Take the Family Admin Audit
Twenty everyday jobs, two quick questions each, about two minutes. Who actually does it, and is it written down anywhere other than inside your head?
Booking the dentist takes ten minutes. Being the only person who remembers the dentist takes all year.
Other tests ask who does each job. This one also asks where the job is stored.
Think about the last school letter that came into your house. Somebody read it, somebody remembered the date, and there is a decent chance both of those people were you. That second job is the one nobody counts. It has no start time, it never really finishes, and you cannot hand it over because it is not written anywhere. This audit gives you two numbers: how much of the family admin lands on you, and how much of your share exists nowhere except your head. Then the zone where it is worst, three things you could give away this week, and a name for the pattern. Nothing you answer leaves your browser.
The audit
20 items, two questions each · about two minutes · nothing leaves this pageWHO DOES THIS
WHERE DOES IT LIVE
Keeper, Dispatcher, Second Pilot, Evenly Held and Falling Between You are our own editorial categories. We invented them to describe the numbers above. They are not a psychological test and they do not diagnose anything.
THREE THINGS YOU COULD HAND OVER THIS WEEK
Hand over the whole job, including the chasing, not only the information. The school trip further down shows what that looks like.
What on earth is a head index
Doing a job takes an hour. Being the only person who knows the job exists takes the whole week, quietly, in the background. You are not working that whole time. You are just never fully off. That is what the second question in every pair is poking at.
Somebody put a number on this. Skylight and The Harris Poll asked 2,005 parents in May 2024, and the parents reported 30.4 hours a week spent planning and coordinating family life. That is close to a full working week, sitting on top of the actual working week.
Hours a week that parents said they spend planning and coordinating family life. In the same survey, 63% said they carry it in their head every single day, and 75% of the work lands on one parent, the one doing most of the caring.
Source: Skylight and The Harris Poll, 2,005 parents surveyed 15 to 22 May 2024. myskylight.com/mental-load-report
Why this is not another “who does more” test
There are good mental load calculators already. Maple’s asks nine questions in about ninety seconds and tells you how the work splits between two partners. Useful number. Different number.
Here is the thing splitting does not fix. You can divide every job down the middle and still have one person who is the only backup for every date, deadline and preference in the house. The chores are shared. The remembering is not. This audit goes looking for that person, including when that person is you and the split looks perfectly fair on paper.
For comparison: Maple's Mental Load Calculator.
Five zones, and how each one usually goes wrong
Loudest zone, shortest notice. It turns up as an email at 9pm and wants an answer before breakfast. The families who cope write the date down while the email is still open on the screen.
Months between events, so nothing is ever fresh in anyone’s mind. Repeat prescriptions and check-ups are the classic things that live in one head right up until they quietly lapse.
Small, endless, invisible the moment it is done. The trap is that each item feels too tiny to write down, which is exactly why it never moves to anybody else.
The zone where forgetting sends you an invoice. Renewals, warranties and insurance stay completely silent until the day they very much do not.
The one people feel silly counting. Replies, presents, lifts and thank-yous eat real hours, and almost nobody ever sits down and divides them on purpose.
If your head index is high, do not open with a conversation about dividing the work. Write down the five things only you know first. The dividing conversation gets much easier once they exist on paper.
What to do with the result
Take the three the audit gave you. Any more and you are running a project instead of getting an evening back. Costs nothing, needs no app.
Shared note, fridge door, family calendar, we genuinely do not mind which. The only thing that matters is that another person can see it without going through you.
Write the job down with a date on it. Now it is something anyone can check, instead of something they have to ask you to remember.
Handing something over, all the way: the school trip
Almost every handover dies in the same spot. Someone says “sure, I will deal with the trip”, and two weeks later you are still the only person who knows when the money is due. So let us take one job apart properly and give every piece of it an owner.
- Where the letter lives. The email goes into a shared note or folder the same evening it lands. Either of you can open it without asking the other.
- Who puts the date in. One named human adds the trip day, the payment deadline and the kit list to the family calendar. Not “we will add it”. A name.
- Who pays. That same person pays, from whichever account, and ticks it off in the note. Paying and remembering to pay are one job, not two.
