Methodology Overview
Counting hours is a start, but it misses something obvious: not all hours are equal. Scrubbing a bathtub for 30 minutes takes more out of you than folding towels for 30 minutes. And planning a week of meals is mentally draining in a way that loading the dishwasher isn't.
So we don't just count time. We weight it, using effort multipliers drawn from two bodies of research:
Physical Effort
How hard your body works, measured with MET values borrowed from exercise science
Cognitive Effort
How hard your brain works — the planning, worrying, and tracking that nobody sees
The output is weighted hours — a number that captures how much a task actually costs you, not just how long it takes on the clock.
Physical Effort: MET Values
What are METs?
A Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET) measures how much energy an activity burns compared to sitting still. One MET equals your resting metabolic rate (roughly 3.5 mL O₂/kg/min). An activity rated at 5 METs burns five times more energy than rest. Simple as that.
EXAMPLE MET VALUES
Sitting quietly
Light household activities (washing dishes)
Moderate effort (mowing lawn with push mower)
Vigorous effort (shoveling heavy snow)
The Compendium of Physical Activities
We didn't invent our own numbers. Every MET value we use comes from the Compendium of Physical Activities, the standard reference in exercise science. It catalogs empirically measured MET values for over 800 activities — everything from sitting in a meeting to chopping wood.
PRIMARY 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.
DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e31821ece12
The CDC and WHO both rely on the Compendium. It's the same data that underpins fitness trackers, clinical exercise prescriptions, and public health guidelines worldwide.
How We Convert METs to Multipliers
We set 2.0 METs as our baseline — that's light housework like washing dishes. Anything physically harder gets scaled up from there:
Multiplier = MET value ÷ 2.0
Examples:
- →2.0 METs ÷ 2.0 = 1.0× (baseline, e.g., washing dishes)
- →3.5 METs ÷ 2.0 = 1.75× (rounded to 1.5×, e.g., mopping)
- →5.0 METs ÷ 2.0 = 2.5× (e.g., mowing lawn)
- →6.0 METs ÷ 2.0 = 3.0× (rounded to 2.6×, e.g., shoveling snow)
Specific Household Tasks from the Compendium
The Compendium assigns specific codes to household activities. Here are some of the ones we pulled directly for this tool:
| Code | Activity | METs | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 05041 | Cleaning, light (dusting) | 2.5 | 1.1× |
| 05050 | Cleaning, moderate (vacuuming) | 3.0–3.5 | 1.3–1.5× |
| 05065 | Cooking or food preparation | 2.0–3.5 | 1.0–1.5× |
| 08120 | Mowing lawn, walk, power mower | 5.0 | 2.2× |
| 08200 | Shoveling snow by hand | 6.0 | 2.6× |
Cognitive Load &
Invisible Labor
METs capture the body side. But anyone who's ever lain awake at 2 AM remembering they forgot to RSVP to a birthday party knows that household work lives in your head too. That's the cognitive side — anticipating, deciding, delegating, tracking.
Daminger's Four Phases of Cognitive Labor
Sociologist Allison Daminger did something nobody had properly done before: she broke the "mental load" into four concrete, observable phases. This gave us a framework we could actually measure against:
PRIMARY SOURCE
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4):609-633.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122419859007
ANTICIPATION
Seeing a need before it becomes a problem.
Example: Noticing the kids are outgrowing their shoes before they complain.
IDENTIFICATION
Figuring out the options and weighing them.
Example: Comparing shoe brands, reading reviews, checking prices.
DECISION-MAKING
Pulling the trigger on a choice.
Example: Deciding which shoes to buy and when to buy them.
MONITORING
Making sure the thing actually got done and done right.
Example: Checking that the shoes fit, that the child wears them, that they're holding up.
Here's what makes cognitive labor so tricky: it's invisible. There's no pile of folded shirts to point at. It happens between your ears, leaves no physical trace, and partners routinely underestimate who does it. Daminger's data confirmed exactly this.
Our Cognitive Load Tiers
We translated Daminger's framework into three tiers of cognitive multipliers:
Routine (baseline)
Autopilot stuff. Your hands move but your brain is elsewhere: washing dishes, folding laundry, making beds.
Active Thinking
You have to pay attention and make judgment calls: building a grocery list, paying bills, helping with homework, shopping for gifts.
