“To win, score the most. To score the most, stop keeping score.”

Last week, after three days in my metaphorical writing cave, I hollered to Partner, “I know I haven’t been doing dishes. I owe you.” I caught it immediately: “Actually, I think keeping score is bad practice. I take it back.” She laughed and continued on with her day.

I like scores. Keeping score is a clear and straightforward way to understand and compare performance. But sometimes, keeping score can be actively harmful.

Macro scoring enables comparison between multiple options. Micro-scoring corrodes as it leads you to optimize the wrong things. As my family motto goes (it’s intentionally too long for comedic effect), “Before you hyper-optimize a process, be sure you’re optimizing for what you actually want and not a correlate.”

The Bad (Reflexive Scoring)

Should I owe Partner dishes? I was heads-down on work because I spent the previous three weeks coordinating medical appointments for Partner and renovation work for our apartment.

As Middle East history teaches: if you dig back far enough, you can find huge grievances on all sides. Without touching on rightness or wrongness (as I do not have a sufficiently long stick with which to touch), this process does not seem to form stability. And stability is something I would like in my partnership.

Simply: if Partner feels I’m not doing dishes enough, she will say so. If I feel I’m not washing dishes enough, I should wash more dishes.

Score-keeping as a way of digging yourself out of a hole will often lead to resentment of the scorekeeping mechanism (or participants, which is even worse).

The Good (Reflective Scoring)

I once heard a successful startup founder describe his romantic check-ins. He and his wife divide his work into four categories: money earner, father, lover, friend. Rating each on a 1–10 scale, so long as his overall score achieves more than 25 points, he passes. For this partnership, this calculation may solve a real problem: it recognizes a person’s contributions despite changes over time.

This scoring process is a feedback instrument, driven by deliberate weighing of details — not a reflex prompted by momentary discomfort.

The Bridge (Incentive Alignment)

Hourly work misaligns incentives. This structure causes less efficiency and innovation: working faster costs the worker money!

I realized this structure with my $16/hr marketing internship after my sophomore year of college. I automated all my work, and all the other interns’ work. My superior said, “Sit tight and read.” I arrived to work early and left late because they paid me hourly. I was always there to do work if they wanted to give me work. (Now, I would take a slightly different tack: raising this lack-of-work to my boss’s boss. But at the time, I thought arriving early and staying late to maximize my dollars was the standard way to play the game.)

Even if your boss is your best friend, the hourly contract puts you in opposition. The score isn’t a personality conflict; it’s a contract feature. No amount of scorekeeping can account for misalignment.

The Ugly (Anti-Commerce)

Some work should be 90%–10%. In my partnership, Partner captains cooking 90% of the time; I captain travel logistics and social plans 90% of the time. I’m sufficiently capable to create edible food. Partner is sufficiently capable to book flights and schedule with friends. We simply enjoy it less (and are less skilled).

Micro tit-for-tat prevents specializing and trading, which is the fundamental lesson of commerce. So long as we both share the common knowledge that we’re both helping the team, the score is anti-helpful.

When partners are aligned on what they’re moving toward, the allocation can skew without it mattering. Some weeks she does more; some weeks I do. The “oxygen mask before helping others” frame applies: feeding yourself, whether literal food or via nurturing work, isn’t a withdrawal from the partnership — it’s a contribution to it, because your effectiveness is shared.

The reflex inside an aligned partnership imports structural-scoring logic into a relationship that thrives on more flexibility than scoring provides.

The score is the thief of commerce.

The Reckoning (Trust)

Would you rather employ someone values-aligned and unskilled, or skilled but misaligned? For piecework, I think skilled but misaligned. For a teammate, values-aligned. (That said, I am historically incompetent at working with unskilled people.) But I guess that’s still better than someone who will sabotage, even if they do it unknowingly.

Alignment produces trust. A scorecard substitutes for trust, poorly.

Last night, Partner asked me to do the dishes.