The Journal

Why a household to-do list stops being a list

A household list that keeps growing is usually treated as a discipline problem. It is a capacity problem, and published time-use data describes that capacity far better than a rule of thumb does. What it will not do is yield a number. This piece works through the arithmetic anyway, shows the three places it cannot be completed, and declines to give you a magic number, because no research supports one.

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The list that quietly became an inventory

In 1994 Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross published five studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In one of them, 104 undergraduates were asked to describe two projects they intended to finish within the week, one school-related and one not; of the 101 who could be followed up, 78 were able to name an everyday one: "fix my bicycle", "clean my apartment", "write a letter to my friend". A week later, in the authors' words, "[a]lmost half of the projects remained unfinished at the time of the second session, even though subjects were instructed to choose tasks that they intended to complete within the week."

Those were single items, self-chosen, with a week to do them in. Nobody in that study was holding a page of them.

A list works while every line on it is a decision already taken: somebody has settled that the job is worth doing, roughly when, and by whom. Once a line is there because nobody has decided anything about it, the page has changed function. It is no longer a list of jobs but an inventory of decisions outstanding, and an inventory does not get worked through. It gets audited, occasionally, with dread.

Length is the symptom rather than the cause, which is why shortening a list without deciding anything only produces a shorter inventory. One house rule runs through everything below: each figure is one that could be traced to a named study or a published table, and the figures that circulate about to-do lists without a study, a method or a stated sample behind them are not used here.

What a household actually has: hours, not slots

The Office for National Statistics publishes the denominator. "Time use in the UK", March 2024 edition, is a dataset rather than a bulletin: 3,477 diary days from adults aged 18 and over, collected between 9 and 17 March 2024, published on 7 May 2024, designated official statistics in development, and the most recent edition listed.

On an average day a UK adult recorded 141.0 minutes of unpaid household work, two hours twenty-one, and 222.1 minutes of entertainment, socialising and other free time, three hours forty-two. ONS publishes intervals with both: 136.5 to 145.5 minutes, and 215.6 to 228.7.

An average taken over everybody flattens what a household actually feels, so the better cut is participation. On that cut, 90.8% of adults did some unpaid household work on their diary day, taking 155.3 minutes among those who did; 9.1% did any DIY or gardening, taking 125.9 minutes among those who did; and 89.3% recorded any free time, averaging 248.6 minutes.

Those two middle rows are the capacity problem in full. Nine adults in ten did some household work on the day they kept their diary, and it cost those who did about two and a half hours; fewer than one in ten touched DIY or gardening on their diary day, and those who did spent about two hours on it. ONS does not publish what people write on their lists, so which of those rows a household's list draws on is not something the data can settle - only that the second is the row fewer than one adult in ten touched on the day they kept a diary.

The arithmetic, and the three places it cannot be done cleanly

The intuitive repair is subtraction: discretionary hours in an ordinary weekday, minus the recurring maintenance already spoken for. The shape is right. The sum cannot be done cleanly from published UK data, for three reasons worth stating rather than hiding.

Neither March 2024 release breaks free time down by weekday. The one that does separate weekdays from weekends - "Time use in the UK, by weekday and weekend day: March 2024", reference number 2097, published on 24 May 2024 from the same 3,477 diaries - reports six coarse categories, and leisure is not one of them. Home leisure sits inside "other home activities", 459.8 minutes on a weekday, in company with working from home, childcare, washing and dressing, eating and household admin; socialising away from a private home, the cinema, the gym and a walk taken as exercise sit inside "outside of the home", 352.7 minutes. Neither column is a leisure figure.

The second reason is sharper. ONS files under "unpaid household work", beside cooking, cleaning, laundry and washing-up, "household administration tasks (e.g. banking, sorting out bills)", "completing a document", "attending appointments or errands", shopping and queueing. Those 141 minutes already contain much of what people actually write on a household list. The time a list competes for is not empty, and part of it is already going on list-type work that nobody logs as such.

The third reason finishes the subtraction off. The one weekday column that looks like committed maintenance is not. The 49.6 minutes that release labels "cleaning" bundles six activities: cleaning, hoovering and tidying; ironing, washing and other laundry; using a dishwasher or washing up; repairing or maintaining household goods and vehicles; DIY; and gardening. The last two are the discretionary jobs a household list tends to carry, so the column cannot be subtracted as fixed overhead and the remainder then offered as the room left over for them. The two releases do not even agree on the point: the main dataset keeps "DIY or gardening" as a category of its own, at 11.5 minutes on an average day, while the weekday release files it with the hoovering. Only the cooking column is what its label says - one activity, "making food and drinks, cooking", 46.3 minutes on a weekday.

So the arithmetic stops short of a number, and the honest place to stop is before the number rather than after it. No research located for this piece establishes an optimal count of items for a daily list, and nothing in the sources below supports one. What the published data does support is narrower: the hours a list competes for are already occupied, part of them by work that looks exactly like what is on the list, and the categories are too coarse to tell a household which of its own jobs it is buying time away from.

