Chores cause conflict. Try managing them like this instead. | Gretchen Rubin | Big Think

[Music] Sometimes when people share an environment, they have a household together, they work in an office together. Different people do different tasks or not to keep everything under control, to keep things tidy, and to keep some level of order going.

Now, what you often see in this kind of shared space is unconscious over claiming. Unconscious over claiming is a phenomenon where people unconsciously think that they are contributing more than they actually are to the total sum of work being done. So if you have a married couple and you say, "How much of the total work are you doing?" what it adds up to is more than a hundred percent because both people will unconsciously over claim how much they're contributing.

Same thing with teams. Research shows that if you ask a team who's doing what, they will come up with far more than a hundred percent because everybody sees what they are doing, but they're not as aware of what other people are doing. So that makes sense. Also, people tend to do the things that they value more, that they think are more important. So they think their contribution is very significant, but to other people, well, they might think something else is more important.

So, for instance, in my house, I work on the holiday cards, and I think that's really important. My husband's very focused on air conditioning repair; he thinks that's really important. So if we're both evaluating what we're contributing to kind of our team as a household, we come up with more than a hundred percent.

So, one thing that you want to remember if you're thinking about perhaps conflict or how to manage a situation where a lot of people are contributing is, you want to think about, well, how might I be undervaluing what someone else is doing? Maybe I never load the dishwasher, and so I'm kind of just not even paying attention to the fact that someone is loading the dishwasher night after night after night or taking out the trash or feeding the dog or bringing, you know, taking the newspapers to recycling or whatever it is. It's very easy, unfortunately, to take for granted what other people do, especially if they do it without complaint, and then overlook the contribution they're making.

At the same time, it's easy to exaggerate in our minds what we're doing, how consistently we're doing it, and how much we are contributing to the overall total of everything that needs to get done. The tragedy of the messy Commons is a phrase from law, the tragedy of the Commons. This is when people are sharing something; they're all making use of something, and because it's a shared resource, no one person feels that much responsibility for maintaining it, for keeping it clean, for keeping it well-stocked, or for doing the little tasks that need to be done in order to kind of keep the environment moving along.

Everybody's sort of like, "Well, it's not really my problem. It's not really my job to clean out the fridge. It's not really my job to load the dishwasher, and hey, everybody else is putting their dirty dishes in the sink. I think I will too. I don't see why I should put mine in the dishwasher if everybody else is just putting their dirty dishes in the sink."

Until when there are these areas that are shared, and no one person has responsibility, they often become a hotbed of anger, resentment, and controversy, and passive-aggressive signage. What I think you need to do when you have a messy Commons like that is to make it very clear what are the expectations for the Commons.

If possible, in my observation, it's far better to make it one person's job to manage that than to try to share it. It's very hard to share tasks. It's much better if someone does a task, someone's responsible for it, someone gets recognized for it—maybe somebody gets paid for it as part of their duties, and they're in charge of that responsibility. Because over and over and over again, I've seen the idea that everyone will just do their part.

Well, people have reasons for why they think that what they're doing is appropriate or correct, and why they shouldn't have to do more or anything different, and those battles will...