Invisible Management
The full Daminger cycle — anticipate, research, decide, monitor — stretched across days or weeks: meal planning, managing the family calendar, renewing insurance, coordinating tradespeople.
How Multipliers
Are Calculated
Every task in our database carries two scores: a physical multiplier from MET values and a cognitive multiplier from the mental load tiers above. But a task only gets one final multiplier. Here's how we pick it.
The Effective Multiplier
The effective multiplier is simply whichever score is higher:
Why not add them together? Because the bottleneck is the harder dimension. Mowing the lawn is physically demanding but mentally simple. The physical cost is what makes it draining. A 2.5x physical / 1.0x cognitive task still hits you at 2.5x.
Examples
| Task | Physical | Cognitive | Effective |
|---|---|---|---|
| Washing dishes | 1.0× | 1.0× | 1.0× |
| Grocery shopping (in-store) | 1.4× | 1.3× | 1.4× |
| Meal planning | 1.0× | 1.5× | 1.5× |
| Mowing lawn (push mower) | 2.2× | 1.0× | 2.2× |
| Home renovation (project mgmt) | 1.0× | 1.5× | 1.5× |
Confidence Intervals
& Uncertainty
Nobody tracks their housework with a stopwatch. You're guessing, and your partner is guessing. We build confidence bands around every result to account for that.
Why ±10%?
Time-use research tells us people are usually within 10-15% of their actual hours. Not bad, but not perfect either. We apply a ±10% confidence band to each result so you can see the realistic range rather than fixating on one precise-looking number.
EXAMPLE
If your weighted hours calculation is 32.5 hours/week, your confidence band is:
Lower bound: 32.5 × 0.90 = 29.3 hours
Point estimate: 32.5 hours
Upper bound: 32.5 × 1.10 = 35.8 hours
Your real workload probably falls somewhere between 29.3 and 35.8 hours. 32.5 is our best guess, but we're honest that it's a guess.
Interpreting Overlapping vs. Non-Overlapping Bands
This is where it gets interesting for couples. If your bands overlap, the difference between you might just be estimation noise. If they don't overlap at all, you've found something real.
Bands Overlap Significantly
Big overlap: 27.0-33.0 sits right on top of 28.8-35.2.
INTERPRETATION
That 2-hour gap? Probably just estimation fuzz. Call it even.
Bands Don't Overlap
Zero overlap: 37.8-46.2 and 25.2-30.8 don't even come close.
INTERPRETATION
14 hours apart, even at the most generous estimates. That gap is real, not a rounding error.
Sources of Estimation Uncertainty
Where does the imprecision actually come from? Several places:
- →Recall bias: You remember last week's epic bathroom clean vividly but forget the quick ones. Emotionally charged or recent tasks loom larger in memory.
- →Week-to-week swings: Some weeks it's a 2-hour grocery run, other weeks you're in and out in 45 minutes. Monthly averaging helps, but it's still fuzzy.
- →Rounding: Everyone rounds to the nearest 15 or 30 minutes. One rounding error is nothing, but across 30+ tasks they add up.
- →Different definitions: Is watching TV with a toddler in the room "active childcare" or "being available"? Partners often draw that line in different places.
The upshot: A 3-hour difference between partners? Don't read too much into it. An 8+ hour gap? That's almost certainly real, no matter how you slice the estimates.
Household Labor
& Relationship Equity
This isn't just about who vacuums more. Decades of research point to the same finding: how fair you feel the split is predicts your relationship satisfaction, your mental health, and whether your partnership lasts.
The Equity-Satisfaction Link
KEY FINDING
Lavee & Katz (2002) found that perceived fairness in household labor distribution was a stronger predictor of marital quality than the actual division of labor itself. Partners who felt the split was fair reported higher satisfaction, even when the division was objectively unequal.
Journal of Marriage and Family, 64(1):27-39. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002.00027.x
Read that again: even couples with an objectively lopsided split reported high satisfaction — as long as both partners agreed it was fair. The problem isn't imbalance per se. It's invisible, undiscussed imbalance. That's what this tool is designed to fix.
The Second Shift & Invisible Labor
Hochschild (1989) gave it a name: "the second shift" — the full round of housework and caregiving that starts after paid work ends. More than three decades later, the pattern has narrowed but not disappeared. Women in most heterosexual partnerships still carry a larger share.
Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (1989). The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. Viking Penguin.
Daminger (2019) pushed the conversation further by mapping out the cognitive dimension — all that anticipation, planning, decision-making, and monitoring work that never shows up on a chore chart. It's mentally exhausting, and it's chronically undervalued precisely because you can't point to it and say "I did that."
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4):609-633. DOI: 10.1177/0003122419859007
Gender Norms & Household Labor
This tool works for any household. But it would be dishonest to discuss the research without acknowledging that in heterosexual partnerships, gender norms still heavily shape who does what.
- →Time-use studies keep finding the same thing: women spend more hours on housework and childcare than men, even when both work full-time jobs (Bianchi et al., 2012).
- →Task segregation is stubborn. Women still do more of the daily, repetitive work (cooking, cleaning, laundry) while men tend toward sporadic tasks like yard work and repairs (Lachance-Grzela & Bouchard, 2010).
- →The mental load skews even harder. Mothers are far more likely to be the ones anticipating, planning, and monitoring — the invisible management work (Daminger, 2019).
Mental Health & Burnout
The toll goes beyond the relationship. It lands on the individual.
What the studies show:
- •Women who see their household labor as unfair show higher rates of depression and psychological distress (Coltrane, 2000).
- •Invisible labor drives burnout, and mothers bear the brunt of it (Dean et al., 2022).
- •On the flip side, partners who feel the split is fair report lower stress and better mental health across the board (Harryson et al., 2012).
What We're Trying to Do
Give invisible work a number. Put cognitive load on equal footing with physical effort. And then hand both partners the same page of data so the conversation can start from facts instead of feelings. When perception (what you each believe) and reality (what the data shows) line up, you can work on the actual problem together. When they don't, at least now you know.
References
Everything above draws on peer-reviewed work across exercise science, sociology, and family studies. Here are the papers and books behind it.
Physical Effort & MET Values
Ainsworth, B. E., Haskell, W. L., Herrmann, S. D., Meckes, N., Bassett, D. R., Tudor-Locke, C., ... & Leon, A. S. (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.
DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e31821ece12
Ainsworth, B. E., Haskell, W. L., Whitt, M. C., Irwin, M. L., Swartz, A. M., Strath, S. J., ... & Leon, A. S. (2000).
Compendium of physical activities: An update of activity codes and MET intensities.
Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 32(9), S498-S504.
DOI: 10.1097/00005768-200009001-00009
Cognitive Labor & Invisible Work
Daminger, A. (2019).
The cognitive dimension of household labor.
American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609-633.
DOI: 10.1177/0003122419859007
Hochschild, A., & Machung, A. (1989).
The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home.
New York: Viking Penguin.
Dean, L. R., Carroll, J. S., & Yang, C. (2022).
Materialism, perceived financial problems, and marital satisfaction.
Family Relations, 71(3), 1146-1164.
DOI: 10.1111/fare.12667
Household Labor Distribution & Equity
Lavee, Y., & Katz, R. (2002).
Division of labor, perceived fairness, and marital quality: The effect of gender ideology.
Journal of Marriage and Family, 64(1), 27-39.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002.00027.x
Bianchi, S. M., Sayer, L. C., Milkie, M. A., & Robinson, J. P. (2012).
Housework: Who did, does or will do it, and how much does it matter?
Social Forces, 91(1), 55-63.
DOI: 10.1093/sf/sos120
Lachance-Grzela, M., & Bouchard, G. (2010).
Why do women do the lion's share of housework? A decade of research.
Sex Roles, 63(11-12), 767-780.
DOI: 10.1007/s11199-010-9797-z
Coltrane, S. (2000).
Research on household labor: Modeling and measuring the social embeddedness of routine family work.
Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(4), 1208-1233.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.01208.x
Mental Health & Relationship Outcomes
Harryson, L., Strandh, M., & Hammarström, A. (2012).
Domestic work and psychological distress: What is the importance of relative socioeconomic position and gender inequality in the couple relationship?
PLoS ONE, 7(6), e38484.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0038484
Want to go deeper? The Journal of Family Theory & Review and Journal of Marriage and Family both publish regular meta-analyses on household labor and gender equity. They're the best place to start if you want the full academic picture.