The intention that never becomes behaviour

Writing something down is an act of intention, and intention is a weaker instrument than it feels.

Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran assembled 47 experimental tests for a 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin: experiments that deliberately changed people's intentions and then measured what they did, rather than correlational studies, which is what licenses reading the result as cause. "[A] medium-to-large change in intention (d = 0.66) leads to a small-to-medium change in behavior (d = 0.36)."

Reviewing the field a decade later in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Sheeran and Webb opened their conclusion by calling the gap "large", and added that "current evidence suggests that intentions get translated into action approximately one-half of the time". That is a summary judgement in a review conclusion rather than a pooled statistic, and is worth attributing as such. The same paper names who produces the gap: "inclined abstainers", the people who intend to act and then do not.

The second mechanism is timing. Buehler, Griffin and Ross also telephoned 37 psychology students in the final semester of a University of Waterloo honours thesis course to ask when they would submit. The means rest on the 33 who had handed in by the time records were discontinued, two semesters later: they predicted 33.9 days and took 55.5. The completion shares do not rest on that base - 29.7% cannot be a fraction of 33 - and on the paper's own figures 29.7% finished in the time they reported "as their most accurate prediction". Asked to forecast assuming "everything went as poorly as it possibly could", they said 48.6 days; 48.7% finished by then, and the mean was still 55.5. In the everyday-projects study, people were on average 69.9% certain they would meet their own forecast, and 42.5% of those projects were finished in the predicted time.

One qualification. A 2012 Psychological Bulletin review by Torleif Halkjelsvik and Magne Jorgensen separates predicting when a job will be finished from predicting how many hours of work it contains, and reports that "underestimation was more frequently reported than overestimation in studies from the engineering and management literature", while "this was not the case in studies from the psychology literature" - a pattern the authors call "dependent on the type of study and the level of analysis". A to-do list is a completion-time instrument: it asserts when, not how long, which is where the Waterloo finding applies and where the claim should stop.

What choice overload does and does not explain

The obvious explanation for a list that paralyses is that it offers too many options. The research is less obliging.

Alexander Chernev, Ulf Bockenholt and Joseph Goodman pooled 99 observations covering 7,202 participants in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2015. Their own most-skipped finding: "in the absence of the conceptual moderators, the mean effect of assortment size on choice overload is nonsignificant". Add four moderators - choice set complexity, decision task difficulty, preference uncertainty and decision goal - and each is significant; only then does a main effect of size appear.

The earlier meta-analysis had found no such effect. Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd pooled 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments, 5,036 participants, in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2010, and found a mean effect of D = 0.02, 95% interval minus 0.09 to 0.12: virtually zero, they wrote, "but considerable variance between studies". Chernev and colleagues say outright that their moderated finding runs counter to prior meta-analytic research, and a corrigendum to their paper was published online on 27 July 2015 and carried in the April 2016 issue, whose contents were not obtained for this piece. Effect sizes across their 99 observations run from minus 4.9 to 1.6, and the typical experiment compared six options with twenty-four.

Length alone, then, is not the mechanism, and "more options make people freeze" is not what the literature says. The transferable part is the four conditions: a list is hard when its items are hard to compare, when the choice is effortful, when the reader is unsure what they want, and when the goal is to spend as little effort as possible. A household list on a weekday evening meets all four.

Two lists, not one

Keeping today's list short only works if there is somewhere for everything else to go. The second list is not a shorter version of the first. It holds work nobody has decided on yet, which is a different kind of object, read at a different time and in a different frame of mind. What happens to an item that sits in it for months, and how a postponed job differs from an abandoned one, belongs to the companion piece on the tasks you keep postponing; whether an undated household job needs a deadline at all is argued in the piece on deadlines. This one owns today.

Reading back a list you have already let grow

Go down the list as it stands and mark every line one of two ways: decision taken, or decision outstanding. The test is not whether the job matters. It is whether somebody has settled when it happens and who does it. The lines with a decision taken are a list. The rest are inventory, and they belong on the other page.

Then check the survivors against capacity rather than against a rule of thumb. Household work will happen tomorrow whether or not it is written down - 90.8% of UK adults recorded some on their diary day, taking 155.3 minutes among those who did - so it is not a slot a list can borrow. DIY and gardening, which the main dataset keeps as a category of its own, were recorded by 9.1% of adults on their diary day and took 125.9 minutes among those who did; a list carrying several of them is drawing on the row fewer than one adult in ten touched. And on an average weekday ONS records 46.3 minutes of cooking, and 49.6 minutes in a column it calls cleaning - which holds the hoovering, the laundry, the washing-up, the repairs, the DIY and the gardening together, and so cannot be read as the fixed cost of the day.

A list that survives contact with a Tuesday is a list. A list that records everything the household has not yet decided is an inventory, and it is worth keeping, somewhere else.

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