Mental Load Network
By the team at The Lookahead App
The invisible work, made visible.
Every bill, deadline, and vendor follow-up your household runs on — caught before it slips, turned into a list everyone can see, and never sent, scheduled, or changed without your say. The work was always there. Now it's shared.
Our hypothesis
Technology introduces a new means of removing the mental load, and of distributing physical labour more equally. This experiment exists to test that.
Five areas, chosen by your household
The same five groups you pick from when you set up your household — turn on only what's useful to you. Nothing here acts unsupervised: every agent proposes, a person decides.
Money
Bills, receipts, budget targets, and tax-relevant purchases — quietly logged and tracked as they happen.
Food
Weekly dinner plans and the shopping list to match, built around your household's real rhythm.
Time & Commitments
Keeps what's on the calendar from becoming a surprise — and protects the time you've promised to yourself.
Home & Chores
Coordinating the people you already hire — or want to — for everything around the house.
Family & Admin
The recurring admin of running a household with other people in it — school, medication, and vendors.
Every one, approval-first
Anything with a real consequence — a drafted email, a calendar hold, an account change — waits for your explicit yes before it happens.
One real household's to-do list, looked at honestly.
It's not a small amount of work, and it's not unique to any one household. Globally, people spend 16 billion hours a day on unpaid care work, most of it falling to women (UN Women). Add up paid and unpaid work together, and women in OECD countries put in about 12 hours a month more than men — every month, on top of a job (OECD, 2024). Here's what that looks like up close, in one real household.
Before writing any code, we sat down with the actual list running that household and asked a plainer question than "what can we automate": what's genuinely safe to hand off, and what only feels that way until something goes wrong?
27
real tasks on the household to-do list we audited to start this project
15
turned out to be physical chores — no software fixes those, only a reminder to do them
1
task (a vendor email change) that looked automatable but had worse data underneath than assumed
From the founding review of the household's original to-do sheet — the same review that shaped the approval-first design you just saw. That household's list has since grown to 30+ tasks, all live in one shared view instead of one person's memory.
This isn't a personal failing
Australian women already do almost an hour more unpaid work a day than men. Carrying a household's mental load — noticing, planning, remembering — is not only additional to that unpaid work, it's often invisible and unappreciated. It's tracking which relative needs a card, a gift, or a call, and by when. It's knowing which school notice needs a reply and which one can be ignored. None of it shows up on a to-do list until it's already done — or until it's missed.
Sociologists call this cognitive labour: anticipating a need, weighing the options, deciding, and following up — work that's taxing precisely because it's invisible to everyone but the person carrying it. It doesn't split evenly even when the physical chores do. Even when some tasks are delegated, what isn't delegated is the planning, organising or thinking about its execution.
The cost of this also shows up at work. Nationally, 74% of women say they're stressed trying to balance work and care — up from 51% just five years ago — and more than a quarter of working parents have thought about leaving their job over it. That second number is what sparked The Mental Load Network in the first place. Women also take on hundreds more hours a year of labour that helps the company and does nothing for their own career. Having a child under five cuts a mother's income by roughly 15%. And it compounds early: only 93 women are promoted into their first management role for every 100 men — and just 74 women of colour.
Parents At Work & UNICEF Australia, National Working Families Survey, 2024 (~6,200 Australian working parents & carers)
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Time Use Survey, 2024
Daminger, "The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor", American Sociological Review, 2019
Weeks, Kowalewska & Ruppanner, "A Typology of US Parents' Mental Loads", Journal of Marriage and Family, 2024 (US study)
Babcock, Peyser, Vesterlund & Weingart, "The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work", 2022 (US)
Institute for Women's Policy Research (US)
LeanIn & McKinsey, Women in the Workplace — the "broken rung" (North America)
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