There are days when I’ve been busy from the moment I woke up and couldn’t tell you what I actually did.
Not because I wasted the day – but because most of what I did was invisible. The things that don’t make a list. The things that nobody notices when they happen, and only notices when they don’t.
There are things I do every day as a parent that I don’t really think of as things I’ve done. Noticing something is running low. Remembering an appointment. Knowing who needs to be where, or what needs to come out of the freezer before dinner. Noticing someone’s mood shift before anything has actually been said. Thinking about what dinner will be. Remembering something one of the kids mentioned days ago, and knowing it will probably need following up. Knowing something needs to happen before someone else even realises it.
None of these things necessarily feels like a task on its own. But they accumulate.
A lot of parenting work happens before anything actually happens
Some things just become part of the routine. School mornings are a good example. Feed the dogs. Feed the chook. Get the lunch boxes ready for work and school. Make sure the kids have what they need. If school clothes were washed the night before, remember that they need to go into the dryer in the morning.
Most of these things don’t feel like decisions anymore. They are simply part of getting everyone through the morning and out the door. But they still require someone to remember them.
There are other things that aren’t quite as obvious. Before dinner is cooked, someone has thought about what is being made. Before the family leaves the house, someone has noticed what needs to be taken. Before something important happens for one of the kids, someone may have already been thinking about it for days.
A lot of parenting work happens before anything actually happens. Remembering. Anticipating. Noticing. Planning. Checking. Adjusting. Thinking ahead. Much of it never appears on a to-do list, and often nobody else sees it.
The work before the work
Even something as simple as a family outing can start taking up space in my mind hours before we actually leave. The kids might ask what time we need to be ready, and from there I start thinking about what everyone needs to wear and how we are going to get out of the house without rushing. Water bottles need filling. The dog might need his backpack checked, with water and biscuits packed. If we want to leave at 1pm, do we need to have lunch earlier?
As the morning goes on, that list keeps coming back into my mind. There might be a reminder to one of the teenagers. Something else gets added. Something gets moved. Then, eventually, we leave.
From the outside, it might just look like we decided to go somewhere and went. But there was a whole layer of thinking before that happened. That’s the work before the work.
Some things become so routine that we stop seeing them
The same thing happens around the house and the yard. We have a meal plan for the week, which takes some of the thinking away from deciding what we are going to eat, but that doesn’t mean the thinking completely disappears. I still need to remember in the morning to get the meat out of the freezer.
Walking around the backyard, I notice the dog’s outdoor water bottle is getting low and make a mental note to fill it later. The chook water needs refreshing. There are palm leaves that need cleaning up, and a few things the dog has left on the lawn before it can be mowed. The lawn itself is usually overdue, and coming into spring I know the broadleaf weeds need dealing with during the season, along with the grass weeds before they run up seed and create an even bigger problem next season. Mowing doesn’t really get rid of them – if the clump or patch is removed properly instead, the lawn has a chance to fill back in once those weeds die off. So I notice them each week as I walk across the lawn, not pulling every one out in one go, just keeping track of what will happen if I let it go too long.
The vegetable garden sits in the same category – pots that need preparing, a job I’ve meant to get to for weeks, one that keeps getting bumped by weather or the weekend running out. None of these things are necessarily urgent. But they sit there. It’s not something the rest of the family necessarily needs to think about. But if I stopped noticing, eventually it would become obvious. That’s another form of invisible work – not because nobody would ever see the result, but because the awareness of when it needs doing sits with me.
Sometimes I wish more of the thinking was shared
This is probably the part of invisible work that is harder to explain, and harder to write about without it sounding like a complaint.
It isn’t a case of me doing everything and everyone else doing nothing. That wouldn’t be fair, and it wouldn’t be true. My partner carries her own version of all this – her own mental load, her own list of things she’s noticing and remembering and keeping track of, plenty of which I probably don’t see any more than she sees mine. We talk to each other about how preparations are going for different things, who’s got what covered, what still needs sorting. In a lot of ways we do share it, just not always the same parts of it.
Where I do notice it more is with the kids, now that they’re teenagers. There’s a difference between a teenager helping once they’ve been told exactly what’s needed, and a teenager carrying the awareness of what’s needed in the first place. Most of the time, if something is going to get done around here, someone still has to notice it needs doing, remember it, check on it, and mention it if it hasn’t happened. That someone is usually me. It’s not that the kids won’t do things when asked – they generally will. It’s that the noticing and remembering hasn’t really shifted onto them yet, and I think that’s a fairly normal part of them still being teenagers rather than adults. But I can see it’s something that will hopefully change gradually, the same way everything else about their independence has.
