Who was organizing My Cupboard?

Prof. Ramya Ranganathan’s take on the psychology of why we discount the work we never see

The Ghost in My Cupboard

When I was in grade twelve, something very strange started happening in my room, and I genuinely could not explain it.

My cupboards, which had always been neat and organized for as long as I could remember, started getting messy, and my stuff was all over the place, and my bags were tumbling out, and my clothes (which had always sat perfectly in their racks) were slipping and falling and bunching up in ways that felt almost eerie to me. I remember going to my mother with the most innocent bewilderment and saying, “Something very weird is happening in my room, things are just falling out of place, everything is getting out of control, what is going on?” And I say this without exaggeration: it almost felt paranormal to me, like some invisible force had shifted in my home.

My mother came to look, and she was equally puzzled for a moment, because she too had her hands full and hadn’t really noticed this as an aftereffect of something that had recently changed in our lives.

And then it hit us both, almost at the same time.

My elder sister (who is just 18 months older than me) had left for college, and with her departure, every single system of order in my daily life had simply… collapsed.

You see, my sister had been methodically organizing our shared space (our cupboards, our shoes, our bags, our books) for what I can only imagine was most of our childhood, possibly starting as a toddler who just naturally put things away. We shared everything: our clothes, our cupboards, our hair accessories, our art supplies, our storybooks, truly everything. And if there might have been some object that was specifically mine and mine alone, she had been quietly dusting and arranging that also during her rounds. We also went to the same school, so I inherited all her books, I used her notes, she was my in-house reminder for any important things, and I never once experienced the chaos of things getting out of place.

And here is the part that still amazes me: we spent so much time together in that room, chatting, giggling, jumping on the bed, dancing, doing all the things sisters do, and I had done all of those other things with her but had just not noticed her doing any of this organizing and cleaning work. For seventeen years. How? How is that even possible?

And my heart genuinely aches when I think of that now: this young girl, just a year older than me, who had been carrying that quiet labour since she was small enough to reach the lowest shelf, while I danced alongside her and saw nothing.

The Brilliant Girl Who Couldn’t See

Here is the part that I find both humbling and fascinating: I was, by every conventional measure, a very smart girl in grade twelve. I was the school topper, I was preparing for IIT JEE (one of the most competitive entrance exams in India) with every fibre of my being, and that preparation was my entire identity, my big purpose, the important work I believed I was born to do. And yet, with all that intellectual horsepower, I could not see that my own cupboard didn’t organize itself.

In 1999, psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris ran one of the most famous experiments in the history of cognitive science: they asked people to watch a video of a basketball game and count the number of passes, and while the viewers were busy counting, a person in a full gorilla suit walked right through the middle of the screen, and roughly half the participants did not see the gorilla at all.¹ The phenomenon they identified is called inattentional blindness, and it describes exactly what happened to me: when our attention is deeply consumed by one thing, our brain literally filters out everything it deems irrelevant, even things happening right in front of our eyes, even a sister folding clothes two feet away.

I have myself run a version of this experiment many times in my classes and workshops over the last sixteen years, and I find it fascinating every single time. Over the years, I have been studying different facets of our thinking (and feeling) related to this phenomenon and today, thanks to a wakeup call by my 19-year-old son, I am exploring attentional blindness, once again, but in the context of household chores.

Here is the crux of what I want to talk about in this article: how even intelligent, well-meaning, high-achieving people can be completely blind to the work that holds their lives together, even as they benefit from it every single day, and why that blindness is (1) a deeply human psychological pattern that deserves both compassion and interrogation and (2) a cultural pattern of celebrating certain kinds of work over others that needs to be changed.

An Entire Ecosystem of Unseeing

You see, my sister was only the beginning.

When I trace the full arc of my life honestly, I can see that there was an entire ecosystem of people quietly compensating for what I couldn’t (or didn’t) do, and I moved through that ecosystem for decades, benefiting from it at every turn, barely pausing to notice.

In school, I had sweet friends who helped me out when I forgot things, lending me notes, covering for my disorganization in small, generous ways that I accepted as naturally as breathing. During college and hostel life, I had friends who lent me their notes and books, who kept track of due dates and exam schedules for themselves and for me, who essentially ran my academic calendar because I was too immersed in whatever I was immersed in to manage my own. I had friends who helped me tidy my room, who made sure I got up in time to eat, who came and pulled me away from my creative flow to make sure I didn’t miss dinner, who let me piggyback on their systems of laundry and tailors and shopping and all the other invisible infrastructure of daily life. And over the years, there have been flatmates and neighbours and family members and a list of very precious house helpers, each of whom carried some portion of the invisible work that kept my life running while I was busy doing what I considered the “important” stuff.

