Mental Load at Work: A Weekly Tally of the Office Jobs That Rarely Count
You know the ones. Somebody needs to take the notes, order the leaving card, show the new starter where everything is, and chase the three people who haven't sent their numbers. You do it because it needs doing and you are good at it. Then review season comes, and none of it is on the list of things anyone talks about.
These jobs have a name in research: non-promotable tasks. They help the organisation but are unlikely to show up in a performance review. They are also the workplace version of the mental load, because the hardest part is usually noticing they need doing in the first place.
The office housework tally
Put in a rough number of hours for a typical week, then choose what you would like to do with each one. Your answers stay in this browser.
What the research found
Economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart studied who ends up with this work, in a paper published in the American Economic Review in 2017. In one lab experiment, people in mixed groups were given a task that everyone wanted done but nobody wanted to do themselves. Under identical rules, women volunteered 50 percent more often than men (full paper).
The next part is the useful one. When the researchers put people in groups of only men or only women, men and women volunteered at the same rate. The gap was not about who is more generous. It came from what people expected of each other: in a further experiment, the person choosing a volunteer asked women more often, and women said yes more often when asked.
That changes how you might think about it. If the pattern runs on expectations, then a single "no", or a suggestion to rotate, changes what the room expects next time. It doesn't have to be a big stand.
Three scenes, and what each could look like instead
The notes
It is the weekly project meeting and the manager says, "Could someone grab notes?" There is a pause and you start typing, because the pause is uncomfortable and you type fast. One option: before the meeting next week, suggest the notes rotate alphabetically and put the order in the invite. It takes one sentence and nobody has to volunteer.
The leaving card
A colleague is leaving on Friday and someone says, "You're so good at these." Being good at it is how it became yours. Agreeing to do this one and asking who will do the next, by name, keeps the job moving around instead of settling with you.
The quick questions
A newer colleague messages you five times a day because you answer quickly and kindly. Some of that is real mentoring, and you might want to keep it. If you do, say so in your review. If you don't, a short set time ("Let's do 20 minutes on Thursdays and save the questions up") helps you both.
Keeping some of it is a fine answer
Not all of this work is a trap. Mentoring, welcoming people and holding a team together are real skills, and plenty of women want to keep doing them. The aim of the tally is that you choose which ones to keep, and that the ones you keep are seen. Writing them into your self-review with the hours attached is a simple start. A line like "I onboarded three new starters this year, about two hours a week each for their first month" turns invisible work into something a manager can count.
The same pattern often runs at home, too. If the tally felt familiar, the one-job explainer on this site does the same thing for a household job. The Protected Hours calculator on our main site helps you plan the time you want to keep for yourself.
This page describes research findings and gives you a planning tool. It is not career, HR or legal advice, and it can't tell you how a particular workplace will respond. If you think work is being shared out unfairly because of your sex, your HR team, a union, or in the UK Acas, can explain the formal routes.
Sources: Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund and Weingart, "Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability", American Economic Review 107(3), 2017 (author PDF). Read 31 October 2026.