ChoreBuster

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!

For the last month there have been experiments with how to make ChoreBuster pay for itself.

The first thing that has been tried was a ‘freemium’ model, where basic functionality is given for free but those who need more features can buy a subscription. This has been moderately successful but it has been very difficult to provide a working and useful app while at the same time maintaining the incentive to upgrade; as more and more features are put behind a paywall, the remaining free features become less and less until it is almost unusable.

It feels like a bait-and-switch – offer the promise of something good but then once people have invested time and effort into trying to make it work they find out what they have is crippled and they need to pay.

Starting from yesterday, a new experiment is beginning. This time it is a free trial period of all features, with a subscription needed to continue using the app after a few weeks. It’s simple, clear and honest. In addition there is a new ‘Pro’ subscription for those accounts that are used in a company, where there are more than 10 people involved.

After a couple of months, if that doesn’t work then something else will be tried!

Before September 2019 people could donate any amount to have full access to ChoreBuster, forever. Nothing is changing for those people – they will continue as per the original agreement.

You can now have your chores appear in any calendar app, by using ical integration! Here is an example from Google Calendar:

It’s not difficult to set up. Simply to go https://app.chorebuster.net/members/ical_list to find the unique address for a person and then subscribe to it in your calendar program. Detailed instructions for 4 common calendar apps is provided.

In future the chores could be distributed throughout the day based on the ‘Time of day’ setting on the chores and the calendar events could have reminders set so your app will pop up a notification about the chore. If you have any ideas for features to do with calendars, we’d love to hear them!