To be stressed out about DH and his portion of the "mental load"

Personally I feel that if you have left a domain of household management to your husband you need to leave it to him even if this involves standards-lowering. I am the equivalent of your DH in my marriage though.

As they say “if he wanted to, he would”.

Being a scientist is all about using your considerable brain power to find creative solutions. He knows this is important to you, he knows it stresses you out and upsets you. What solution is he coming up with to manage things better and ensure he doesn't forget in future.

To be honest all these solutions like setting alarms, writing lists, leaves yet another thing to OP to manage. And stuff like not doing his stuff and dumping his things in a hamper to sort later just leaves OP having to tolerate living in a bomb site and opts him out of family life.

I’d say I can’t make you remember these things. But I am falling apart with the load and furious that you do so little for our kids but treasure your protected focus time with them, while totally not recognising that I get none of that quality time as I’m overloaded. I’m going to leave one evening a week for a while and stay with a friend and you do everything and if it impacts your focus time I don’t give a flying fuck. I am also going to take the focus time opportunity once a week and you do all the house load I do. I don’t care if you have to stay up till 4am to complete it, that’s up to you, I’m not talking you through methods or any of that shit. I will write a tick list, treat it like a mandatory work task and don’t go to bed till it’s done. and maybe then I’ll slowly start to recover. If you just leave the place in a mess with it not done though I will need to increase my time away to balance the load you choose not to carry.

What do you mean you are "prepping his lunchbox?" Is he going on a coach trip with the Boy Scouts?

My husband is also a 'quirky scientist' but he applies the same focus to tasks at home as he does to work and does his fair share. I'm sure your husband is perfectly capable of doing the same, he is just outsourcing the effort to you.

I'm currently going through some health issues and my DH is doing almost all the domestic stuff. You need to ask yourself how your DH would manage if you needed him to.

There are solutions. He (probably with support from you, sorry) needs to find ways of adapting his brain to fix the things that bother you.

Tissues - easy, put a bin right beside the place where piles of tissues congregate.

things like that. Make it easy for him not to fuck up.

As a teenager I was scatterbrained (told things like, you are very intelligent but you’ve no common sense OR you’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on) and I had to develop a whole range of coping strategies and tools to operate sensibly in daily life.

Seems like your DH needs to add to his brain toolbox. Present it as an academic challenge and I bet he’d rise to it.

“quirky scientists that everyone accepts are very absent minded and engulfed in their own world”

Do you live at Kirrin Cottage?

They CAN change. but they have to WANT to. Mostly men like this don’t see the effect on you of their inability to function normally and even if they do, they don’t really care about it because they can’t see how it affects them.

Ask him what would happen if he was this incompetent at work or had a colleague who was?

Tell him you expect him to find a way to ensure he completes his assigned tasks and that if it means that he misses out on family or couple time then so be it. And mean it. No more doing his jobs for him. When yours are done, you relax.

He should be embarrassed. Emptying the bins correctly is not that hard

If you think he's really trying, the obvious solution is for him to have tasks to do which aren't time-pressured (i.e. put the bins out) or where failure to do it inconveniences him the most.

Another thing you/he can do is remove the element of judgment and make things into a routine. Dishwasher goes on every night, even if not full. Dishwasher is then emptied every morning. Bins go out every morning, even if not full. You'll use a few more bin bags, but it will get done if it's built into the routine.

He leaves snotty tissues on the night stand for you to pick up. Ugh, I wouldn't accept it from a ten year old. Leave them fester

JFC. He is not a child. Stop making excuses and tell him to get himself a whiteboard for his list so he doesn’t “forget”

You'll get a lot of replies telling you he just needs to get better at all this stuff and you are "enabling" it. Sometimes there is some truth in that, sometimes it's quite unhelpful.

I can't relate to all of what you describe but I can tell you how we split the load. What is the most helpful-to-you thing he can take on? The biggest bang for your buck? Bins are a poor choice difficult because it's a once-a-week job that takes about 5 mins. Which jobs do you hate most that he would be good at?

