Category: News

Each chore can now have an icon associated with it, making schedules more attractive and easier to understand, especially for those with low literacy due to young age or disability.

At present the icon library you can choose from is mostly household furniture and places, with a few cleaning actions mixed in. If you find nothing suitable for the chores you’re creating, let us know and we’ll see what can be done to accommodate you.

Also if you find the icons messing up the formatting of the schedule, speak up. There may be situations where text-only is more suitable but without seeing your schedule and situation it’s hard to know.

One of the assumptions ChoreBuster made was that people involved would be living at the same location most of the time. There was a ‘Chore holiday’ field on each person so they could have a once-off break from chores but if someone was regularly coming and going this field would need to be continually updated.

This didn’t work very well for blended families where children move between households often. So now ChoreBuster has been improved by making it possible for someone to have multiple chore holidays with easy creation of new holidays by copying old ones and automatically shifting the dates.

Some blended families use the ‘Give this person no chores on these days’ feature a lot, but when that person returns from being away they have a large pile of chores to do in order to catch up with the work they missed while gone. This could be seen as unfair, especially if they did chores in their other home too.

Quite often it would be better if when Peter returns on Thursday he gets the same amount of chores as everyone else, more like this:

There is a new setting to change to the second method:

This checkbox is unticked for all new accounts but if you have been using ChoreBuster for more than a fortnight then you might like to visit the settings form and untick the checkbox.

Older accounts have this setting enabled by default, to preserve existing schedules and expectations.

If you’re not using email often then receiving a reminder about chores in your inbox is not very helpful. So we’ve recently added popup notifications, similar to those produced by various apps.

On Android, they’ll look something like this:

On a Windows PC, like this:

You can click/tap on the notification to view the entire week of chores.

One big difference from email is you can’t simply put in someone’s address and then they’ll receive the notification – you need to ‘opt in’ by browsing the site using the device you want to receive notifications on, and tapping a button. To facilitate this, the notifications page (at View schedule → Notifications) doesn’t require a log in to use.

To set this up, log in to ChoreBuster then click on ‘View schedule’ in the main menu, then on ‘Notifications’. Choose your name from the list, then click the blue button. Send the URL of that page to other members of your household who also want to receive notifications, so they can do the same process on their devices.

Once you’ve completed a chore you can cross it off the schedule, like this:

By using this everyone will be able to see who has done what and it might not be necessary to print out the schedule.

Chores can be crossed off by clicking a link in the daily chore email or by going to the ‘Finish chores’ menu option under ‘Edit chores’. No login is needed to access this page so you can give everyone a link to it and they will be able to do what they need to without sharing your login details with them.

The new chat widget in the bottom right is bringing in a flood of great questions, leading to many small improvements!

Today someone asked the above question, about how this differs from assigning chores manually, on paper.

When you use pen and paper the schedule is the same each week and some chores that should be done infrequently can get left out or done too often.

Also to keep the number of chores to a number than can be manually assigned they need to be quite large chores (e.g. “Clean kitchen”), whereas if the computer does it they can be many small chores, possibly done by different people at different times, e.g. “Clean benchtop, clean oven, mop kitchen floor”.

Another thing is that when you sit down and write the schedule manually, you are the one responsible for being fair. If the computer does it, you are not the person at fault for any perceived unfairness.

Work is underway on translating ChoreBuster into Spanish and German.

While the public parts of ChoreBuster (the home page and ‘how it works’) will be translated by a professional human, the user interface of the app itself is mostly just done by a computer, through Google Translate. So there will be quite a few quirky translations and if anyone can provide a better translation of anything, please let us know!

A fundamental idea behind ChoreBuster is that the amount of work involved in a chore is more important for determining fairness than the number of chores someone does. Mowing the lawn is different than feeding the pet so someone should need to do a few pet-feeding chores to be equal to someone else who spent an hour working in the sun.

Fixated on this, I ignored many requests from people for some way to rotate chores between people – simply assign it to one person, then the next person, then another, until everyone has done the chore, then start with the first person again. It seemed as if what those people really wanted was a physical chore wheel and it would be difficult to incorporate that smoothly into ChoreBuster.

The good news is that a way has been found to incorporate this functionality into ChoreBuster without watering down the original vision or significant changes to the user interface. It turned out to be fairly simple:

Simply set the Intensity of the chore to be “Rotate between people”. Be careful with the Start Date as the first person in the schedule will be the first person to get the new chore on that day. As chores like this have no value associated with them someone doing this chore will not reduce the number of other chores they need to do, but over time everyone will have their turn at doing it so overall fairness will result.

Hopefully you find this useful. It is always a bit difficult to test all the possible ways different types of chores can fit together so there may be unpredictable results. So if you see anything that looks wrong, let us know!