- Who chases. If it is still unpaid three days before the deadline, the reminder goes to them, not to you. Everyone forgets this part, and this part is the whole game. It decides whether the job actually left your head or just moved desks.
A sentence that tends to work: “The trip letter is in the shared note. Can you own the date, the payment and the reminder, so I can stop tracking it?” Ask for the whole job. Asking for help with it leaves it yours.
Visible is not the same as handed over
Writing something in a shared place makes it visible. Visible means the other person can find it. It does not mean the job belongs to them, and those two things get mixed up constantly.
A job has been handed over when one named person is responsible for it happening, chasing included, and nobody has to nudge them. If you are still the one quietly checking that it got done, the job is on a list and also still in your head. Visibility is step one, and step one is what this audit measures. Ownership is step two, and only a conversation gets you there.
Here is the test. Could you go away for a week with your phone off, and this thing still happens on time? If the honest answer is no, it has not moved yet.
If your family is not two adults
Most of this page assumes two adults, because most of the research does. Plenty of homes are not that. The audit still works and the numbers still mean something, you just read them a bit differently.
- Single parent. Your share is going to be high and there is nobody to move it to. The head index is still the number that helps, because writing things down lets a grandparent, a babysitter or an older kid pick up one thing without a full briefing from you first.
- Separated parents. Answer for your own house. Then compare the shared items, especially school dates, because those are the ones that break when two homes each quietly keep their own version of the truth.
- An adult child looking after a parent. Read the zones as one person’s health and money admin. Siblings who live further away can absolutely take whole items, but only if those items exist somewhere they can see them.
- Grandparents or a nanny in the mix. Answer “evenly split” where they genuinely carry a job. Be honest about the ones where they do the task but you are still the one holding the schedule.
- They do not want to take anything on. Then do not start with the whole load, because that argument goes nowhere. Start with the smallest complete item you have, something with an obvious finish line, and give it away entirely. One finished handover changes the tone of the next conversation more than an hour of debate.
One more thing, said plainly. Not everything belongs in the family group chat. Medical details and money are the obvious ones. Put those where the people involved can see them, and no further than that.
Show it to the person you share the house with
The point of the card is not the score. It is that this conversation goes very differently when it starts from a picture on a screen rather than from a bad Tuesday evening. The card has your pattern, the two numbers, the five zones and the three items on it, and nothing that identifies you.
Where we come into it
dEssence is somewhere to put things so they stop living in your memory: links, screenshots, notes, products, places. You save it, and later you ask Tracy instead of digging around in your own head. To be clear about what it will not do: it will not divide your family’s work for you. It will hold the part you are currently holding alone.
An unshared load is heavy. An unwritten one cannot be shared at all.
Which is exactly why the second question in each pair matters more than the first one.
How the audit is scored
Twenty items, five zones, four items per zone. Each item asks two things: who does it, and where it is recorded. Your share is how many of the twenty land on you. Your head index is how much of your share is written down nowhere. Your weakest zone is simply where you do the most and record the least.
The categories are ours, and we made them up. The five names and the cut-off points behind them are our choices, not findings from a study, and they are set so most people land in the middle. The exact arithmetic is below if you want to check our work.
The formula, in full
- Your share. Mostly me counts as one point, evenly split counts as half, mostly my partner and nobody count as zero. The total is divided by twenty.
- Head index. Among the items you carry, the share answered “only in my head”. If you carry nothing, there is no head index to show.
- Weakest zone. Your share in that zone multiplied by the head index in that zone.
- Categories. 60% or more of the load with a head index of 50% or more is the Keeper. The same load with a lower head index is the Dispatcher. Between 35% and 60% is the Second Pilot. Below 35% is Evenly Held. Ten or more items with no owner overrides all of that and gives Falling Between You.
- Items with no owner are counted separately. They are not a failure, but they are the ones that surprise people.
Sources and privacy. The figures on this page (30.4 hours, 63%, 75%) come from Skylight and The Harris Poll, May 2024. The comparison test is Maple's. Everything runs in the page: no account, no submission, no analytics event carrying your answers.