Experiment No. 13: SMART Resolutions

The Basics

We’re Trying to Solve: Unfair division of labor
Target Audience: Partners, spouses, housemates, parents
Ages: 3 and up
Category: Household chores, holidays and celebrations
Estimated Time: 3+ hours
Difficulty Level: Moderate, some planning and follow-through

A classic challenge of New Year’s resolutions is that they focus exclusively on individuals and their will to change themselves. That brings us to the most important BLLx takeaway on New Year’s resolutions: Sharing the load at home is a problem you could never--not in one year, not in a hundred years--achieve by yourself. It’s no fairer to expect one person to create new systems for sharing the work at home than it would be to expect one person to do all the housework, chores, errands, logistics planning and caregiving every week. So if you were considering a personal resolution to rebalance the work at home this year, don’t. Let’s start somewhere more realistic and involve all the people it will take to fairly share the load.

Research shows there are some critical components to making goals achievable, and therefore, ensuring they actually result in new behaviors or improvements in your life. They call these SMART goals, because they are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• There’s a Reward for sticking to it
• And progress is Trackable

Let’s try it for the division of labor!

Directions

1. First, let’s get specific. Sit down with your partner in sharing the load and think about the biggest pain points in your current division of labor. What are the moments in the day when you’re most aware of how unfair things feel? Is it picking up the kids from school? Getting dinner on the table? Tidying the house before bed? Pick one task, chore, or errand that has been falling on one person but should be shared by two. This is the task you’re resolving to rebalance this year. You might rebalance even more, because of the experience with this first target. But research shows that if you try to change everything at once, you’ll end up changing nothing.
2. Then, get even more specific. What are the habits, assumptions or circumstances that drive this unfair workload? Why is this task falling on one person so often? Is it something you both notice? What could you change to encourage a fairer approach? Will making a rebalance possible require reminders? A new schedule? Jot down those details so you have a clear record of it and a vision for what’s to come.
3. How could you measure whether or not you’ve more fairly shared the load? Fairness can be hard to quantify, but it’s important that you both have an idea of what you’re aiming for. The more concrete, the better, because fairness can mean different things to different people. Will “fairness” be measured by how many days of the week one person takes on the task compared to the other? Are you going for an even split? Or will the person who usually did this task be completely relieved of it for the coming year? Will fairness mean one person does it in January and the other in February? Jot this down too.
4. What reward awaits you both for achieving this new arrangement? Don’t wait for 2021 to treat yourselves for your transformation. Maybe you want to check in every month and if you’ve achieved the goal for that month, you hire a sitter for an evening and go on a date. Or, maybe you each get some personal, protected leisure time? Pick something that gets you excited to follow through on your goal.
5. Lastly, agree on a method for tracking your progress. If the idea is to keep a calendar of who did the task on a daily basis, remember that this, too, is work that needs to be recognized and taken into account. But there are other, less intense ways to track progress! For example, you can simply check in at the end of the week to think back on how the task went, and jot down some quick notes together. You can also use technology! Snap a selfie when you’re doing it so you have a record in your phone. Then you can pull these up when you have a moment to breathe and decide whether or not you’ve earned your reward. The dream goal is that by the end of 2020, you’ll not only have successfully rebalanced the labor on your chosen chore, but that you’ve both become more aware of your habits, recognized how the division of labor impacts your relationship and how each of you experience stress, treated yourselves for your efforts to change them, and gained a more realistic portrait of what it takes to create change together. That sounds like success to us!

Connect With the Better Life Lab

Are you going to try this week’s experiment? Do you have a story about how you and your own family solved a problem with the work at home? Is there a specific challenge you’ve been trying to tackle? Can this experiment be improved? Please let us know via this form, at bllx@newamerica.org, or in our Facebook group for BLLx Beta Testers.

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