The mental load, measured

It is 8:15 on a Tuesday. The little one is in the bath. You are emptying the dishwasher and, without really thinking about it, you are making a list.

The swimming bag is for tomorrow. It is still in the hall, wet since last week. So it needs emptying tonight, or the towel will smell. The trip form has to go back before Friday. It is somewhere in the school bag. There are three yoghurts left. And your mother-in-law's birthday is on the 14th, which means ordering the present this week if you want it to arrive.

You have done none of it. You have thought about it, that is all. Again.

Your partner comes into the kitchen and asks if you are all right. You say you are tired. He says, kindly and sincerely: "You only have to ask. I'll do it."

And something tightens, without your quite knowing what.

"Just ask me": ask what, exactly?

Take his sentence seriously. What exactly would you have to ask him?

This: "Can you sort out the swimming bag?"

There. One sentence, seven words, two seconds. And he would do it. He means it.

Now look at what had to happen before you could say that sentence, tonight, at 8:15.

One. Know that swimming is tomorrow. Nobody reminded you. You have been carrying that since September.

Two. Have noticed, walking through the hall, that the bag is still there and still shut.

Three. Know that a swimming costume left wet for a week starts to smell, so it needs doing tonight, not tomorrow morning in a rush.

Four. And, once the sentence is said, remember to check later that it was done. Because if you do not check, there is a good chance the bag will still be there at 7:30 tomorrow.

His sentence, "Can you sort out the bag?", is step five. The first four are still yours, and they are exactly the ones going round in your head while you empty the dishwasher.

That is why his offer, however sincere, does not really relieve you. He is offering to carry the part that shows.

Somebody went and checked

For a long time all of this existed only as a feeling. Hard to name, and therefore easy to wave away: you worry too much, you are too organised, nobody asked you to.

In 2019 an American sociologist, Allison Daminger, decided to look more closely. She spent long hours with 35 couples, separately and then together, getting them to describe how their household actually kept running: who thought about what, when, and how they knew.

What she got out of it is simple. Running a household is not one task. It is four moves, always the same ones.

Anticipating. Seeing it coming. Swimming is Tuesday. The shoes will be too small by September. This work happens before there is anything visible to act on, which is why nobody sees it happening.

Identifying. Finding the options. Which orthodontist, which slot, which present for a mother-in-law who has everything.

Deciding. Choosing between them. This is the part people talk about, the part that looks like a decision.

Monitoring. Checking it got done. Then checking again. This move never ends, because today's check does not excuse you from tomorrow's.

And here is the result that matters. Daminger found these four moves are not shared evenly within a couple.

Deciding is shared relatively evenly. It is visible, it happens through conversation, and people remember taking part in it. Identifying options is somewhat less evenly shared. But anticipating and monitoring tend to fall much more heavily on one person, most often the woman.

She also notes that men often join in when the decision is being made, once the preparation has been done by somebody else. In other words, they arrive at step five.

So the move everyone talks about is the one already being shared. The two that carry most of the burden are the ones nobody sees, including, sometimes, the person carrying them.

Why it is so tiring

Anticipating and monitoring have one thing in common: they never finish.

An ordinary task ends. You put the bin out, it is done, your head lets go. We have known for a long time that the mind works like that. In 1927 a young psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, put people in front of a series of small tasks and interrupted half of them. When she asked afterwards what they had done, it was the interrupted ones they recalled best. As long as a task is unfinished, it stays on your mind.

Monitoring, by definition, is never finished. You checked the form tonight, fine: tomorrow you will have to check it actually went. It is a permanent watch rather than a task.

And while it runs, it takes up room. Not separate room, reserved for the household. The same room as everything else. The psychologist Nelson Cowan, who spent a career measuring what the mind can hold at once, puts that capacity at around four things in adults. Four. What you are carrying on Tuesday evening is competing directly with a meeting, a conversation, driving.

