The HVAC filter that went 14 months because I kept assuming Marcus was thinking about it

The filter was fine, technically. The house didn't catch fire. But when the HVAC guy came for the annual check and pulled out the filter, he did that pause that contractors do when they're being polite about something. He changed it without saying much. I thanked him and felt bad for the rest of the afternoon.

Home maintenance is different from regular household tasks because of the time scale. You can tell when the laundry needs doing because the laundry is sitting there. You cannot tell when the gutters need cleaning because you never look at the gutters. The things that get missed in a house are almost always the things that are out of sight and low frequency.

The mental model I had was: someone will remember these things. The problem with that mental model is that "someone" was me, and I was keeping track of this list the same way I keep track of everything else in the house — in my head, somewhere behind everything more urgent.

Marcus assumed I had a system for it. I assumed he thought about these things too sometimes. We had a house quietly accumulating deferred maintenance while we both assumed the other one had it handled.

The category that actually bit us: anything on a longer cycle than a month. Water heater flush (annual). Smoke detector batteries (twice a year, but do you actually do it twice a year?). Dryer vent cleaning (I had not thought about this once in five years of homeownership). Exterior caulking before winter. The list of things that a house requires, spread out over a year, is actually quite long if you write it all down.

Writing it all down is the first step. Actually writing it down somewhere, not keeping it in your head.

The second step is attaching intervals and lead times so the items resurface when they're due, not when you happen to remember them. A list of home maintenance tasks with no dates is just a list you feel guilty about. A list with due dates and a way to assign who's handling each one is a system.

Marcus handles most of the physical maintenance. I coordinate and track. That's a reasonable split for us. But for it to work, the tracking has to be visible to him — he can't look at a list that only exists in my head.

We run the home maintenance schedule in Orbyt now. The recurring tasks show up when they're due. The HVAC filter is in there on a three-month cycle, Marcus's name on it, done before I have to think about it. The HVAC guy made no comments last fall.

It's in beta at orbythq.com. If your house is running on a list of vague guilt, it's worth having an actual system.