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Everything you need to know about creating fair chore schedules
Getting Started
ChorePlanner generates fair, printable chore schedules for your household. You set up who does what and how often (the chore plan), and the scheduler figures out the daily assignments for an entire month — balancing the workload so nobody gets stuck with more than their share, and you're not wrangling individual chore assignments by hand.
The basic workflow looks like this:
Once your chore plan is set up, you can generate a new schedule each month with a single click. The scheduler remembers your configuration and produces a fresh, balanced schedule every time.
Adding People
Click Edit Plan to open the side panel, then add everyone in your household who participates in chores. Names are all you need — just make sure each person has a unique name so you can tell them apart on the printed schedule.
Defining Chores
For each chore, you'll set a few things:
- Name — What the chore is called (e.g., "Dishes", "Vacuum living room")
- Frequency — How often it needs to happen (daily, weekly, etc.)
- Effort — How hard it is, on a 1-6 scale
- Who — Which people are eligible to do this chore
- How assigned — Whether people rotate or everyone does it together
Saving Your Plan
Your chore plan saves automatically as you make changes. A brief "Saving..." status appears at the bottom of the panel, followed by "Saved" once the change is stored.
Your schedule regenerates automatically when you close the chore plan panel after making changes. You can also regenerate manually at any time using the dropdown arrow on the active month tab.
Resetting Your Plan
If you want to start over completely, click the Reset link at the bottom of the chore plan panel. This permanently deletes your current plan and all generated schedules, and gives you a fresh demo plan to customize.
How Scheduling Works
The scheduler uses a constraint-based optimization algorithm to find the best assignment of chores to people for each day of the month. It's trying to satisfy several goals at once:
- Cover all chores — Every scheduled chore gets assigned to someone
- Balance the load — Total effort across the month is distributed fairly
- Avoid same-chore back-to-back — Nobody gets the same chore too often before another eligible person takes a turn, and definitely not two days in a row!
- Spread assignments within each day — When multiple chores happen on the same day, they're spread across people rather than stacked on one person
- Keep separated chores apart — Chores you've marked to keep separate are never assigned to the same person on the same day
Why isn't the schedule perfectly even? Different chores have different effort levels and frequencies. A fair schedule doesn't mean everyone has the same number of chores — it means the total effort is balanced. Someone might do more low-effort daily chores while another person handles fewer high-effort weekly chores.
Assignment Modes
When multiple people are eligible for a chore, you choose how assignments rotate between them:
Flexible Rotation (Default)
The scheduler picks who does the chore each time, prioritizing overall balance. It tries to space out assignments so the same person doesn't do the chore too often, but it has flexibility to optimize for fairness across all chores.
Best for: Most chores. Gives the scheduler room to balance the overall workload.
Strict Rotation
People take turns in a true round-robin: everyone gets exactly one turn before anyone repeats. If you have 4 people doing dishes, you'll see a clean A → B → C → D → A → B → C → D pattern.
Best for: High-frequency chores (like daily dishes) where predictability matters and you want everyone to take equal turns, no exceptions.
Everyone Does It
All eligible people are assigned the chore together, every time it occurs. There's no rotation — everyone pitches in.
Best for: Chores that require multiple people (like "family cleanup hour") or personal chores that everyone should do individually (like "make your bed").
Effort Scores
Each chore has an effort score from 1 to 6, representing how demanding it is:
- 1 (Light) — Quick tasks, minimal effort. Examples: take out trash, wipe counter
- 2-3 (Medium) — Moderate tasks. Examples: load dishwasher, sweep floor
- 4-5 (Heavy) — Substantial tasks. Examples: vacuum whole house, clean bathroom
- 6 (Major) — Big tasks. Examples: mow the lawn, deep clean kitchen
The scheduler uses effort scores to balance workload across people. Someone doing a 6-effort chore contributes as much as someone doing six 1-effort chores. This is how the scheduler keeps things fair even when chores vary wildly in how demanding they are.
Tip: Don't overthink effort scores! The exact numbers matter less than the relative ordering. If vacuuming feels twice as hard as dishes, give dishes a 2 and vacuuming a 4. The scheduler will figure out the rest.
