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Ever argued about who does the most chores at home with your partner?<\/p>\n
A Swedish app, called Accord, says it can help couples and families share and track their household chores such as laundry, cleaning or grocery shopping.<\/p>\n
\u201cAccord is for couples and families who simply want less stress and more harmony in their day-to-day lives,\u201d Victor Fredrikson, a co-founder of Accord, told Euronews Next.<\/p>\n
The app functions as a checklist for households to share.<\/p>\n
A couple or family creates a group, adds tasks to shared lists, and marks them off as they are completed.<\/p>\n
The app then tracks who has done what and displays the division of labour on a progress page.<\/p>\n
This allows families to see how household work is distributed over time, according to the developers of the app.<\/p>\n
The app is available in multiple languages including Spanish, French, German, English and Swedish.<\/p>\n
The team behind the app says it\u2019s determined to tackle inequalities in household chores.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a challenge to find family harmony. And one of the biggest factors preventing this from happening is the inequalities between men and women,\u201d Fredrikson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis causes a lot of frustration and tension in relationships. So what Accord does is it brings families closer to organise chores and activities together and to work on this, minimising the stresses and arguments that so often come with it,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
In Europe, 79 per cent of women do cooking and housework every day, compared to just 34 per cent of men, according to data from the European Commission.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd there’s a really interesting sociology study showing that when families divide chores more fairly and each family member’s stress levels reduce drastically and communication improves. And this eventually leads to happier relationships and better relationships,\u201d Fredrikson said.<\/p>\n
Gender gap reduced by 60 per cent among users<\/p>\n
The team started building the app in 2023. In just ten months since its launch in September 2024, it has gained more than 25,000 users in Europe.<\/p>\n
The app was developed by three male students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo years ago, I was still living at home with my parents and my dad was always nagging at me to clean my room. One day, he asked, \u2018Why don’t you just programme an app so I don’t have to nag at you anymore?\u2019\u201d Frederikson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took it maybe a bit more seriously than he thought I would take it. The next day, in school, I pitched the idea to my then-classmate,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe dived deeper into the core problem within households. Why is this nagging always coming up? Where are the arguments coming from?\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fredrikson and his co-founders quickly realised that the lack of structure to organise households, compared to the workplace, was an underlying issue causing common arguments about chores.<\/p>\n
He says the gender gap in household chores has shrunk significantly among the app\u2019s users \u2013 from women doing about twice as much as men, to a gap that\u2019s been reduced by 60 per cent, which Fredrikson calls a \u201chuge improvement\u201d.<\/p>\n
The developers say users report that the app is an integral part of their lives and has improved their day-to-day.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Lina-Marie Lundqvist works part-time as a special educator at a preschool and uses Accord.<\/p>\n
She said the app has made a \u201cbig difference\u201d for her household with her partner, kids and pets.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow there are tasks that are distributed clearly, and everyone has taken responsibility for taking this,\u201d Lundqvist says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t have to be the project manager and be the initiator all the time. \u2018Can you empty the dishwasher?\u2019, \u2018Can you do this?\u2019, \u2018Can you do that?\u2019. So now the kids and my partner can do things without me having to be the initiator,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
More than a strict 50-50<\/p>\n
The Accord team said fairness is more about understanding and communication than strict equality.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think one thing maybe that scares people off from the app a little bit is thinking that we want absolute fairness and 50-50 in terms of the amount of tasks or the exact time that you spend on different things,\u201d Fredrikson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it’s way more about this conversation to be had. Seeing, appreciating what the other person is actually doing and getting that visualisation very clear on who’s doing what, how much, and then ultimately starting that conversation,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Fredrikson also noted that fairness in the home isn\u2019t only about how much time a task takes, but how it feels to the person doing it. When designing the app\u2019s summary view, his team began thinking not just about time management, but about energy management.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spoke to a woman [ app user] who talked a little bit more about energy management. So, for example, she hated doing the dishes, but had no problem cooking, even though that took longer than doing the dishes. So for her, the fairness in distribution was less about splitting chores down the middle by minutes and more about balancing the tasks that drained her compared to energising her,\u201d Fredrikson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that’s what we’ve been doing with adding on effort points, where you can weigh the tasks depending on how difficult they are and how much you feel that they’re taking from you,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
In Lundqvist\u2019s household, she says, she still does most of the chores since she works part-time while her partner works full-time.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you look at these circles [in the dashboard] where you can see in the app how many tasks have been done, and then you can really see with the colour scale that we are being helped, that there is a \u2018team spirit\u2019 in a different way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She also believes it\u2019s not about splitting everything exactly down the middle, but about feeling seen and supported.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I got home from work one day and the laundry was folded and the dishwasher was unpicked without me even having to remind. It was such a hallelujah moment,\u201d Lundqvist added.<\/p>\n
For more on this story, watch the video in the media player above.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ADVERTISEMENT Ever argued about who does the most chores at home with your partner? A Swedish app, called…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3159],"tags":[390,93312,93311,2548,547,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-239802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-family","9":"tag-house-husband","10":"tag-household-chores","11":"tag-marriage","12":"tag-mobile","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114800036639358846","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}