Are you sharing the load fairly?
Methodology
MET-Based
Built on the same metabolic scoring used in exercise science
Privacy
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How It Works
Not all hours are equal
168
Hours per week
Everyone has 168 hours per week. But an hour of scrubbing floors (3.8 METs) takes a lot more out of you than an hour of meal planning (1.5 METs). And an hour spent coordinating family schedules and appointments? That kind of sustained mental juggling is exhausting in a completely different way.
So we don't just count hours. We weight them by effort, physical and cognitive, to show what the workload actually looks like.
Physical Effort
We borrow Metabolic Equivalents (METs) from exercise science. 1 MET is what your body burns sitting still. Once a task crosses 2.3 METs, it gets a multiplier because your body is genuinely working harder.
Range: 1.0× – 2.6× multiplier
Cognitive Effort
Meal planning, scheduling, keeping track of who needs what by when. None of it is physically demanding, but it occupies your brain in a way that's genuinely tiring. Tasks that require anticipation and ongoing monitoring get their own multipliers.
Range: 1.3× – 1.5× multiplier
Baseline
How many hours do you work, sleep, and spend on personal care? That tells us how much time you actually have available for household stuff.
Task Audit
Go through 50+ household tasks and log your monthly hours. We convert everything to weekly figures and apply the effort multipliers.
Results
Your weighted hours, the effort split between partners, and your true rest: how much genuine leisure each person has once the household burden is accounted for.
The Science
Research behind the multipliers
Physical Effort: Metabolic Equivalents (METs)
METs measure how much energy an activity costs compared to sitting still. The multipliers we use come from the Compendium of Physical Activities, a peer-reviewed reference that has cataloged MET values for hundreds of activities since 1993.
SOURCE
Ainsworth BE, Haskell WL, Herrmann SD, et al. (2011). 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities: a second update of codes and MET values. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 43(8):1575-1581.
Folding laundry, dishes
Vacuuming, cooking complex meals
Raking, mowing, weeding
Scrubbing floors, moving furniture
Cognitive Effort: Invisible Labor
Sociologist Allison Daminger broke household management down into four cognitive stages: anticipation, identification, decision-making, and monitoring. Most of it is invisible to anyone who isn't doing it.
SOURCE
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4):609-633.
Active Thinking · 1.3×
Research, judgment, sustained attention (bills, gift shopping, homework help)
Invisible Management · 1.5×
Anticipation, delegation, monitoring (meal planning, insurance, calendars)
Why Combine Physical & Cognitive?
Mowing is almost entirely physical. Taxes are almost entirely mental. Grocery shopping with a list you had to plan? Both.
For each task, we take the higher of the two multipliers so the dominant burden is what counts. No task gets shortchanged.
FAQ
Common questions
Yes. Everything runs in your browser. Your audit data never leaves your device, nothing gets stored on a server, and nothing is tracked. We use Cloudflare Turnstile for bot protection, but that only validates your session and has zero access to your audit information.
A lot of household work happens on irregular schedules. You might deep clean once a month, do taxes once a year, or mow the lawn every two weeks. Monthly tracking catches these tasks that a weekly view would miss. The calculator handles the conversion to weekly hours.
There are 100+ tasks across ten categories, but every household is different. If yours is missing something, add a custom task. Describe what it involves and the calculator will figure out the right effort multiplier from the physical and cognitive demands.
The physical multipliers come from peer-reviewed MET values used in exercise science, so those are on solid ground. The cognitive multipliers draw on research into invisible labor but are inherently harder to pin down. That is why we show a ±10% confidence band around the results.
It depends on your household. If the leisure gap between partners is under 5 hours per week, things are roughly balanced. Over 10 hours means one person is carrying a much heavier load, and it is probably worth talking about how to shift some of that.
Right now it is built for two-partner households. If you are in a multi-generational home or shared living situation, you could run separate audits for different pairs, but it is not a perfect fit. Broader household support is something we would like to add eventually.
Find out where the time actually goes
The whole thing takes about 10-15 minutes. No sign-up, totally private, and free.
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