A Data Viz Couple’s Journey to the “Waffle Chart”

Before the pandemic altered their home and work-lives, partners Amy Cesal and Alexander (Zander) Furnas had a division of labor that worked for them. They had their “rules”—Alexander cooked, Amy cleaned up, and a house cleaning service took care of the deep cleaning. Looking back, they realize now that Amy was doing more than half of the overall unpaid work it took to keep their household running. Alexander thought the chore gap between them was narrow. To Amy, it sometimes felt vast. But for the most part, thanks to their ability to “hire out” much of the cleaning, their division of labor caused minimal conflict.

But the wave of pandemic lockdowns in the spring of 2020 changed everything. Suddenly, every meal took place at home, and the chores were neverending. With a house cleaning service no longer an option, due to safety and health concerns, the workload doubled.

Their old model pushed to its breaking point, they needed to find a way to re-establish order, and they agreed, the new order had to feel fair—to them both. Amy knew immediately the old chore charts of her childhood wouldn’t work. “The standard chore wheel assumes every wedge is equal—that every task has equal difficulty or importance. But some tasks take more time and thought than others,” Cesal says. They wanted a chore chart that could include both a monthly deep clean of the bathrooms and a daily task like washing dishes. And the chart should account for the multi-faceted, multi-step nature of some chores—not just cleaning the bathrooms, but remembering to add a new toilet brush or cleaning supplies to the grocery list. They also wanted a chore chart that could help them establish some grounds for equal time spent on chores between them—rather than an equally long list of chores.

Both Amy and Alexander work with data, and have a knack for creating simple visual representations of large amounts of data and complex information. They turned to spreadsheets and model graphics, and settled on a design—the waffle chart—that worked for them.

Nobody should have to re-invent the wheel or the waffle chart on their own. Amy and Alexander have partnered with BLLx to share a step-by-step guide to making a waffle chart to help members of your own household more fairly share the labor of home.