Build a house agreement
Five short steps. What comes out is a plain agreement in your own words, specific, boring, and ready for the fridge.
The short version
- Most household arguments are not about effort. They are about two people using the same word (clean, soon, tidy) to mean different things. This tool turns those words into specific, boring rules you can point at instead of at each other.
- You give a few objects a fixed home, hand whole admin categories to one person permanently, write down what done actually looks like for the rooms that cause trouble, and set the three rota rules that survive a bad week.
- Nothing here is saved or scored. It rearranges what you type into an agreement you can copy onto the fridge.
Shared homes run on the assumption that everyone means the same thing by keeping on top of it. One person's threshold for a kitchen being unacceptable is another person's Tuesday, and neither is being unreasonable, they are running different settings and have never compared them. The steps below work better written down than agreed out loud, because a spoken agreement quietly reverts to whatever each person already thought.
Before you begin
If you can, do this with whoever you live with, the rota rules and the category split are not yours to decide alone. But you can draft it solo and bring it to them. Nothing you type is saved.
Steps
Step 1 of 5
Your house agreement
The house agreement
Put it where the argument happens
Select the text below and copy it onto the fridge, or into a shared note. When someone is annoyed, the fridge is the thing being appealed to rather than the other person's character. This page keeps nothing.
The ten-minute meeting that makes it hold
An agreement on the fridge drifts unless something keeps it honest. Once a month, ten minutes, standing up, one fixed question each: what is not working, what needs buying, who owns what now. Ten minutes monthly is much cheaper than one difficult conversation a year, and it changes what the flat is like to live in far more than any one person changing their habits.
Buy the hardware, too. A bin in every room, a second laundry basket, hooks by the door, a shelf where things already get dropped. Objects land where the environment makes it easiest, so it is usually cheaper to move the container than to change the person.
Worth knowing. Deciding when and where something will happen (not simply that it will) is one of the better-supported findings in the goal-setting literature; Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 studies reported a medium-to-large effect (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006). That is why "bins on Tuesday night, by the front door" holds and "we will both be tidier" does not. The rest of this tool is craft rather than evidence.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.