Gemma

Gemma is a simple application to track recurring tasks, named after Gemma Hartley who wrote an article about task distribution issues in households.

Background

(Skip this if you just want the technical bits)

Gemma's article launched a discussion in my friend circle about what causes an uneven distribution of household workload. I theorised that this is not so much a gender issue, but mostly a discoverability issue.

Usually one person in a household is aware of what needs to be done, but in many cases the "overhead" of delegating the tasks would actually take more time than simply doing the task.

I theorise further that the person (or people) who do a smaller share of the household work would often do the work if they had a convenient way to become aware of what needs to be done. Many times the "household manager" has the function of tracking non-obvious tasks like when bedsheets were last changed - shouldn't it be possible to actually distribute this information somehow?

The Project

This project is an initial attempt at sketching out a little application that aids with reminding users of recurring tasks. Some basic ideas:

• The system should be blame-free.
• There should be as little usage overhead as possible so that people actually do use it.
• It should work mostly passively without much user interaction.

I believe that the basic (very simple) idea behind Gemma solves these issues. Unfortunately my living situation changed before I actually got to test this out in a real-life situation involving multiple people, but feedback from other potential test subjects would be welcome! :)

Overview

Gemma is a Common Lisp application in which a list of recurring tasks is declared, together with the maximum interval at which they should be completed (in days). Example:

;; Bathroom tasks
(deftask bathroom/wipe-mirror 7)
(deftask bathroom/wipe-counter 7)

;; Bedroom tasks
(deftask bedroom/change-sheets 7)
(deftask bedroom/vacuum 10)

;; Kitchen tasks
(deftask kitchen/trash 3)
(deftask kitchen/wipe-counters 3)
(deftask kitchen/vacuum 5 "Kitchen has more crumbs and such!")

;; Entire place
(deftask clean-windows 60)

These tasks are marked with their last completion time and tracked by Gemma. A simple Elm-based frontend application displays the tasks sorted by their "urgency" and features a button to mark a task as completed:

Marking a task as completed resets its counter and moves it to the bottom of the task list.

In theory this should be it, the frontend is made available to household members in some easily accessible place (e.g. an old phone glued to the fridge!) and people should attempt to develop a habit of checking what needs to be done occasionally.

The "household manager" still exists as a role of the household because someone is entering the tasks into the application, but if my theory about people not actually being actively unwilling to do tasks is correct this could help a lot.

Usage

(Note: Gemma is alpha software so the below is clearly not the final goal)

Right now using this is non-trivial, but I'll eventually make a better distribution. Basically you need to know Common Lisp (in which case you'll know how to get the backend running) and have elm-reactor installed to run the development version of the frontend application.

Gemma is configured via a configuration file that should be located either at /etc/gemma/config.lisp or at a custom location specified via the environment variable GEMMA_CONFIG. Have a look at the config.lisp file in the repository root for an example.