Chore chart maker: type the jobs and the names, print a chart for each week

What is on the paper

• One sheet for each week, 1 to 8 of them, on upright paper.
• A row for every job, written the way you typed it, in the order you typed it.
• A box for every day of the week in every row, to tick by hand when the job is done that day. The week begins on Monday or on Sunday, as you choose.
• A column that says who has the job that week, when you typed names. With no names, the chart has the jobs and the days only.
• Under the chart, each person with their jobs for the week, unless you untick it.
• Chore chart at the top, or a few words of your own, and Week 2 of 4 under it when there is more than one week.
• No dates. The page has no calendar in it: Week 1 is whichever week you start.

Your lists

• Up to 12 jobs, 30 characters each. A longer line is cut at 30 characters. Lines after the 12th are left out, and the page names them.
• Up to 8 names, 16 characters each. A longer name is cut at 16 characters. Names after the 8th are left out, and the page names them.
• Anything you can type goes in: accents, Ñ, numbers, a nickname.
• A line that is there twice is used once, capitals aside: Sam and SAM are the same name. The page names the one it left out. Two people with the same name need something to tell them apart, like Sam K and Sam R.

How the jobs are shared out

• Nothing is drawn by chance. In week 1 the first job goes to the first name, the second job to the second name, and so on down both lists; after the last name comes the first name again.
• With taking turns on, every job moves on by one name each week. The job the first person had in week 1 goes to the second person in week 2.
• After as many weeks as there are people, everyone has had every job once. With 4 people that is 4 weeks, and week 5 is the same as week 1.
• In any one week, nobody has more than one job more than anybody else. With 6 jobs and 4 people, two people have 2 jobs and two have 1.
• With more people than jobs, some people have no job that week, and the page says how many. With taking turns on, who that is changes every week.
• With taking turns off, each job stays with the same person, and every week’s sheet is the same.
• The order you type things in is the plan. To change who starts with what, move a name or a job up or down in its box. The same lists and choices give the same chart every time, on any device.

What this page does not do

• It counts jobs, not work. It does not know that one job takes five minutes and another an hour, so a week with the same number of jobs is not a week with the same load. Taking turns evens that out over the weeks; within one week it is for the people in the home to look at.
• It does not know who can do what: someone’s age, health, or hours away from home. Whether the plan suits the people in it is for them to say.
• It cannot give a job to only some days or to two people at once, and it cannot keep one job out of the turns. Every row has all seven boxes; leave the boxes you do not need empty, or cross them out by hand.
• It says nothing about rewards, pocket money or what happens when a job is not done. That is for the home to agree on.
• It cannot be ticked on the screen: the chart is for paper.
• It keeps nothing: close the page and the lists are gone.
• It has been tried in one browser’s print preview (Chromium, saved as PDF), not on paper from a real printer.

Every time the page is built, a program checks 66 examples worked by hand. Then it types 2,000 made-up pairs of lists, some with accents, signs, lines that repeat and lines that are too long, and writes the charts the way the page prints them. A second reader, written separately, takes the rows back off the paper and works out who has what in its own way, by moving the first name to the end of the list for each week. It checks that every week has every job once and in the typed order, that every row has seven boxes under the right days, that the names in the chart are the ones it worked out, that in no week one person has more than one job more than another, that with taking turns everyone has had every job once after as many weeks as there are people, and that the list under the chart says the same as the chart. That checks the page’s own counting, not whether a plan is fair to the people in it.