Chorma is an app to get you and your housemates on the same page when it comes to chores. More straightforward than a passive-aggressive sticky note left on the week-old pile of dirty dishes and less confrontational than a house meeting, Chorma wants to make it easy to communicate with the people you live with without killing them.
I don’t strictly speaking have any housemates, but I do have a husband, and he does leave piles of dirty, well, everything lying around. We’ll see if Chorma can help us get things done before our dirty laundry takes over the house and we have to move into the yard.
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Do Your Chores!
Starting out with Chorma, you need to go ahead and add everybody who lives in your house as Housemembers. Each person will get a link to join up and install the app. Once everyone is together in Chorma, it’s time to start creating chores.
Create a chore, schedule it, and even assign it to your roomie.
To my mind, chores work best when they’re something that’s going to happen over and over again, and Chorma allows you to set a chore to repeat. Even if you don’t set a specific date or tell Chorma how often the chore recurs, it will hang onto to those repeating chores so they can be reassigned later.
However, Chorma works if something irregular pops up and needs to be delegated to only one housemember, like meeting the plumber in the middle of the day. Hopefully that doesn’t happen too often, and while it probably shouldn’t get set up as a repeating chore, it’s not a bad idea to stick it on the house duty roster.
If you didn’t assign the chores already, you can claim them from the list.
You can either assign chores when you’re creating them, or you can leave them to be claimed in the All Chores list. It might be awkward to start assigning your housemates chores, but that’s on you. You decide how you want to play this one. You can let your roomies claim the chores they can complete when they have time to do them and hope everyone’s a responsible adult, but if that fails, you can always open a chore back up and dole it out to whomever isn’t pulling his or her weight.
View all your chores — and when they’re due — in the My Chores list. Check off a chore when it’s done, and you’ll receive Chorma points. Yeah, you get points. Tap back over to Housemembers to see a running tally of everybody’s points. Tap Redeem Chorma Points, scheduling a meal amongst your housemates and splitting the check based on who has the most points. All your points will get cleared after being redeemed, and you’ll all start over fresh from zero.
It’s About the Points
The thing about Chorma is that it only works if everyone in the house also has Chorma. For everyone in the house to have Chorma, everyone in the house has to have an iPhone. If you’re living with three other adults, the chances seem high that at least one of them is going to be an Android interloper. Then Chorma is doing you no good at all, and you’re back to a whiteboard on the side of the refrigerator and that new guy Travis trying to get away with doing his laundry in the dishwasher.
Take a look at your chores, and maybe pass one off to someone else.
Chorma may be even better suited for families who likely all have the same type of phone by design, in this case an iPhone. If you’re not using Chorma with housemates, though, and you’re not building up Chorma points toward an awesome meal that loser Travis is totally going to have to cover because he was slacking all this month, what will you do with those points? Well, kids can exchange points for kids stuff, or if your kids have already got enough stuff — hard to believe — they can get a favorite meal or day at the zoo.
I like the points system, especially since I’ll probably decide how many points each chore is worth.
Adults can exchange Chorma points for grownup stuff, like grownup meals out as suggested by the app, or whatever makes your adult happy — mostly video games in these parts. Following on the video game theme, you can just try to earn more points than your opponent/significant other, and then lord it over them when you’re doing so much better. Alternately, you could try to earn fewer points, like in golf, because that means you’re getting away with doing less work, but that would be undermining the spirit of Chorma.
Final Thoughts
I’ll admit, I went into the Chorma experience expecting to be disappointed. My assertion was that if Chorma works with housemates, it should work with the married sort of housemates, too. After all, we have all the same chores, and arguments about chores, that any other two people, maybe three, living together would. The only difference is I can’t move out at the end of the semester if I’m fed up with him never buying toilet paper. I didn’t think Chorma would do the trick, though; I thought it would be too specific to the lives of singletons in a group living situation and wouldn’t have the flexibility to adapt.
Let me tell you, I was wrong. Chorma is great. It’s perfect for anyone at all living together and doing chores together. In fact, it’s really just great for people trying to accomplish anything together, whether that’s keeping the garbage from overflowing, managing a household or even completing a work project. The points system is a neat incentive to get everyone on board, and while I don’t think the default prize, a dinner out, is going to be right for all users, you can make your goal anything you want. The one failing is that all housemates need to have iPhones, and that might not be plausible in a house of more than a couple of people. If everyone is on the same page, though, Chorma can really help them get their stuff done.