Day 15: Consider Some Hard Facts about Shared Work (Happier at Home: 21 Day Relationship Challenge by Gretchen Rubin) One obstacle to happiness? Feeling resentful when another person won’t do his or her share of work. Consider these facts about shared work: Fact 1: Work done by others sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn baby who sleeps twenty hours a day? To return a few phone calls? To fill out some forms? Often, daily work by other people sounds easy. This fact leads us to under-estimate how onerous a particular task is, and that makes it easy to assume that we don’t need to help or provide support. Fact 2: When you’re doing a job that benefits others, it’s easy to assume that they’re aware of your work—that they should feel grateful, and that they feel guilty about not helping you. But no! Often, the more reliably you perform a task, the less likely it is for someone to notice that you’re doing it, and to feel grateful, and to feel any impulse to help or to take a turn. You think, “I’ve been taking out the garbage for weeks! When do I get a break?” In fact, the longer you take out the garbage, the less likely it is that someone will do it. Fact 3: If you care more about a task being done, you’re more likely to end up doing it–and just because you care about it doesn’t mean that others feel the same way. You think it’s important to clean out the basement, and you expect your spouse to share the work, but your spouse thinks, “We never use the basement anyway, so why bother?” People are much less likely to share work they deem unimportant. At least not without a lot of nagging. Fact 4. If you want someone else to do a task, don’t do it yourself. This sounds obvious, but think about it. If you think you shouldn’t have to do it—don’t. Someone else is a lot more likely to do it if you don’t do it first. Of course, this doesn’t always work. Someone must get the kids ready for school. But many tasks are optional. So resolve to “Consider the hard facts about shared work,” and see if these points alter the way you think about work you share with others.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 20:53:10 +0000
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