What this article is, and what it is not
This is an argument, not a proof, and it comes from the people who make Bunkly. We build a chore app that ships with no points, no badges, no leaderboard and no mascot, and we made that call before writing a word of this page.
We are also not going to quote a study at you. Everything below is built from situations you can check against your own kitchen. If none of them look familiar, the argument does not apply to your household, and a section near the end says so plainly.
The first two weeks are real, and that is the trap
A points system does three things on day one, and all three are useful.
It makes the work visible. A task done quietly at eleven at night disappears the moment it is finished, and whoever did it has nothing to point at.
It gives instant feedback. Taking the bins down changes nothing you can see. Taking the bins down and watching a number move does.
It adds novelty. For a few days the app is a small game you open because it is fun, not because something is due.
Those three have very different shelf lives, and that is the whole problem. Visibility never wears out, because it rewards nothing and only informs. Instant feedback dulls. Novelty dies fast. A points system bundles all three into one object, so when the novelty goes it takes the working part with it. Two weeks later you are not back where you started, you are slightly behind: the reason you used to vacuum has been replaced by a price, and the price is worth nothing.
The failure modes are specific
Vague scepticism is easy to dismiss, so here are the four things that actually go wrong.
The score measures activity, not the state of the home
A score counts what it can see, and what it can see is ticks. Wiping the hob counts. Noticing that the hob has needed a proper clean for three weeks does not. Rebooking the dentist, remembering the extractor filter, tracking what is left in the freezer: none of that makes a tick, so none of it earns anything.
The result is a household that posts a strong week in a filthy flat. Everyone was busy. Nothing that was actually wrong got fixed.
Someone learns to farm the cheap tasks
Not out of malice. Give a list a price and people run the arithmetic without deciding to. There are nine quick wins before dinner and one job that takes an hour and pays double. The quick wins take it every time, until the hour-long job is a real problem.
A scoreboard does not make anyone lazy. It tells them, very clearly, which corners are free.
The scale becomes the new argument
Fifteen points for vacuuming and ten for the washing up, on what basis. Whoever feels short-changed now has a number to say it with, and the row the system was meant to end comes back in accountancy form. It looks objective, which makes it worse.
Whoever stops playing first looks like the one who stopped caring
This is the one that does real damage, and it only happens in a shared home. Interest fades at different speeds for different people. One of you loses interest in week three, which is normal, and the app records it as a widening gap. The person still playing has a display saying in numbers that they carry the place. The person who stopped has a display saying they gave up. Neither is true, both are on a screen, and a screen is harder to argue with than a partner.
Badges and streaks do the same in slow motion. A streak rewards showing up in the app rather than doing the work, so people tick on evenings when nothing needed doing. Then the streak breaks, and there is nothing left to protect.
Two evenings a scoreboard cannot read
The couple where one of them works late. She finishes at half seven, he finishes at half eleven three nights a week. He does what can be done silently after midnight: dishwasher, laundry, bins, kitchen floor. She does what needs daylight or a phone call: the boiler service, the school form, the bathroom grout that has gone black. On points he wins easily, because his work is countable and hers is phone calls and remembering. After a month he leads the board and she is the one who thinks the flat is falling apart. Both are right, which is exactly why the number is useless.
The four-person flatshare with a leaderboard. Three of them are into it for a fortnight. The fourth never really engages, partly because he travels for work, partly because he finds it silly. By week four the board says he has done a quarter of what the others have. It does not say he is the only one who has ever descaled the kettle, or that he fronts the shared internet bill. The leaderboard did not create the resentment, it gave it a number, and that number is what they argue about at the table now. Our five rules for a flatshare come at the same problem from the other side.
What to do instead, starting this week
None of this needs an app. It needs one evening and a sheet of paper.
Write the invisible work down
Everything recurring, including the jobs nobody asked for and the ones somebody has quietly done for years. That last group matters most: a task that has never failed is a task nobody knows exists. Until it has a name on a list, it cannot be handed over, and it cannot be raised without sounding like a complaint.
Give each one a rough frequency rather than a date. The bathroom about weekly, sheets roughly every other week, cupboards two or three times a year. An approximate rhythm you keep beats a precise calendar you abandon in March.
Agree what done means
Most housework arguments are definition arguments in a costume. “I did the kitchen” means wiped the surfaces to one person, and surfaces, hob, sink and floor to the other. Neither is lying and both are annoyed.
Write the definition next to the task, six words or fewer. Kitchen: surfaces, hob, sink, floor. Bathroom: sink, loo, shower, mirror, floor. Ten minutes for the whole house, and a whole category of row disappears.
Split by cycle, not by count
This is the step people skip, and the one that matters most. Equal piles feel fair and are not, because what tires people out is frequency rather than effort. Cooking is daily and cannot be postponed. Defrosting the freezer is twice a year and can wait a fortnight. Six daily tasks means being on duty every single evening. Twelve quarterly ones means most of the year off.
So share out the daily grind first, deliberately, before anything else. Then the weeklies. Then the rare jobs, where the count genuinely does not matter. If one person ends up owning every daily cycle, you have not shared the housework, you have shared the paperwork about it.
Revisit when life changes, not when the score drops
Ten minutes once a month, out loud, counting nothing. The only question is whether anyone finds their share unsustainable, and what should trigger a change is a new job, new shifts, an illness or a baby, not a bad week on a display. If someone says their share is too much, change the split. Changing the person was never on the table.
Some households genuinely do run on a scoreboard
We would be overselling this if we stopped there. Plenty of people are straightforwardly motivated by a number going up, and if that describes everyone under your roof, a points app is the right tool. It works best when the household is genuinely competitive rather than politely pretending, when tasks really are comparable in size, and when nobody is carrying invisible work the score will never see. If you tried points and they worked, keep them. We would rather you had a system that works than one that agrees with us.
What we built instead, and what it does not do
This is the only section about our own app, so skip it without missing the argument.
Bunkly has no points, no badges, no leaderboard and no mascot, and that is a written rule in the project’s design notes rather than a matter of taste. The reasoning is the argument above in one sentence: a reward that is not renewed stops working, and the chore it was propping up comes back. In a shared home that is worse than a reset, because whoever stops playing first looks like the one who stopped caring.
Two decisions follow. Recurrence is anchored on the day a task was actually completed, not on a fixed weekday. Most chore apps pin the bathroom to Saturday, so one missed Saturday makes you late and two turn the list into a wall of red you stop opening. Clean it on Monday and the next one counts from Monday. One slip stays one slip.
Undoing a completion recomputes the next due date from the previous real completion rather than from the mistake, so a mis-tap does not quietly shift your schedule. One honest limit we hit while building it: if you had moved that due date by hand before the mis-tap, the undo restores the calculated date, not your manual one.
What it does not do: no web version, no shopping list, no calendar, no meal planning, and a household caps at six people. The free plan is a complete single-person plan rather than a trial, one household, one member, fifteen tasks, three zones, and it does not expire. The paid plan adds the extra members and the automatic rotation between them. What each plan contains is on the features page, what it costs is on the pricing page.
The boring version is the one still running in six months
A good housework system congratulates nobody. It says what needs doing, roughly when, by whom, and what done means. It makes the rest visible, so an imbalance is something you both see and fix rather than something one person has to raise. That is much less fun than a counter going up. It also does not need anyone to keep playing.