Who took out the trash last week? Nobody remembers. That's the whole problem.

Every household runs on invisible labor, and invisible labor breeds resentment. A shared chore board fixes it — but the free apps want your family's names, schedules, and habits sitting on someone else's server. You don't need that. You can run your own in an afternoon.

Why not just use a whiteboard?

A whiteboard doesn't rotate. Someone has to erase it and rewrite it, and that someone becomes the household manager nobody signed up to be. A self-hosted board rotates chores automatically and shows the same list on every phone in the house. No one can claim they "didn't see it."

And it stays inside your walls. No app maker learns that you clean the bathroom on Sundays.

The tool: Vikunja

Vikunja is a free, self-hosted task manager. It's built for projects, but it's perfect for chores because it does three things you need:

  • Recurring tasks — "Take out bins" reappears every Tuesday on its own.
  • Assignees — each chore points to a real person.
  • Shared views — everyone opens the same board.

It runs as a single small container. No database wrangling required for a first try.

Set it up in 15 minutes

  1. On any always-on machine (an old laptop or a Raspberry Pi works), install Docker.
  2. Grab the Vikunja docker-compose.yml from their docs and run docker compose up -d.
  3. Open the web page it gives you and create one account per household member.
  4. Make a project called House.
  5. Add each chore as a task. Set who it belongs to and how often it repeats.

That's it. Bookmark the page on every phone. Add it to the home screen so it opens like an app.

Make the rotation actually rotate

Here's the trick most people miss. Instead of assigning "Dishes" to one person forever, create it once per person and stagger the start dates. Week one it's yours, week two it's theirs, and the recurrence keeps the pattern going. The board does the fairness math so you don't have to referee it.

For bigger families, use labels like kitchen and outdoor so anyone can filter to just their zone.

Keep it private and reachable

Don't expose this to the open internet. Instead, install Tailscale on the server and every family phone. It builds a private network between your devices only. The chore board is then reachable from anywhere — the school pickup line, the grocery store — but invisible to everyone else. No port forwarding, no leaked home address.

Your one move today

Install Docker on that spare laptop gathering dust and spin up Vikunja. Add just one recurring chore for each person before dinner. Tomorrow, when the trash needs taking out, the board — not you — will name the person whose turn it is.