That is also why it spills. Sophie Leroy, a management researcher, gave the spill a name in 2009: attention residue. When you move from one thing to another, especially if the first is unfinished, part of your attention stays caught on what you were doing before, and you are measurably worse at the next thing. The swimming bag does not just cost you twenty minutes on Tuesday evening. It takes a little attention away from everything else.

The limits of the study, and of any app

It is worth being honest about what Daminger did, because "mental load" is now used for more or less anything.

She interviewed 35 American couples, relatively well off and well educated. It is interview work, not a survey. Which means she described and named the phenomenon very well, but did not measure how widespread it is. Her study does not tell you how things are in your house.

And above all: no tool rebalances this load. An app can hold the monitoring for you. It will never make somebody else do the anticipating. If the split in your house is unfair, that is a conversation to have with the person concerned, not a feature to install. Selling you software as the answer to that would be dishonest.

Handing over a whole domain, all four moves included

The split is useful for something very concrete: it gives you a practical way to divide the load.

"Help me more" cannot be delegated, because it does not point at anything. "You take the medical appointments" is not enough either: you keep the part where you know when one is needed.

What can genuinely be handed over is a whole domain, all four moves included. Taking responsibility for medical appointments means thinking of them, finding them, choosing, and checking. From that point it is no longer yours to manage. It is theirs, including when they forget.

And for the monitoring, there is another route. It is the most tiring move because it does not stop, but it is also the most mechanical: it is largely about not letting information slip. That is the part you do not necessarily have to keep in your head.

The part an app can hold

That is more or less what Nitka (heynitka.com) does: you tell it the thing the moment it occurs to you, by voice, text or photo, and it brings it back when it is useful again.

Monitoring is the part it is best placed to take over. Once you have told it something, you no longer have to keep checking that it is still coming up: the reminder arrives ahead of the date, and if the thing is still open afterwards, it comes back without you having had to carry it. It also does a little of the anticipating. Because it holds everything you have told it, it notices when two things cannot both happen, such as a school play that starts half an hour before the dentist appointment. You can also simply ask it what you told it three months ago.

Identifying and deciding stay with you. But how that load is split is still a conversation to have with the other person.

Back to Tuesday evening

You will probably still be holding the list tomorrow.

What changes is that it stops being "I am someone who thinks of everything", a way of being that you can do nothing with. It becomes four moves, two of them largely invisible. Some can be handed to someone else, provided you can name them, and part of the monitoring can even be handed to a tool.

That is already a great deal more useful than "you only have to ask".

Disclosure: this article is published by Nitka, which appears above. The research cited exists independently of us, and the links below go to the original sources.

References

1. Allison Daminger, "The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor", American Sociological Review, 2019, 84(4), 609 to 633. The original study: 70 interviews with members of 35 couples, and the four moves. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419859007 A general-audience version, written by the researcher herself and free to read: https://behavioralscientist.org/how-couples-share-cognitive-labor-and-why-it-matters/
2. Bluma Zeigarnik, "Über das Behalten von erledigten und unerledigten Handlungen", Psychologische Forschung, 1927, 9, 1 to 85. Interrupted tasks being better remembered. Full English translation, freely available: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/willpower/1927-zeigarnik.pdf
3. Nelson Cowan, "The magical number 4 in short-term memory", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2001, 24(1), 87 to 114. Attention capacity at around four items. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922 Free PDF: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/44023F1147D4A1D44BDC0AD226838496/S0140525X01003922a.pdf/the-magical-number-4-in-short-term-memory-a-reconsideration-of-mental-storage-capacity.pdf
4. Sophie Leroy, "Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks", Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2009, 109(2), 168 to 181. Attention residue. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002 Freely available bibliographic record: https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jobhdp/v109y2009i2p168-181.html

Nitka, the app mentioned above, turns what you say, type, photograph or forward into dated reminders, and tells you when two things you told it do not fit together. It keeps only what you give it, and your data is never sold, never used for advertising and never used to train models.

Try it free for three months.* On the App Store now; on Android, ask for early access.

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