The Mental Load Inventory: List Everything Your Home Requires

To share the mental load, start with an inventory: list everything your home requires, then mark who anticipates, who decides and who executes each task. Without the list, you argue about feelings. With it, you discuss facts, one task at a time.

Why you need an inventory before any split

Most conversations about sharing chores go wrong for the same reason. Each person talks about what they can see. And nobody sees the same thing.

The person who takes out the trash sees the trash. The person who knows the pediatrician checkup expires in December sees the appointment. There is no shared list. The invisible work stays invisible, even to the people doing it.

An inventory fixes that in one evening. It does not divide anything. It makes things visible. That is a separate step, and you should treat it as one. If you try to negotiate while you list, the list will be incomplete and the conversation will get tense.

In a real home, it often looks like this. One adult knows the kids' shoe sizes, the cafeteria login, the date of the next vaccine, and which detergent leaves no residue. The other helps, gladly, when asked. All the weight sits in that last phrase: when asked. Asking is a task. It belongs on the inventory.

For the underlying concept, the mental load definition page sets out the terms. Here, we get practical.

What the numbers say

The gap in domestic time between women and men has been documented for decades. Insee estimated that French households performed 60 billion hours of domestic work in 2010, a volume the market does not pay for and few households map. Across OECD countries, women do almost twice as much unpaid work as men, which leaves them working about 24 minutes more per day once paid work is added.

These figures mostly measure execution time. They say little about anticipation and decision, which cannot be timed with a stopwatch. That is exactly the part an inventory tries to capture. For more benchmarks, see our mental load statistics.

The 5-step method

Plan 90 minutes, two pens, and a shared sheet or spreadsheet. No kids in the room if you can manage it.

1. Empty your heads, separately (20 minutes). Each person writes down everything they believe the home requires. Tasks, appointments, purchases, follow-ups, deadlines. Do not sort. Do not reread. One item per line.
2. Merge the two lists (10 minutes). Put everything in one document. Group by area: meals, laundry, kids, health, school, paperwork, budget, housing, extended family, activities. You will immediately see areas where one of the lists is empty.
3. Split each line into three verbs (30 minutes). Add three columns. Who anticipates (thinks of it before it is too late)? Who decides (chooses what, when, how much)? Who executes (does it)? Write a first name. Not "we." Not "both."
4. Size it roughly (15 minutes). Note the frequency (daily, weekly, yearly) and an approximate duration. Add a mark if forgetting the task is urgent or costly.
5. Spot the gaps, without concluding (15 minutes). Count names per column. Look especially at where the "anticipates" and "executes" columns carry different names. Stop there. The split gets discussed another day.

What an inventory excerpt looks like

Here are a few lines from a real, anonymized inventory. The pattern is common: execution is shared, anticipation is not.

B does a lot. B is not absent. But across seven lines, A anticipates and decides five times. That is what A's feeling was already telling them, and what B could not see without a list.

The table also exposes a task that had no name: "remembering gifts." It is small. Repeated twelve times a year, it gets heavy.

The most common traps

Forgetting coordination tasks

Visible tasks list themselves: laundry, meals, cleaning. Coordination tasks slip between the lines. Answering the parent group chat. Checking that the health record is in the backpack. Calling grandma to set the vacation dates. Add them explicitly. If your inventory has fewer than 80 lines for a family with kids, something is probably missing.

Turning the exercise into a trial

The inventory is not a courtroom. If one of you defends yourself at every line, stop the session. Restart with one rule: we observe, we do not comment. Judgment comes later, and it targets the structure, not the people.

Confusing "executing" with "carrying"

Someone who shops from a ready-made list executes. The person who wrote the list, checked the pantry and remembered Wednesday's snack carries. Both are work. But only the second keeps drawing on your attention all day. Our article on mental load versus a plain to-do list details the difference.

Counting only what is daily

Yearly tasks weigh little in minutes and a lot in vigilance. Renewing an ID, switching health insurance, registering the kids for after-school care: these are deadlines you cannot miss, and someone holds them in mind all year.

Doing it alone

An inventory filled in by one person produces a contested document. Both adults write. If you live alone, the logic is the same, except you write it and ask a friend or relative to read it. The inventory then tells you what to automate, drop or outsource. The solo page goes further.

Does it work for two working parents?

Yes, and it may matter even more. When both adults work full time, nobody has slack. Tasks that used to be absorbed by one person's free hours now fall through the cracks. A common example: the school sends a form with a Friday deadline, it sits in a bag for three days, and the person who finally notices it is the one who "always notices." The inventory makes that role explicit. Once it is written down, you can rotate it on purpose instead of by default.

After the inventory: three useful decisions

Once the list is complete, you have material to work with. Here is the order to use it in.

Delete. Some lines have no reason to exist. A forgotten subscription, an inherited habit, a standard nobody asked for. Cross them out without debate.

Group into full blocks. Instead of swapping tasks one by one, hand each person entire areas: anticipate, decide and execute. The owner of "kids' health" books the appointments, picks the doctor, keeps the record. The other person should not be pinged. That is exactly what our guide on how to delegate household tasks recommends.

Schedule a review. An inventory ages fast. A birth, a move or a job change makes it wrong. Book a 20-minute check-in every three months, or fold it into your regular household meeting.

For couples, the couples page offers more benchmarks. To measure where you stand before you begin, the mental load test takes five minutes.

What if your partner refuses to take part

This is the most common objection. Two concrete answers.

First, start with your own list only. Ten minutes is enough. Present it without blame: "Here is what I am holding right now. What is missing?" A completeness question is easier to accept than a request to share.

Second, do not propose to change everything. Pick one area, the smallest, and hand it over as a full block for one month. A short trial is harder to refuse than a new contract for life together.

If the talk stays stuck, it is not necessarily unwillingness. Some people have never had to anticipate, and do not know where to start. In that case, the list becomes an instruction manual.

Key takeaways

The inventory does not solve anything by itself. It replaces "I do everything" with "here is what I do, here is what you do, here is what nobody does." It is a change of ground. You leave blame behind and enter management.

One evening is enough for the first draft. Three months is enough for it to become a habit. And the result is simple to measure: fewer things to keep in your head, because they are written down, and because someone else owns them.

To go further on the levers you can pull, read our guide on how to reduce your mental load.

Sources

1. Insee, Insee Première no. 1423, "Le travail domestique : 60 milliards d'heures en 2010"
2. OECD, Gender Equality in a Changing World, 2024