If he doesn't really care that much about the state of our kitchen floor, it isn't surprising that he spends less time cleaning it than I do. So perhaps, rather than putting my energy into bemoaning the housework gender gap I should just learn to care less about the state of the damn floor. Cat Rodie This is a strategy that works for feminist writer Tiffany Dufu, who recently published a manifesto urging women to 'drop the ball'. Speaking to Jenni Murray on the BBC Women's Hour podcast, Dufu explained that housework matters more to women because we are conditioned to think it should matter more. "For most of my career I was a staunch advocate for disrupting gender stereotypes in the public sphere … but the irony was that at home I didn't question the gender stereotypes that were operating. Publicly I was Rosie the Riveter – but privately I was on Stepford-wife autopilot," she recalls. Dufu explains that she suffered from "home control disease" – a conviction that everything should be done in a particular way. For her, this included seemingly trivial things like all the hangers facing the same way in wardrobes and all the towels being folded the same way in the airing cupboard.

The breakthrough came when she reached the point at which maintaining her high standards at work and in the home became impossible. And, shock horror, she started to drop some balls. It turned out to be life-changing. "I discovered that the world didn't fall apart," she says. Dufu then began to "drop the ball" more strategically. She let some stuff go and stopped trying to do everything to an impossibly high standard. So does this mean that rather than expecting (hoping?) men will pick up some slack on the domestic front that women should merely lower their standards? Well ... it might be slightly more complicated. Dufu notes that for many women, "standards" are strongly attached to values. For example, you may believe that in order to be a good partner, wife or mother you need to have an immaculate kitchen floor. Therefore if you don't mop the kitchen floor you will see yourself as a bad partner, wife, mother… (human). On top of this is the perceived judgment we feel from the outside world and the risk that others will share the view that our grubby floor leaves us lacking.

But what if we were to reframe our mindset? "If the floors are dirty it means that I haven't got time to do them. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad wife or mother. It's not lowering your standards, it's changing the definition," says Dufu. Of course this doesn't mean that Dufu has let her husband off the hook entirely. She has created a system that ensures he takes an equal share – but in dropping some balls, she has also lightened the load, freeing up precious time and energy. In practice this works via a household management spreadsheet that details every single task required for the smooth running of the home. There is one column for Dufu, one for her husband and another one – perhaps the most important – that is labelled "no one". Items marked "no one" are things that the couple have mutually agreed not to do. "We update it every five to six months. Right now the car washing is in that column – the car is a mess and we've decided that it's OK. Folding the laundry [is in the "no one" column] we just pull the clean clothes straight from the basket," she says. Loading

It sounds like dropping balls could be a game-changer. Yeah, there will always be blokes that don't want to pull their weight, but that doesn't mean we should pull it for them. I'm hopping on the Dufu bandwagon, and I'm starting with my kitchen floor, which I don't have time to mop.