Don't Yuck my Yay

Before we get into today’s post, a quick ask: have you read What’s on Her Mind? Did you like it? If yes, would you consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon and/or Goodreads? The mechanics are opaque, but my publisher tells me this is helpful for spreading the word…

Most of us know (or can intuit) that turning what you love into a job sucks the joy out of it. Resist the urge to spin your hand-knit dog sweater hobby into a side hustle! Before you know it, knitting miniature outerwear will become something you have to do rather than get to do.

Whenever new categories of “work” are identified, I suspect it’s this truism that motivates some of the blowback. If you stick the “work” label on activities like “planning a child’s birthday party” or “helping your lonely spouse find some friends,” don’t you risk turning love and joy into obligation and drudgery?

(Not coincidentally, this pushback almost always seems to come from people who are not currently doing the supposedly joyful task themselves and seem to be made uncomfortable by the fact that others may find it effortful.)

I’ll be the first to admit that this can go too far - though where the line lies is anybody’s guess. If I wrote for The Onion, I would pitch the headline “Totally Normal Thing is Actually Form of Oppressive Labor, Study Says.”1 But while pushback against the encroachment of “work” into more and more corners of life isn’t totally unfounded, it draws on several misconceptions.

Do you hate your job? Okay, sure, don’t we all. But when you break it down into its component parts, do you really hate every single bit? Probably not. (And if you do, you have my condolences. Perhaps you can spend this section imagining your dream job, or at least a marginally better one.) Most people I know feel a range of things about their paid work: they dread task A, feel pretty meh about task B, and quite enjoy task C.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines work as (among other things, there are a lot of definitions) “action or activity involving physical or mental effort and undertaken in order to achieve a result.” If you accept that definition, labeling something as work doesn’t imply that it’s a horrible thing to be minimized at all costs. It implies that it is an effortful undertaking in service of some larger goal, often one that provides value to others.

Admittedly, the OED’s definition of “labor” is more intrinsically negative: “bodily or mental exertion, particularly when difficult, painful, or compulsory.” I’d argue that it’s the “compulsory” piece of things that comes into play when the hobby-to-side hustle transition goes south. Remove the agency by becoming accountable to customers or becoming dependent on the financial proceeds of your dog sweater sales and, yeah, that’s less fun.

In the unpaid labor realm, the “compulsory” bit operates slightly differently: whether you call procuring food labor or not, your family does need to eat on a daily basis. Labeling meal planning and cooking as “labor” doesn’t change the underlying dynamics of the exchange. More often, it validates the cook’s feeling of exertion and, perhaps optimistically, encourages their family members to appreciate the contribution.

Would you rather spend one hour cleaning your bathroom, or one hour cooking a meal? If you are like most people, option B is more appealing. And while I haven’t empirically tested this proposition, I suspect many people would even be willing to spend 1.5 hours cooking to avoid 1 hour of bathroom-cleaning time.

But that nuance often gets lost in quantitative household labor research, which operates under the assumption that more time on housework is worse than less time, and that every minute of housework time is equally painful regardless of how it’s spent.2

There are a lot of valid reasons for these assumptions. But when the data allow for it, I appreciate when researchers acknowledge task heterogeneity—i.e., that some tasks are more onerous than others. Doing so is tricky, because the tasks you find onerous are probably not identical to the tasks I find onerous. (The same goes for whole categories of activity: gardening may be work to me and leisure to you, but it’s gotta get categorized somewhere.)

Nevertheless, scholars have tried to identify task characteristics that impact the average person’s experience in predictable ways. For physical housework, they usually look at flexibility and frequency: if you have more control over when you do something, and if you don’t have to do it all that often (e.g., paying bills), it’s usually seen as less onerous than a frequent task with a cadence you can’t control (e.g., feeding your family).3

In the book, I outline a similar taxonomy for cognitive tasks. YMMV, but what characteristics make the average person dislike a task more? Originally, I tried plotting cognitive tasks on a continuum from most to least burdensome. But when I re-analyzed my interview data, I realized there were actually two continua: burden and benefit. The average person’s dream is not to do zero cognitive labor. Instead, I suspect most people prefer to maximize the benefits while minimizing the burdens.

What makes a cognitive task burdensome? Usually, more complexity and abstractness. The more moving parts you’re dealing with, the more effortful the task becomes. The less concrete the task, the more thankless and distracting it becomes.

What makes a cognitive task beneficial? More visibility and higher stakes. When it’s obvious, to you and to others, what you’re contributing, that’s a plus. Likewise, when your effort more directly shapes outcomes you value, it’s more likely to be experienced as beneficial. There’s a reason scholars often use decision-making authority as a proxy for power: it’s not intrinsically negative to decide how you’ll allocate your resources or handle a parenting conundrum!

Sometimes I get the sense people think there’s a single “Right” way to divide up household work. I don’t personally subscribe to that philosophy; my goal is more along the lines of helping folks achieve their own personal “Right.”

Many of the couples I hear from say they’re striving for something along the lines of balance or fairness. If that’s you, optimizing for equality by task count (i.e, you handle 10 tasks and your partner handles 10 tasks) probably isn’t the best way to achieve that aim.4 (It might be the best way to get a researcher to consider you an egalitarian couple, though…)

As we’ve seen, cognitive tasks vary in their burden and benefit levels. If I have ten high-burden but low-benefit tasks, and you have ten low-burden but high-benefit tasks, then my subjective experience is going to be way worse than yours.

Here’s the rub: what’s high-burden to you might be low-burden to me, and vice versa.

Does that mean throwing out your fair/equal/balanced goal altogether? Nope. It means finding a way to account for the subjective alongside the objective. For my partner and me, this means we independently sort all the household and childcare tasks we’ve agreed need doing into three piles: Yuck, Meh, and Yay. I put researching flights and hotels into my Yuck category; my husband put that same task in his Yay pile. I put keeping track of household supplies in my Meh category; he put it in his Yuck pile.

When I’m thinking through my own categorization, I take both the burdens and benefits into account. For instance, managing daycare-related admin for our daughter went into my Yay pile. Not because I consider filling out paperwork and messaging with her teachers a fun hobby, but because I don’t find it especially taxing and I place a high premium on knowing exactly what’s going on with her care. The benefit component of that task outweighs the effort involved, so on net it’s a Yay.

Then when my husband and I get back together to divvy up the tasks, our primary goals are to make sure neither of us is a) saddled with too many of our personal Yucks, or b) overwhelmed by the collective weight of all of our tasks.5 We keep an eye on the overall number of tasks each of us is responsible for, too, but that’s secondary.