal with it because I didn’t know how to fix it like Jeff probably would have. But I was competent enough to get the problem dealt with in some manner, and I didn’t make Jeff deal with it remotely while he was traveling.
  • If you have very little knowledge of some area like cooking or plunging a toilet, develop some basic skills. The internet can help you.
• When assigning someone a task that’s normally your own area, it can help to convey commander’s intent / the overall goal rather than the minutiae of how you usually do it. E.g. “I need you to own getting our kids’ hair washed sometime this weekend,” or “I need you to be in charge of the kids getting breakfast.” We don’t have to accomplish this goal in the same way the other person would (which bathroom, bath vs shower, does adult or kid wash the hair, what type of shampoo).
• Ask for help: “I would normally handle X but I’m overwhelmed / busier than usual at work / struggling, can you handle it this time?”
• When adding an area to the family life, discuss who will be responsible for the extra work. E.g. I wanted to get cats more than Jeff did, so I’m responsible for pet care by default.
• Take seriously that planning and staying on top of things take time and mental bandwidth. Emailing the school, planning what groceries are needed, scheduling appointments, etc are real responsibilities.
• Some amount of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Jeff generally has more energy than me and needs less sleep, and I’m grateful that he’s typically done more of the total (paid and unpaid) work. Currently his job has more pressing needs than mine, so I’m doing more of the home responsibilities.
• In sickness and in health: this all might shift a lot if one of us develops health needs that change things.
• Meet in the middle about what tasks are worth doing, e.g. how clean the house needs to be, or whether you need to give gifts to extended family. Some things might just not be worth doing.

Problems can still happen:

• You dislike feeling “managed.” Ideally there’s no one manager, but you each have areas you’re responsible for, and you coordinate the overall picture together.
• When there’s no spelled-out arrangement and the default feels onerous or falls through. Last time we went on a trip neither of us really owned making a packing list, so we both added some stuff to a list but neither was responsible for being sure it was complete, and we forgot some stuff we intended to bring.
• If the responsible person isn’t attuned to a problem in their area, like when one of our kids stopped eating lunch at school.
• If there’s a safety concern or something that one of you has strong feelings about. E.g. we realized recently we weren’t on the same page about how closely to supervise a young child in the bath.
• If one of you wants signoff over an area and the other doesn’t realize that. (We discovered after our 5-year-old got an impulse hair cut that I thought major haircuts should get signoff from me, and Jeff didn’t know I thought that.)
• You might have significant disagreements about whether an area is necessary at all, or what counts as an adequate job.
• Someone agrees to be responsible for an area but doesn’t reliably cover it.

Related:

• Tool: “Is this causing a problem?”
• Relaxing my standards on housekeeping
• Jeff: Equal parenting advice for dads