We looked at where DH could relieve the most drudgery I suppose. He clears up the kitchen every night without fail, no matter how much stuff has built up there over the day. Even if the breakfast bowls are still sat there, or I have baked, he will do it all without complaint. He finishes with a quick sweep of the kitchen floor and taking out any full bins, if needed and if time allows. The attitude makes a big difference to my mental load - no griping that I haven't cleaned as I went along or anything, just no worries, I've got this, you go and sit down. It takes a chunk of time every evening but it is not difficult. I can rest if I need to, or swipe round with a vacuum cleaner or wipe over a bathroom, or sort some washing.

He would also do most bedtimes on a similar sort of basis. He didn't see the children much in the daytime so it was time with them, and it's a job that takes up a big chunk of the evening and is more or less the same every time, so gave me "back" a lot of time (not that it was primarily ever my job, but we used to take turns).

Another job he took on was doing all the finances for school. I did the admin, but instead of me doing payments and tracking dinner money etc I just asked him to. Another fairly standard alone job which also kept him in the loop with what was happening at school.

I wonder if your system and mine are not that different. Whoever gets to the DW first in the morning does it here, because it facilitates everything else running more easily, but if neither of us manages it in the morning then the dishes just build up on the side and DH sorts it all after dinner. No shaming, no pressure, I just trust him to handle it. Try to avoid having your jobs dependent on him having done his, because that is setting things up for him to wind you up.

Tying jobs to things you already do helps with exec dysfunction. He should find things he already does every day (brushing teeth, putting keys down/taking shoes off when entering house, eating meals) and tack new habits onto the ends of these. Do it every single day for a month and it's got a good chance of sticking. Taking bins out is easier to remember when you have just filled up the kitchen bin than on a random Tuesday, so it is easier to do tacked onto a daily kitchen clearup than from thin air.

With parenting you should both be able to fly solo. If you can manage to do a party or bedtime alone with them, then so can he.

Sorry for the essay!

Do you have smart speakers? I am increasingly forgetful but I live alone so I set all my jobs up as recurring reminders on Alexa so on bin day, Alexa reminds me to empty the bins. It's set so it keeps repeating until I tell her to stop. I have reminders to pay the window cleaner, to book my car in for a service/MOT, renew insurances, etc. Takes a bit of time to set up but at least I no longer forget to do stuff.

Tell him to set a reminder on his 'phone, which tells him what needs doing in which order. There is no reason for him to 'forget'

He "forgets" to put his snotty tissues in the bin? No, sorry OP. That won't fly.

I don’t buy this “through no fault of his own” bollocks, if he’s capable enough to have a job, produce children and get married, he can empty a bin or wash some clothes.

Stop letting him get away with being a lazy waste of space.

yes, also this. Actually, it's a good point. DH can be a bit useless and has had to learn and, for example, I no longer feel in the slightest bit guilty when he's doing laundry at 9:30pm and i'm watching tv - he could have done it earlier he just wasn't organised enough to do it.

This would really annoy me. Sounds like he's happy to be incompetent and a slob at home but would be sacked if this happened at work. Pay for a cleaner

If he literally canot remember he needs a checklist and you direct him to that each bin day or whatever
We all gave reminders calendar alerts he can set them recurring for bin days etc

Drop the rope. Let his clothes fester. Stop doing anything that is his responsibility.

Tell him you're fed up with him ignoring his end of the bargain and you're not picking up his slack any more. Let him deal with any fall-out too.

I think you should split the effort fairly. If he takes so long to do it that you have no time left for ‘us’ (weaponised incompetence much?) then so be it. You have fun with the kids / relax whilst he does his fair share. I strongly suspect under those conditions he will miraculously find solutions.
The key point is to remove the solution that you pick up the slack instead. Then it just becomes his choice what comes next. Leave his tissues (dirty sod), pile the rubbish next to the full bin etc. Not your job. Either he changes or eventually you will be unable to live like this any longer.