How wearing a fitness tracker made my house tidier and improved my relationship

My partner was quite surprised when I asked for a fitness tracker for my birthday. For those who aren't in the know, a fitness tracker is a super awesome pedometer which (for me) does things like track my sleep as well as how many steps I've done.

After a few days of me counting steps, and him reading about other friends who have found wearing a tracker being really helpful for them to be aware of how much physical activity they're doing. Or not. So a few weeks later, when he saw a special on them he jumped on it.

Then it was on like Donkey Kong. The program that we use allowed us to set little challenges "who can do the most steps over the weekend" "Who can do the most steps over the working week?". Suddenly we had gone from a boring and virtuous system where we tried to better ourselves to a cheeky and exciting battle for stepping glory. There was trash talking, cheering for each other and lots of fun.

Because he works nights and I work days, we often don't spend much time in the same room over the week, so having a little chat room in our fitness tracker app which allowed us to trash talk each other as I walked to the train station on my morning commute, or cheer as he made the most of his morning to get another thousand steps. We felt like we were closer together, even though we were in different places.

I stopped walking to the nearest train station, and started walking to one a little further away. I would bring my lunch to work and then spend ten minutes of my lunchbreak walking around the block.

He decided he needed to step it up a notch too and soon we were walking places we would normally have driven – to the café for brunch, to the supermarket for a loaf of bread… We were becoming unstoppable.

However, it was the housework that is really a surprise. My partner and I are both, well, kinda slobs. Housework is not a priority for us, although we certainly do enjoy living in a tidy house, often we find the motivation to keep it that way just… difficult. But right now, the dishes are done, the clothes are folded and in the cupboard and the coffee table is no longer the snowdrift of opened and unactioned correspondence that it always seems to be.

The reason for this is... well, housework accrues steps. In order to earn extra steps, housework has become something of a game too. Let me explain. We’ve been able to ascertain that cooking food accrues a decent amount of steps (around 500 per meal). Now if my partner’s cooking, that means I need to catch up with 500 additional steps. So I’d go into the lounge room and tidy all the bits and pieces off the coffee table. Or spot the unfolded pile of clean laundry in the basket and fold it and put it away. My partner, of course, would spot this, and say that I was ‘stealing steps’ which meant that he would have to do additional steps, by doing other small chores around the house.

The air of cheeky competition in the air is palpable. But the part that has improved our relationship the best was how… appreciated we are both feeling right now.

When you come home from work, and the house is tidier than when you left it, I feel grateful for it.

When I jump up and do the dishes after dinner, instead of leaving them for my partner to do the next morning, he feels cherished and relieved. He does other work instead – folding laundry or tidying the lounge room.

Its amazing how one small positive change can have unexpected flow on effects.