So, what got me thinking about this is the complaints about how "harder" domestic labor is vs. professional labor.

When people go to work (professional labor) their tasks are laid out for them, often explicitly. They know what they need to do and often how much time they have to get those tasks completed.

By contrast, domestic labor is somewhat akin to a person who works from home or has their own business or is an entrepreneur: the deadline and task list is often set in your own head, rather than on paper and monitored by an authority figure (your boss).

Self-monitoring and self-creating the structure that helps you self-motivate to complete tasks that you need to complete in the absence of a boss is an additional layer of work. This, I feel, is a bit of blind spot in men who gripe about women complaining about domestic labor. They compare domestic labor to professional labor (and, to be fair, domestic labor is often much easier than professional labor), but they fail to account for the fact that domestic labor involves "being your own boss," and I would argue this is important to take into account.

Like entrepreneurship, domestic labor requires people to work around the clock. There are no "work hours," unless you set them yourself—and honestly, why would you, when you could be using any set of time that you feel motivated to get the requisite work done? Professional work usually doesn't feature this; you're required to be doing work when you're at your job, but not when you're not. For most people, that's 7-8 hours, depending on your lunch break. For domestic labor, the "work hours" are often 24/7, meaning you're expected to be working at any particular time, albeit not all the time.

Then there's the task list. Professional jobs provide you with this. Domestic jobs simply provide you with you ideals/goals to meet, and leave you the task of figuring out how to meet them. Creating a framework of individual tasks for meeting these goals is an additional layer of work, involving an additional skill set. Again, like people who are "self-employed" or "freelancing," self-discipline is paramount here in a way that it just isn't in professional jobs.

So, while professional labor comes with a whole host of issues that domestic labor doesn't (e.g. you can get fired, you don't decide your own salary, you don't get to choose how to do your work all the time, etc), domestic labor has it's own issues, and I would argue that one of those issues is an additional "self-monitoring" skill set that requires domestic laborers to put in cognitive effort towards creating a structure that is already created for professional laborers.