Recurrence Options
ChorePlanner supports several ways to schedule when chores happen:
Every ... days
Repeats at a regular interval you choose. Use the dropdown to set how many days between occurrences:
- Every day — dishes, tidying up, daily pet care
- Every other day — alternating days throughout the month
- Every 3-6 days — less frequent repeating chores
If you have multiple chores set to the same interval, the scheduler automatically staggers them across different starting days so they don't all pile up on the 1st.
Weekly
Happens once a week. You can either:
- Pick a specific day — "Trash goes out every Tuesday"
- Let the scheduler choose — It picks a consistent day that works well with other chores
Biweekly
Happens every other week. You choose whether it's on odd weeks (1st, 3rd, 5th) or even weeks (2nd, 4th) of the month.
Twice Monthly
Happens twice per month. You can specify:
- Specific dates — "1st and 15th of the month"
- Ordinal weekdays — "1st and 3rd Saturday"
Monthly
Happens once a month. You can specify:
- Specific date — "15th of the month" (if that date doesn't exist, like the 31st in a 30-day month, it uses the last day)
- Ordinal weekday — "Last Sunday of the month"
Chore Order
The order chores appear in your chore list controls the order they appear on the printed schedule. For each person on each day, their assigned chores are listed in the same order as your chore list.
To reorder chores, drag the ⋮⋮ handle on the left side of any collapsed chore card. Drop it in the new position and the order saves automatically.
Note: You must save any changes you've made to chores in your plan before you can reorder chores. If the drag handles aren't available, it's because you've got unsaved changes to a chore in your plan - save your changes first, then the drag handles will become available again and you can reorder.
Reordering is a "how it looks"-only change: it affects how chores are displayed but doesn't change who does what or when. Your schedules won't regenerate when you reorder chores. You don't need to save your chore plan to save your newly ordered chores: chore reordering takes effect immediately!
Keeping Chores Separate
Sometimes you have chores that shouldn't land on the same person on the same day. For example, if you have "Litter box upstairs" and "Litter box downstairs," you probably don't want one kid doing both litter boxes while everyone else does nothing litter-related.
The Chores to keep separate section at the bottom of your chore plan lets you create rules for this. Each rule is a group of chores that the scheduler will avoid assigning to the same person on the same day.
Setting Up a Rule
- Click + Add rule at the bottom of the chore plan
- Give the rule a name (e.g., "Litter boxes")
- Check at least two chores that should be kept separate
- Collapse the rule card or save your plan
You can use the filter box to quickly find chores by name if you have a long list.
Note: This is a hard constraint — the scheduler will never assign two chores from the same rule to the same person on the same day. If your chore plan doesn't have enough people to make that possible (e.g., two daily chores kept separate but only one person eligible for both), you'll see an error when the schedule is generated.
Common Questions
Why did the schedule change when I regenerated it?
Each time you generate a schedule, the scheduler finds a new optimal solution. While it follows all the same rules, the specific assignments may vary. This is normal — different solutions can be equally fair.
Can I manually assign a chore to a specific person on a specific day?
Not currently! This is very much a conscious design choice, too: after years of making our own daily chore charts for an entire month at a time, what we realized is it's the rules that matter - not the individual assignments & days. ChorePlanner is built around the idea of you sitting down to define your family's chore plan once, and then letting the computer work it's magic for each month from there on out.
And if you still decide that you really need that specific assignment, you can usually finagle the settings for that chore to only assign that chore to one person and its recurrence options to force the scheduler to put the chore on just about any day you want.
What happens if someone is unavailable for part of the month?
Right now, the scheduler assumes everyone is available all month. If someone will be away, you can temporarily remove them from chores they can't do, generate the schedule, then add them back for next month.
How do I print the schedule?
Click any month tab to view the schedule, then click the "Print" button in the top toolbar. This will take you to a clean full-page print preview. From the full-page print preview, you can either use your browser's native "Print" function directly or click the "Print/Save as PDF" button on the page (the on-page button is just a shortcut to launch your browser's native "Print" function).
The schedule is designed to print cleanly with one day per page, ready to hang on the fridge or put in a binder. If you _are_ planning on using the charts in a binder format, check to see if your printer supports 2-sided printing - if so, use that mode and save paper!
I changed my chore plan. Do I need to regenerate the schedule?
It happens automatically — when you close the chore plan panel after making changes, the current month's schedule regenerates. You can also force a regeneration at any time using the dropdown arrow on the active month tab.