The invisible job of running a household

The boiler engineer is called Dave. He’s based in Hornsey. He charges £85 for a standard service. He prefers WhatsApp to phone. Of the two adults in the house, one of them knows all of this. The other one doesn’t.

Most households have a Dave or two - the engineer, the dentist, the child’s teacher, the neighbour with the spare key. Most also have one adult who knows who all these people are, what they charge, and how they prefer to be contacted, and one adult who doesn’t. Holding all that is work, even though nobody calls it that.

The shape of the job

The work has a name - mental load - though a name doesn’t make it much easier to see. It’s made of a thousand small things. On any given Tuesday, someone in the house is probably holding in their head: which bin goes out tomorrow, the name of the child’s after-school coordinator, the fact that the car tax is due in August, that the dentist rang about moving the appointment, the broadband password, and the kitchen tap that’s been dripping for a fortnight and needs a plumber.

Individually, each of these is trivial. Collectively, they are a second job with no start date, no pay, and no end time - the job that holds everything together when no one else is looking.

Why it’s invisible

The work is invisible because it’s preventative. When it’s done well, nothing happens - the boiler doesn’t break, the insurance doesn’t lapse, the birthday card arrives on time. Because nothing happened, it’s hard to point at the work that made the nothing possible.

The same quality makes it hard to share. When a partner asks “what do you need me to do?” - a good question, asked with love - the honest answer is often “I need you to already know.” You can teach someone the dates, but not the fact that dates matter. You can share the broadband password, but not the awareness that passwords and expiry dates and unread letters from HMRC all need someone to look after them. For a person who has never held the list, the list doesn’t quite exist. You can’t hand over something invisible.

How one person ends up with it

In almost every household, the work lands on one person. It doesn’t arrive in a single moment. It accumulates, through a thousand small defaults. Someone picks up the insurance renewal because no one else is going to. Someone answers the school email because it arrived in their inbox first. Someone calls the boiler engineer because they happened to be home when it broke. Each default is unremarkable. The sum of them is not.

The position has a gendered tilt in heterosexual couples - the research on cognitive labour has shown for years that the mental load falls disproportionately on women. But the shape of the position is broader than that. Lone parents carry it because there’s no one else to. Flatmates end up with one accidental coordinator. Adult children managing ageing parents hold it alongside their own household’s. The pattern is about the position, not the person.

What the work costs

The cost is harder to name than time.

The biggest part of it is ambient vigilance - the part of your brain that never entirely relaxes, because it’s scanning. You’re in the shower and you remember you still haven’t called Dave about the boiler. You’re on a walk and you realise the pet insurance renews next week. You’re trying to fall asleep and you check, one more time, that the car tax is paid. None of these checks takes long. All of them keep a portion of your mind, always, slightly awake.

There’s also the difficulty of leaving. If you’re the one who holds the household, you can’t easily leave it - not for a weekend, not for a holiday, not for a hospital stay. Things will lapse. People will ask questions no one else can answer. You can set up automatic payments, you can write instructions, you can try to hand over what you can, but the ambient vigilance doesn’t transfer. It stays with the person who’s been running it.

And there’s the strange loneliness of being the backstop. When things go well, no one notices. When things go wrong, the question is often some version of “why didn’t you sort that?” You are the household’s reason nothing bad happened, and its reason when something does. Nobody is quite aware of the asymmetry. Everyone benefits from it. The person holding it rarely mentions it, because saying it out loud sounds, to them, like complaining.

What it would look like to put it down

The usual answer is “share it more fairly.” That’s fine as far as it goes, and in many cases it’s overdue. But sharing invisible work is hard in a way sharing visible work isn’t. You can’t divide up a list that no one has written down.

The other answer - the one we’re more interested in - is to take the list out of any one person’s head, entirely. Put it somewhere reliable and shared. A spreadsheet doesn’t quite do the job because spreadsheets fall out of date, and a shared calendar only tells you about dates, not details. What you want is something that holds all of it, brings it back at the right moment, and tells everyone the same thing.

This is what we built Oosby for: to be the place the list lives, so it doesn’t have to live in any one person’s head. Once it does, the ambient vigilance has somewhere to go.

And then, the next time someone in the house asks when the boiler was last serviced, the answer is already there, and neither of them has to remember.