The filter is the clearest example of a maintenance task humans are badly built for: cheap, quick, consequential, and on an interval long enough that no natural rhythm reminds you.
Ninety days is the worst possible interval
Weekly tasks attach to a routine. Annual ones attach to a season. Ninety days attaches to nothing — it lands on a different day of a different month every time, and there is no sensory cue. A clogged filter looks fine from the hallway and gets noticed only when the system starts struggling.
So it needs an external memory, not more discipline
The households that manage this are not more conscientious. They wrote it down somewhere that resurfaces it. That is the entire difference, and it generalizes: any task whose interval does not match a natural rhythm needs a system, not resolve.