My last post described my attempt to generate a report on housework using Deep Research, and the way it came to a crashing halt. Over the fold, I’ve given the summary from the last version before the crash. You can read the whole report here, bearing in mind that it’s only partly done.
As I said, I chose the questions to ask and the points on which to press further. DR extracted the data (I was planning to get detail on this process before the whole thing crashed), produced graphs to my specifications and generated the first draft of the text, with a style modelled on mine.
If I were doing this to produce a report for publication, I’d initially I was about halfway there, after only a few hours of work on my part. But as with LLMs in general, I suspect the final editing would take quite a bit longer.
Still, the alternative would have been either nothing (most likely) or a half-baked blog post using not-quite-right links to the results of Google searches. So, I’m going to keep on experimenting.
Early versions of LLMs were mostly substitutes for medium-level skill. It made it easy for someone barely literate to generate an adequate business email or (in the graphics version) for a complete klutz like me to produce an obviously-AI illustration for a post (Substack expects some kind of picture)
But with Deep Research, I think there’s an amplification of general research skills. It’s ideal for topics where I have some general idea of the underlying reasoning, but am not familiar with the literature and am unaware of some important arguments
Single-person households reveal the underlying structure of domestic labour more clearly than multi-person households, because cooking, cleaning and household administration can-not be negotiated or delegated. Patterns among singles therefore show how norms, incentives and technology shape behaviour directly. Over the past four decades, both single men and single women have experienced substantial changes in domestic tasks, but the scale and nature of these changes differ sharply by gender.
Single women display long-run stability in cooking and cleaning routines. Their time spent on meal preparation remains high, though modestly reduced by more efficient appliances and improved supermarket offerings. Cleaning remains routinised, but technologies such as cordless vacuums, microfibre cloths and robot cleaners reduce the effort required to maintain prior standards, as does the the near-elimination of labour-intensive tasks such as ironing and mending.
Single men show much larger behavioural shifts. The share of meals prepared at home and weekly cooking time both increase substantially from the early 2000s onward. This shift reflects not a dramatic rise in cooking skill, but improvements in technology that substitute for skill—particularly microwaves, air fryers, rice cookers and standardised convenience foods. These appliances lower the risk of failure and expand the feasible meal set. Cleaning time among single men also rises modestly, driven by increased home cooking, higher hygiene expectations and accessible cleaning technologies.
Digitalisation reshapes household administration in two distinct ways. Pre-existing tasks—bill payment, insurance renewals, contact updates—become simpler and generally decline in time as online systems streamline formerly paper-based processes. At the same time, new digital tasks emerge, such as managing streaming services, software subscriptions and multiple platform accounts. These represent expanded digital consumption rather than an increased administrative burden in the traditional sense. For single adults, the total time spent on ad-ministrative tasks remains roughly stable, but its composition shifts from inherited analogue chores to the maintenance of digital services.
Both groups benefit from the falling time cost of provisioning through online grocery shopping, which saves roughly 45–60 minutes per week. While total domestic labour has not fallen dramatically, its composition has changed: physical labour has declined in favour of cognitive and digital administration, and routine tasks have become less burdensome through automation and improved design.
Overall, technology—not exhortations like those of Jordan Peterson—has been the central driver of change. Single women maintain stable routines with efficiency gains, while single men adapt more dramatically as skill-substituting technologies, shifting incentives and expanded digital consumption reshape their domestic production decisions.
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