Keeping a household running smoothly takes a lot of effort. There are the more obvious physical tasks like cooking meals, taking out the garbage, folding laundry and picking the kids up from school. But it also requires a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes planning, organising, anticipating of needs, decision-making and delegating known as the mental load — an invisible kind of work.

In heterosexual relationships, most of these invisible tasks tend to fall on the mom’s shoulders, even when both partners work outside of the home. Men today may be taking on more hands-on domestic responsibilities than they have in the past, but women are still usually carrying the bulk of the mental load.

“Women aren’t just doing more labor, the labour they’re doing is mentally and emotionally taxing: anticipating and planning for how to meet the family’s needs,” Laura Danger, an educator who facilitates workshops on domestic labor, previously told HuffPost.

“When you consider, in cis-het couples, who is usually keeping the social calendar, signing kids up for summer camps and ensuring the grocery list is planned and prepared? It’s often defaulted to mum. Doctors, teachers and coaches often dial mom first. Even the vet usually calls mum before dad!”

Managing kids' clothes, for example, is a much bigger task than it might seem.

These invisible tasks often take up way more time and energy than meets the eye. One example? Registering a child for school, which artist Mary Catherine Starr, the woman behind @momlife_comics on Instagram, just did recently for her son.

“What went into this registration was so much invisible labour,” she told HuffPost. “Keeping an eye out for when registration opened, going online to fill out all of the forms — which includes locating all sorts of paperwork and medical history— calling the registration office when a technical issue comes up on the website, booking a registration appointment to turn in the rest of the paperwork, scheduling a ‘kindergarten screening’ for the child, taking the child to said screening, texting normal child care provider about child being late to child care on registration day, and rearranging work schedule to accommodate kindergarten screening.”

“All of this takes three to five hours out of an already busy schedule, and if they’re not a part of it, their partner has no idea what went into this,” she continued. “It’s something you simply can’t understand unless you’ve lived it.”

We asked moms which invisible tasks on their plate are more........

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