Household
Domestic work stays invisible until somebody resents it.
Beatrice makes it visible without turning it into a competition. Everything the house needs sits in one pool, anyone can pick something up, and the app never ranks the people doing it.
The pool
Nobody has to ask.
One shared pool holds everything, and it is the same pool everyone in the house is looking at. You claim a job and it becomes yours, and when you finish it, it comes off with your name on it, so whoever took the trash out at eleven at night is not invisible by morning.
Nobody has to assign anything, and nobody has to say out loud that the bathroom has not been done. The list is simply there, and it is the same list.
Effort in minutes
A light switch and an hour of shovelling.
Most chore apps score a job one to three. That scale cannot tell the difference between flicking off a light and an hour of shoveling, and everybody in the house knows it.
Twenty minutes is twenty minutes, whoever does it.
It is the only unit that survives an argument, and a reviewer of another app named its one-to-three scale as the exact reason their partner refused to install it.
Capacity
Everyone has a different week.
Two people in a house rarely have the same amount left in the tank, and a fifty-fifty split that ignores that is fair on paper and resented in the kitchen.
You can set a weekly capacity for each person, for someone on nights, someone in a hard month or someone recovering from something, and what the pool expects moves with it. Nothing else in this category offers it, and one couple built a version of it by hand with fake chores because it was missing.
The house
The list is not the house.
There is a screen that shows the house as a place rather than a list: who is here, what is open for everybody, and what has actually been done in the last three weeks, laid out by day.
Underneath it, the rooms, because a job belongs somewhere and a kitchen has a kitchen’s worth of work in it. The shopping lists live here, and so does the calendar the whole house shares.
The pool: every open job in one place, and anyone can claim one.
Rooms: a job belongs somewhere, and a kitchen has a kitchen's worth.
Lately: three weeks of what actually got done, laid out by day.
The shared calendar: chores, birthdays and the twice-a-year things on one grid.
Recurrence
It comes back when it should.
A weekly chore you finish eight days late should come back a week from today. Most apps count from the original date, so the next one arrives already overdue, and a daily job you fall two weeks behind on can never be caught up at all.
Beatrice counts from whichever is later, the day it was due or the day you actually did it, so a chore never comes back already failing. Finishing early does not drag the schedule earlier every cycle either, so a Thursday job you keep doing on Tuesdays does not walk backwards through the week.
No rank
No rank, anywhere.
There is a scoreboard, and it only ever goes up, with no deductions, no penalties and no streak to lose. This week resets on Sunday so nobody is permanently last, while all time never resets, so the effort stacks.
- No row says first, or fourth.
- No deduction, no penalty, no streak to lose.
- No sentence anywhere about whose total is bigger.
Reminders are on Tasks, and the research behind the refusals is on why it works.
Get Beatrice
Make it visible.
It is free, and it is in beta on iPhone.
Your address is used for this list and nothing else.