028: The Mental Load Is Not a Chore List — Here's How We Divide It at Home
Note: This post contains affiliate links to some of the products I use in the Lab. If you make a purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only highlight products that are a core part of my actual routine.
The Mental Load Is Not a Chore List — Here’s How We Divide It at Home
Note: This post contains affiliate links to some of the products I use in the Lab. If you make a purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only highlight products that are a core part of my actual routine.
The Mental Load Isn’t Executing the Grocery Order. It’s Anticipating the Empty Cabinet.
For years, couples have tried to solve this with a chore list. But you can’t put anticipating the future on a whiteboard.
In our house, we’ve stopped dividing chores. We divided domains. We don’t share tasks. We share ownership.
So today: why the mental load is not a chore list, and how we actually divide it at home.
Welcome Back to Season 4: Reinvest in the Rest
Welcome back to Season 4 of All Green Lights CEO: Reinvest in the Rest. How I treat my personal bandwidth like my most valuable asset.
Last time, we talked about delegating at work. The drafts, the calendar, the red pen. Those are tasks. A task has edges. You can put it in a project tool and give it a due date.
But the invisible logistics of a home don’t work that way. The empty cereal box. The youth sports registration deadline. The HOA meeting. None of them are tasks until someone notices.
Why does any of this matter? Here’s what I notice about us: executives who lead at work, lead at home, and are finally ready to bring that same intensity to ourselves. At work, every box on the org chart has one name on it. Not two. Not we’ll take turns. But at home, we try to split everything 50-50 and call it fair. Then we wonder why the mental load still feels heavy.
Splitting the tasks isn’t the same as splitting the ownership.
If we’re just meeting, I’m Alysia Bell. Forty-five. Executive, wife, mom. Not a doctor, not a guru. I run experiments on myself, then I share the receipts.
Three things today: what the mental load actually is and what it isn’t, how the two of us divide it, and the one thing neither of us wants to own. And at the end, the piece of the load I will never hand off, because I asked for it.
What the Mental Load Actually Is
It’s not the doing. It’s the noticing. The remembering. The anticipating. The deciding.
A chore list tells us what to do. The mental load is knowing it needs doing.
In our house, mine is centered on three things. The household inventory: every bit of food, every cleaning supply, and knowing what’s running low before it runs out. The social calendar: how we fit in playdates, dinners, and time with family, friends, and neighbors. And the holidays.
For me, the mental load isn’t a grievance. It’s what comes with a full life. A career I love. A family I’m deeply grateful for. Friends I’m lucky to have.
Every thriving organization requires operations. That isn’t a flaw. It’s proof of activity.
The mental load isn’t a tax on a full life. It’s the operations behind one.
And operations always run smoother when there’s exactly one name next to them.
At Work: Every Yellow Flag Was Someone Else’s Job Living in My Head
The mental load is connected to every aspect of life, so let’s start at work. Here’s my bad habit.
When I send an email that needs an answer, I BCC myself. Then I flag it yellow, which means I’m waiting on someone else. It’s my safety net, so the ball doesn’t drop.
But a yellow flag doesn’t tell me if the work is actually done. It just reminds me to follow up.
Every yellow flag in my inbox was a little piece of someone else’s job living in my head.
What finally fixed it? Moving that tracking into our project management tool. Now the project owner updates the status, not me. The remembering moved to the person doing the work, which is exactly where it belongs.
And the funny part is, at home, we had already figured this out.
At Home: We Didn’t Divide the Chores. We Divided the Domains.
My husband owns the numbers. Taxes, insurance, HOA. He owns the things that break, because we have terrible luck with appliances. And critically, he handles the spiders. That allows me to focus on my bug-free domains: the household inventory, the social calendar, and the holidays.
There was no big summit or sit-down. We just noticed what we were naturally doing, asked if it was working, and made it official.
We don’t love every piece of what we own. Nobody loves insurance renewals. But it works because we divided by strength. I wouldn’t thrive with his list, and nobody wants me in charge of the taxes.
At work, we never rotate the finance seat every other month just to keep things even. We put the strongest person in the seat and let them own it.
Taking turns at home sounds fair, but every handoff has a switching cost. Relearning a task every single month isn’t partnership. It’s just bad operations.
And here’s the secret to making this work: ownership includes the remembering. I trust his process, and he trusts mine.
