Thirty-one domestic tasks

The optimistic reading

A household's maintenance has to happen somewhere. Done in an evening, it competes with rest and company. Done in a ten-minute gap between two work tasks, it costs almost nothing and the evening is free. Before treating a quiet week as proof that the arrangement works, managers can check what the software records and define which delayed workload patterns would trigger a closer review.

Thirty-one such tasks in a fortnight is roughly two a day, and the household's own account is that the evenings in this fortnight were noticeably emptier of chores than they had been when both people commuted. A separate perspective on homes, workplaces, or remote work is available from The Spruce.

That is a straightforward improvement in the quality of a day and it is why this category sits in the gains column.

The sceptical reading

Working from home means being available to do domestic tasks during working hours, and being available to do them means doing them.

An office does not offer the opportunity to put on a wash at eleven. It also does not offer the possibility of feeling that one should have. Thirty-one tasks absorbed into the working day is thirty-one occasions on which paid work was interrupted for unpaid work, and the unpaid work is not distributed evenly either: nineteen of the thirty-one fell on the person who also absorbed thirty-one of the forty-seven collisions.

The record cannot settle it

Both readings fit the same thirty-one events and the log contains nothing that distinguishes them.

What it does contain is the household's own view, asked directly, and the two people disagreed. One described the midday tasks as the best part of the arrangement. The other described them as something that had quietly become theirs.

That disagreement is itself the most informative thing in this category, and it is worth more than a resolution would be.

A task done at eleven instead of seven is either an evening recovered or an hour of work given away, and which one it is depends on something the log cannot see.

What the numbers do show

Three things that are not in dispute.

The split. Nineteen to twelve, in the same direction as everything else in this record and for the same reason. The person who can be interrupted is the person who hears the machine finish.

The timing. Twenty-two of the thirty-one happened between ten and four — inside the working day rather than at its edges. These are not tasks done before starting or after finishing; they are tasks done instead of work, for a few minutes.

The kinds. Laundry accounts for eleven, cooking ahead for seven, cleaning for six, waiting in for a repair or delivery for four, admin for three. Laundry dominates because a machine imposes its own schedule and somebody has to be there when it stops.

Why laundry is the clearest case

Eleven of the thirty-one, and it is the one task where the gain is unambiguous.

A washing machine run in an empty flat finishes into an empty flat. The clothes sit wet until somebody comes home, which in an office arrangement is the evening, which means the drying happens overnight and the airer is up during the one part of the day the living room is being used for living.

Run at eleven with somebody in the building, it is hung by noon and down by six. The same task, the same effort, in a window where it costs nothing.

That is what the category is at its best: not less work, but work moved into a part of the day where it does not compete with anything.

Whether the other twenty tasks are like that, or are instead work that has quietly migrated into working hours, is the question the household could not agree on and this record cannot answer.

The eleven washes

Laundry is the largest single activity inside the largest category — eleven of the thirty-one — and it is the clearest case because the machine imposes its own schedule.

A wash started at ten finishes at eleven. If nobody is in, the clothes sit wet until the evening, the airer goes up in the living room during the hours the living room is being lived in, and the whole thing occupies a room at the time of day that room is most wanted.

Started at ten with somebody present, it is hung by half past eleven and down by five, and the living room never sees it.

That is the same effort, the same machine and the same clothes, moved into a window where it costs the household nothing — and it is the single most unambiguous entry in the gains column.

It also illustrates why the sceptical reading of this category does not fit everything in it. Nobody is doing more laundry because they are at home. They are doing the same laundry at an hour when it does not compete with anything.

The three that nobody would defend

Against that, three entries in the thirty-one are tasks that the household agrees would simply not have been done at all under an office arrangement, and that they are not sure were worth doing.

A cupboard reorganised on a Tuesday afternoon. A window cleaned. A drawer sorted.

Each was logged honestly: each happened, each would not have happened from an office. Each also looks, on reflection, like work that expanded to fill the availability of somebody to do it.

Three out of thirty-one is not much. It is enough to establish that the category is not uniform, and it is the concrete form of the sceptical reading that the rest of this page could only state in the abstract.