the open model
The open model
A number two people are going to argue about should be one they can check. This is the whole of it — including the parts we are not sure about.
Why this is public
There is no validated instrument for domestic cognitive labour in English or French. None. That is the finding the whole of this project sits on, and it cuts both ways: it is the reason to build something, and it is the reason nobody should take the resulting numbers on trust.
So the arithmetic is published, the weights are published, and the places where a number was chosen rather than discovered are marked as chosen. An instrument whose calibration is secret is asking for a kind of trust that this subject does not deserve.
What a point is, and what it is not
Two components, only one of which is a duration. Why the app will not show you a total, and what that costs.
The capacity model
What the app does with the fact that one of you works fifty hours. The concession, in arithmetic, before anybody is asked for anything.
Judgement calls
Every constant that is a choice rather than a measurement, listed, with what would change it.
The shape of it, in one screen
A task's weight has two parts, and they are added rather than blended. **The app calls them the doing and the carrying; the model, and the pages that publish it, call them execution and cognition.** They are the same two things, and the formulas below use the model's names.
hours = frequency × minutes / 60
intensity = 1 + 0.25·(energy−1)/4 + 0.30·(disruption−1)/4 → 1.00 to 1.55
execution_load = hours × intensity
cognitive_load = K × (vigilance/5)^1.5 × (1 + ln(1 + frequency)) K = 1.0
task_load = execution_load + cognitive_loadExecution scales with time. Cognition does not. A two-minute weekly task that sits in your head all week and a ten-hour weekly task that sits in your head all week score the same cognitively. Carrying is not proportional to doing, and that one asymmetry is the thesis of the product.
The three dimensions
Three inputs per task, roughly orthogonal, each carrying a distinct complaint. The app asks them as plain questions with named answers rather than as numbers on a scale.
| What it is | What it is not | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy | Physical and emotional drain while doing it. Lifting, scrubbing, absorbing a tantrum | Not attention |
| Vigilance | How much it occupies your mind when you are not doing it. The dentist appointment booked three weeks ago and carried since | Not attention during the task. This is the most important distinction in the model |
| Disruption | Whether it breaks your day: fixed timing, cannot be batched, happens at 07:40 or not at all | Not duration. Not unpleasantness |
Vigilance has to mean between occasions, because it is the only input to the cognitive half. Redefined as attention-while-doing it would scale with duration, and the app would be a chore-splitter with extra steps.
Where the numbers came from
Every weight in the library was scored against anchors rather than in isolation, ranked within its category, then spot-checked across categories. The evidence behind the categories and the dimensions is a review of the academic literature, kept with its own caveats intact — each finding carrying its sample size, its evidence type, and a robustness grade.
Several findings in that review conflict with decisions this project has made. Three of them are live and unresolved, and they are written down as conflicts rather than quietly settled.