Back to EOS for a minute. The first item on the Vision Traction Organizer isn’t a revenue target. It’s core values. When a team shares values, people move forward with confidence. A household operates in a similar fashion. Shared values create alignment.
And we’re starting to build that alignment with a third department head: our son, and his schoolwork.
Our Health: Inventory Is Infrastructure
I’ve logged my macros for nearly 4,000 consecutive days. That habit doesn’t run on willpower. It runs on logistics.
If the protein isn’t in the fridge, the plan fails before I make a single decision.
So managing household inventory isn’t a chore. It’s the infrastructure for our nutrition plan. Having the right foods and supplements in stock for all three of us means my macro tracking is seamless, and the whole family’s default nutrition is mostly healthy.
The Task Neither of Us Wants to Own
Auditing the expenses. Diving into the line items to find subscriptions we forgot about.
It’s tedious. Neither of us likes it. So we let it sit. It builds into a mountain of data, and we just kick the can down the road.
It’s the ultimate proof that work belonging to everyone belongs to no one. Turns out that corporate rule also applies to uncovering how many streaming accounts you’re paying for.
The Domain I’ll Never Hand Off
Here’s the piece I promised: the holidays. Especially fall.
I asked for this one. Planning our fall excursions brings me real joy. The calendar, the plans, the anticipation. For me, that isn’t operations. That’s payoff. And this time of year, I’m deep in it.
Some domains we own because we’re good at them. Some we own because we love them.
The Bottom Line: Allocate It, Don’t Eliminate It
So here’s where I landed.
The mental load isn’t something to eliminate. It’s something to allocate.
For us, that meant dividing by domain instead of by chore. It meant letting ownership include the remembering. And it meant keeping the parts that light us up.
Boring + Consistency = Results.
Two Things You Might Be Thinking
“Isn’t this just traditional roles with a new name?”
Tradition is assigned. Domains are chosen. We divided the territory based on who was already crushing it. If it stops working, we change the org chart.
“We can’t agree on who owns what.”
The hardest friction always comes from shared territory. When two people own a domain, nobody owns the domain. I wouldn’t start by arguing over chores. I’d look at the domains where you’re constantly bumping into each other, and give one person the keys.
Your Next Move
Don’t try to redraw your whole household org chart tomorrow. Be kind to yourself. Pick one.
If the chore list keeps failing, the move is to stop looking at tasks and start looking at domains. What’s a whole territory one person could own, including the noticing and the remembering?
If you’re constantly bumping into each other over the same territory, the move is to give one person the keys. Shared ownership is usually no ownership.
If you’re tracking other people’s follow-ups in your own head, the move is to put the tracking where the work lives, so the remembering belongs to the person doing it.
And if there’s a domain you genuinely love, the move is to keep it on purpose. Not everything you own has to be a burden you’ve absorbed.
If you’re wondering which part of your own mental load to look at first, the free one-page ASSETS Audit is linked below. It’s a one-pager I built to spot which of the six executive health pillars (Activity, Strength, Sleep, Equilibrium, Total Energy, and Sustenance) is running in the red. Find the one green light move you can make, and start there.
Because you can’t lead from empty.
When you're optimized, everyone wins.
Grab the free ASSETS Audit
Watch the full video: “The Mental Load Is Not a Chore List — Here’s How We Divide It at Home”
Up next in Reinvest in the Rest: Our operations at home work well because each of us owns something whole. Not a chore list, a domain. And once we mapped it out, I realized how many others had been carrying a piece of my mental load all along. The Season 4 finale is next week: the team every woman over 40 needs, and the one person on mine I never would have predicted.
Alysia Bell is the founder of All Green Lights CEO. She's tracked her nutrition for ~4,000 consecutive days, wears an OURA ring 24/7, and does N-of-1 experiments with a continuous glucose monitor, and is currently running Season 4 of the show, Reinvest in the Rest, about treating personal bandwidth like your most valuable asset.
Topics referenced in this episode:
Topics referenced in this episode: the mental load as anticipation and remembering rather than execution; domain ownership versus task-splitting; switching costs in rotated responsibilities; core values on the Vision Traction Organizer from the EOS operating system; and the ASSETS framework of six executive health pillars developed by www.allgreenlightsceo.com.
The N-of-1 Disclaimer:
I am an executive and a mom, not a doctor or medical professional of any sort. The content shared here — including biometric data, protocols, and "Vitals" — is for informational and experimental purposes only. It is a documentation of my personal journey and should not be taken as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health, diet, or supplement routine.