There is a concept in psychology called hedonic adaptation (sometimes called the hedonic treadmill), first described by Brickman and Campbell in 1971, which explains how our brains adjust to consistent positive conditions so quickly and so completely that those conditions become our invisible baseline, our “normal,” and we stop experiencing them as something someone is actively giving us.² I adapted to the care and order that surrounded me so thoroughly that it became the air I breathed, and I only began to notice it later during periods of its absence. A clean home feels like nothing; a dirty home feels like a crisis. The work is only ever visible when it disappears.

The Story I Told Myself About “Important” Work

You would think that the grade twelve revelation would have been enough to change me, and in some ways it did land (I understood, intellectually, that my sister had been doing this invisible work), but I carried a deeper story inside my own brain (we call these mental models) that the revelation alone could not touch: the story of what kind of work deserved my attention and what kind didn’t.

Instead of building my muscle of household management, I navigated around it for years, simplifying my lifestyle in clever ways (outsourcing, delegating, keeping things minimal) and also, if I am honest, telling myself an internal narrative that sounded something like this: “This is not what I am born for. My intellectual and creative capacities are too precious to use them for mundane tasks like keeping a home running.” (I am cringing even as I write that, but honesty is the foundation of this article, and one of my reasons for writing it is that these narratives have to change).

Having studied psychology and organizational behaviour for years, I can now see that story for what it really was: a product of what researchers call the cultural devaluation of care work. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology on goal-congruity theory (Diekman et al., 2017) shows that domestic and care-oriented roles are systematically undervalued across societies, because there is a deep, historically constructed hierarchy that places “productive” work (work that generates wealth, status, intellectual output) above “reproductive” work (work that maintains life, nurtures bodies, sustains homes).³ The story I told myself for years was a culturally reinforced narrative that runs particularly deep for high-achieving people, because we have been rewarded all our lives for intellectual and professional accomplishments, and nobody ever gave us a gold star for folding laundry.

And I will be honest about something else that I think many high-achieving people will recognize in themselves if they are willing to look: there were always people around me (family members, partners, helpers) who picked up the background work, and my success would have never been possible without it. They were the infrastructure, and I was busy being the skyscraper, never once looking down at the foundation that made it all possible.

The Slowdown That Opened My Eyes

For most of my adult life, I had this enormous force inside me: this ability to just power through situations, to tune out the clutter around me, to let the mess be someone else’s problem and focus with fierce intensity on the work I considered meaningful. My body, my fierce sense of purpose, and my ambition all supported that tunnel vision for a very long time, and until very recently, there were always other family members doing the household management work that I was so cheerfully ignoring.

And then, over the last couple of years, menopause changed me. My biology slowed me down in ways I had no say in, and in that slowdown, I started spending a lot more time at home, and I began (for the first time, really) to play a more active role in the day-to-day activities of maintaining the home. Before that, home beautification would be a once in a while project for me – visioning, restructuring, designing… even implementing but then letting someone else do the work of the actual day-to-day operations.

And it is in the doing of it (the actual, daily, hands-on managing of a household) that I finally began to understand what I had been blind to for so long: the sheer scale and complexity of the work that keeps a home running. I actually put “Home CEO” on my vision board last year, and this year, I am truly living it.

The Organization Running Inside Every Home

Think about what household management actually involves: giving holidays and leave to helpers and planning around their absence, ordering groceries and estimating the right amounts to cook so that food doesn’t go to waste, coordinating multiple people’s schedules and preferences, setting standards of cleanliness and maintenance, giving positive appreciation and constructive feedback, delegating tasks clearly, handling the inevitable day when someone calls in sick and the whole system needs to be reorganized on the fly. This is true operations management with several interrelated variables, dependencies, and real-time adjustments, and it is precisely the kind of complex systems thinking that any MBA programme would teach with great seriousness if it were happening inside a corporation rather than inside a home.

Sociologist Allison Daminger at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published foundational research in 2019 (expanded in her 2025 book What’s on Her Mind, Princeton University Press) identifying that household labour includes a vast layer of what she calls cognitive labour: the work of anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring outcomes.⁴ Her research showed that anticipating and monitoring are the most invisible stages, because anticipation is the work of creating the to-do list itself, and monitoring is the quiet vigilance of making sure everything actually got done. Even with household help, even with a full team, this cognitive labour runs constantly in the background for whoever is managing the home, and it deserves to be seen as the skilled, demanding work it truly is.

The irony is not lost on me that, despite having a PhD in organizational behaviour and spending years teaching it, I barely noticed the organization that was quietly running inside my own home.

The Mirror

And then, into the middle of this awakening, my son comes back home as the official representative of the university of life that he has always been.

