"Why should I, when nobody else does?"

If you share your home, there may be another voice in the mix, and it's an angry one. "I did the bins last time. And the time before. If I do them again, that's just how it'll be." So the bins stay full, as a kind of protest.

The anger is often fair. In many households the work is split unevenly, and the person doing more has usually noticed long before the person doing less. I'm not going to tell you to rise above it and scrub cheerfully.

But look at how the protest performs. The message you're sending is "I refuse to carry this alone." The message received is a full bin, and the other person may honestly not notice a full bin. Tolerance for mess varies a lot between people, and the one with the higher tolerance can outlast you without knowing there's a contest. Meanwhile you live in the mess too, and it bothers you more than it bothers them. You're paying the full cost of a strike that management hasn't heard about.

It helps to split this into two problems, because they have different solutions.

The first is fairness, and the tool for it is a conversation, held at a calm time and kept specific. "You never help" starts an argument about character. "Can you take over the bins and the bathroom completely, so I never have to think about them?" is a proposal someone can say yes to. Handing over whole jobs works better than asking for help with tasks. Someone who only helps still leaves you doing the noticing and the asking.

The second problem is your own habit of postponing, and that one is yours whatever happens in the conversation. Once it's clear which jobs are yours, doing them promptly costs you less than doing them late, for all the reasons in the chapters before this one.

"If I just get on with my share, they'll never change." Perhaps they won't, which is why the conversation matters and may need repeating. If it keeps going nowhere, you have a relationship problem that a book about housework can't fix, and it deserves attention in its own right. Leaving the bins won't solve it either.

If you live alone, the same belief shows up in a different form. "Nobody sees it, so who cares?" You see it. You wake up there every morning, and you count.