It isn’t really a question of who does more overall, because I don’t think that’s a fair way to measure a family. It’s more that different kinds of load sit with different people at different stages – my partner and I have found our own way of splitting a lot of it, and the kids will find their own share of it too as they get older. I don’t always say any of this out loud. But I think it shows sometimes in the way I respond to something small, when it isn’t really about that one thing at all. It’s just one more piece landing on a mind that already has plenty moving around inside it.
The list doesn’t clock off
One thing I’ve noticed is that I can feel guilty taking a break when I know there are still things that could be done. There might be jobs around the house, things outside, something that could make the next few days easier. And because I know those things are there, sitting down doesn’t always completely feel like switching off. It’s almost as though there’s a quiet list running in the background.
It isn’t only household things either. Some evenings I’ll be sitting down to rest and find myself thinking I should really be doing some admin, or getting onto the next blog post, or looking into a budget item that’s coming up – an insurance renewal, say, and whether there’s a better option out there before it auto-renews. None of that is urgent, and none of it belongs to anyone else to carry. It’s mine. But it still competes for the same tired headspace at the end of the day.
Thankfully, I mostly still sleep well. But that doesn’t mean my mind completely switches off. The list is still there somewhere, and the next morning, when my brain wakes up, it starts checking in again. What’s happening today? What needs doing? What did I leave yesterday?
It’s not necessarily a conscious conversation in my head. It just happens. And I think that’s part of what makes invisible work difficult to recognise. It doesn’t always feel like work. It just feels like thinking about life.
The frustrating part is that the list doesn’t really have an end. I’ve learnt that if I let too much of it build up in my head, I don’t actually function better. I don’t think as clearly, I don’t get the things done that need doing that day, and I don’t prepare properly for the next few days either. So I try not to overwhelm my mind with everything at once. Some things have to wait. Some things get shuffled forward. Some things eventually get done. And some things turn out not to matter as much as I thought they did.
Sometimes I finish the weekend and realise more was done than I thought
There are weekends when I get to the end and initially feel like I didn’t get much done. The vegetable garden still isn’t finished. There are jobs outside that didn’t happen. Something I planned to do has been pushed into another day.
But then I think back over the weekend. The dogs were looked after. The chook was fed. Meals were made. Shopping was done. Something around the house was fixed or cleaned. The lawn was mowed. The kids got where they needed to be. Something else happened that wasn’t planned. And I realise that actually, quite a lot happened.
The mental list just makes it easy to notice what remains rather than what was completed. The unfinished things get shuffled onto the next few days, and the family keeps moving.
Some of the thinking is about things that haven’t happened yet
Sometimes the invisible work isn’t even about today or tomorrow. We have a child graduating from high school this year. The ceremony and formal are still a month or two away, but some of the planning is already sitting somewhere in the background. There is time that needs to be booked off work so we can attend during the day. There is the question of what everyone will wear to the formal. There are arrangements that need to be made.
Thankfully, I don’t need to personally organise all of these things – one of the parents will take responsibility for some of it. But I still need to be mindful of what is being organised and make sure the things that need to happen are actually happening. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing is particularly urgent. But it has already entered the mental calendar.
That’s another part of family life that can be difficult to see from the outside. Something doesn’t have to be happening today for a parent to already be carrying some of the thought around it.
When nobody sees the work
I think that’s what makes some of this work genuinely invisible.
The appointment wasn’t missed. Dinner appeared. The school clothes were ready. The dog had water. The lawn didn’t become completely overrun with weeds. Everyone got where they needed to be. The graduation plans didn’t suddenly become a problem because someone had thought about them early.
When these things happen, they don’t necessarily attract any attention, and perhaps they shouldn’t. That’s what families do. But the strange thing about invisible work is that when it is done consistently, it becomes part of the background. Nobody notices the thing that didn’t become a problem. They only notice when something doesn’t happen.
I’ve written before about the mental load that sits underneath the visible tasks of family life. I think this is where invisible work and mental load start to overlap. The mental load is often the remembering, anticipating and thinking that sits underneath what needs to happen. The invisible work is the wider layer of things that quietly get carried out, managed, noticed or kept moving without necessarily being recognised as work. Sometimes it is difficult to separate the two.
Maybe recognising it is part of the shift
I’m not sure there is a simple answer to all of this. Families will always have things that need doing. Children will always need reminding about something. There will always be meals to organise, appointments to remember, things around the house to notice and something else waiting to be done.
But maybe we don’t always need to respond to that by trying to become better at doing more. Sometimes it might be worth asking whether something really needs to be carried by one person. Whether someone else could take ownership of it rather than simply help with it. Whether something needs to be remembered at all, and sometimes, whether the thing still sitting on the list can simply wait.
Because family life isn’t a project that can ever be completely finished. There will always be another job, another reminder, another meal, another weekend, another thing to think about.
Maybe the first step isn’t doing more.
Maybe sometimes it is simply recognising how much is already being carried.
Some of the work that matters most in a family is the work nobody sees.