He is nineteen, he plays Ultimate Frisbee for India, and he has been away at hostel in College for the past year. When he came back for summer vacation, I could feel the contrast immediately: the laundry doubled, the cooking expanded, sticky shoes appeared by the door, sweaty socks and athletic clothes piled up everywhere, and someone (me, this time) was picking it all up, adjusting grocery quantities, recalibrating the entire household rhythm around one energetic, completely oblivious human being.

I have been getting really angry and irritated with his behaviour this last month, and then I realized that I was exactly like him at his age,…and even afterwards for many years. I know he is a wonderful person, and I love him, and yet a part of me gets really angry when he can’t see the background work I am doing to keep this a wonderful and safe space for him to just flit in and flit out of.

And I want to call out something here: I know from both the research and my own wider reading on this topic over the last year that this blindness is especially common among high-achieving men, and the literature on invisible labour documents this gender difference extensively. But I deliberately will not make this article about gender, because I myself was a woman who was equally blind. This is a human pattern, and the compassion I feel toward my son is the same compassion I am learning to extend toward my younger self, who simply could not see what she had never been taught to look for.

It was watching him that brought me full circle to the science I have been teaching all these years. I found myself thinking about inattentional blindness again, and about all the other research on why capable, intelligent, caring people can be so thoroughly blind to the labour that holds their lives together.

Making the Invisible Visible

Eve Rodsky, in her bestselling book Fair Play (2019), built on Arlie Hochschild’s foundational concept of “the second shift” to create a system that makes invisible household work tangible and negotiable.⁵ Rodsky’s central insight (drawn from interviews with over five hundred men and women) is that it is impossible to value what remains invisible, and that the path to equity begins with seeing, naming, and fully owning the work, from what she calls Conception through Planning to Execution. What struck me about her framework is that she discovered something counterintuitive: couples were happier when each partner fully owned fewer tasks from start to finish (rather than splitting everything fifty-fifty, which encourages scorekeeping and fuels resentment), because it was the cognitive load (the conceiving, planning, remembering, and managing) that was truly exhausting, far more than the physical doing.

And this connects directly to what I’ve discovered in my own home: even when someone else does the physical work, the cognitive labour of managing that work (of maintaining standards, of ensuring the groceries are ordered and the meals are planned and the leave schedules are covered) is itself a full management role that deserves recognition and respect.

The invisible gorilla experiment ends, every time, the same way: we replay the video after telling the participants about the gorilla. And once the viewers finally see the gorilla, their faces change with bewilderment, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. That is where I am now, and I suspect that if you have read this far, something in this article might have shown you a gorilla in your own life.

What I Am Learning

I am writing this from the middle of my learning, from the messy, humbling, sometimes joyful, sometimes frustrating process of building a relationship with my home and my household that I should have started building decades ago.

This is, genuinely, my primary area of personal (and spiritual) development right now: the deeply personal, deeply delayed work of learning to see, value, and participate in the labour that keeps a life running.

And I share this because I know I am not alone. I know there are brilliant, accomplished, kind-hearted people reading this who will recognize themselves in my story: people who have spent their lives focused on their own “important” work while someone else quietly kept the lights on, the food warm, the clothes clean, and the home standing. Recognizing this pattern is really about the genuine expansion of awareness that happens when you finally see what was always there, and you feel both the grief of having missed it and the gratitude of finally being able to see it.

Your current calling might not be to get your hands deeper into the everyday work of your own living (like mine currently is), and that is OK. I am not against delegation or outsourcing. We would not have a functioning society (or homes) without it. My ask of you is that you begin to ‘see’ all that invisible ongoing work and allow your brain to begin a new relationship of acknowledging it AND the people who do it for you.

I also ask you to join me in changing society’s cultural narrative that domestic work and regular home maintenance chores are less useful, meaningful, or purposeful than any other work. My brain fell into that trap and it has taken me so many years to start breaking out of that early conditioning.

To my sister, who organized my cupboards for sixteen years without a word of complaint: I see you.

To my mother, who was so busy holding everything together that she, too, didn’t notice who was holding the cupboards together: I understand.

To my son, who cannot yet see the invisible hands that maintain his world: I have been exactly where you are, and your moment of seeing is closer than you think.

I had a rich conversation this morning with my son and we came up with new laundry processes that include him hand-washing his muddy socks and the creation of colour-coded buckets for separating sweaty sports clothes. I am looking forward to this new experiment as a prototype, and I am keen to see which aspects of it might work in this fascinating home playground that I am now the CEO of.

Person by person, brain by brain, I hope that we can reshape the longstanding cultural narrative that discounts home maintenance chores as something ‘less than’.