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Speaker: This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Diana Roe Roberts, a commercial and finance executive. And I'm Mia Northrop, a user experience designer, researcher and writer. We're on a quest to make life admin more bearable.
Speaker: We want to minimise it, automate it, share it and delegate it because it takes up too much time and too much headspace. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. We all have these powerful tools and information at our disposal and we want to make them work for us. Before we get started, let's clarify what we define as Life Admin.
Speaker: Well, for me, life admin is all of that stuff that needs to happen to make our lives work. You know, paying the bills, the banking, insurance, the kids and all their activities and schedules and the logistics of having a social life. I think I used to be able to manage it all with my Filofax and the Leverage folder and a bit of a wall calendar. So I found my Filofax the other day in the back of a cupboard.
Speaker: And I was incredulous that my whole life fitted at one stage in this little B5 document. I had my contacts in there, I had business cards, my diary, I had my projects listed out, all sorts of lists. And now my life is scattered across my phone, my iPad, my laptop, filing cabinets, lever arch folders, wall calendars, it's, you know, exploded.
Speaker: We conducted a survey to find out what all of our friends thought Life Admin was and the sorts of things they thought it included were financial tasks, comparing products and services and setting them up, paying bills, insurance, utilities, getting your dreaded tax return done, paying your car rego, organizing your banking and even maintaining things around the house. And it also extends to things like making medical and dental appointments for yourself and your family members, your kids.
Speaker: organizing digital photos, filing documents. I think that was the one of the most out of control aspects for people's lives when it came to administration. There's the whole family schedule management, the logistics of who needs to be where, where and all those extracurricular activities and organizing tradespeople for that home maintenance or things that are going on around the house.
Speaker: So Mia, let's talk about why we've decided to start this project, Life Admin, Life Hacks. What's really inspired you to think about it? The fact that our lives are quite different. We followed different trajectories. We went to high school together and we went off to uni and you were very determined about what you were going to do. You had a clear idea of what you wanted to do and had this amazing career and lived overseas and got married quite early, had two kids.
Speaker: I have done lots of part -time work and contracting and freelancing in the last couple of years, especially. And my life isn't especially complex. We don't have lots of responsibilities, but we had that weekend away, didn't we, where we realized we spend way too much time thinking and stressing about life admin.
Speaker: Yeah. I think we both, you know, in our friendship group, I think we're both considered to be quite organized, but it's really interesting that sort of now in our life, somehow things have just got a bit more out of control and less organized. So I think it's a really good time for us to just take stock. Yeah. And we also mentioned the fact that, you know, juggling the load with your partners and making it feel more equitable and a little less resentful will also be a very good thing.
Speaker: That would definitely be a good thing for me. I guess also as a user experience designer, I couldn't help but look at this as a design problem and think, okay, so are we using the wrong tools? Do we have the wrong resources? Are the processes not as efficient as they could be? Like where are those problems?
Speaker: How can we tweak this so that life admin isn't such a big deal? Well, I think I used to be completely on top of our life admin, even when we first got married. And I think it's particularly because I have that financial background, so I didn't feel frightened or wary of taxes and superannuation. But somehow as our life has just got more complicated with kids arriving and I think technology's also moved on. But my systems haven't really caught up with those changes.
Speaker: And life these days is truly more complicated because we have so much more choice than previous generations. So for example, in Australia, electricity and gas and telephone companies have all been privatized. And whereas our grandparents or previous generations would have had
Speaker: One bill to pay and one provider got out their little checkbook, sent it off in the post. We get to choose which provider. We get to choose which product from that provider. We get to choose how we pay, how frequently we pay. And we have more expenses. We have, you know, car parking permits to park out the front of our houses. We've got a gazillion different permission forms and health detail forms that we have to send off for our kids.
Speaker: got mobile phones and internet plans and streaming. And none of this existed a few generations ago. And all of this means more expenses, more bills, more forms, more emails, more letters. And you know, Mia, how you mentioned trying to make the load more equitable. I think I had kind of a light bulb moment when I saw that cartoon you should have asked
Speaker: It's by a French cartoonist, Emma, and she put some words around my frustrations. And I think it's the same argument I have with my husband over and over again. And she called it the mental load. But I guess one of the things that thinking about our life admin and the systems around it that's made me reflect on is that I've created systems and processes that I had designed for myself. And I've never really thought about how I'd better design the systems for a team of two.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a nice way of putting it. A team of two. So perhaps you've partnered up with someone and you'd like to share the mental load of remembering and managing all the admin more equitably.
Speaker: Or perhaps your parents and your kids paperwork and craft and their digital photos have gotten out of control. Or perhaps you started to take on some of the admin for your parents or a family member who needs your support. We want this podcast to be able to help you save your time, your money, peace of mind, and perhaps introduce a bit more household harmony.
Speaker: And I guess I'm doing this selfishly because I really want to develop a new system and start afresh in a system that's designed for today's environment technology and so that my husband and I can actually share the load. Yeah, I think the idea is that we want to get on top of it once and for all and just have things humming along. So we want to develop a system that's going to be more efficient and deliver that peace of mind and that harmony.
Speaker: What we're going to do is address a life admin high of the week and a life admin low of the week. Yeah. And each episode will also address a topic in deep dive. So it might be into filing systems or how to handle digital photos. We'll also discuss the tools or a book or whatever resources we've been using or reading that are helping us establish this new and improved system.
Speaker: So that wraps up our introductory episode. If you'd like to join us on our life admin journey, please head to our Facebook page, life admin life hacks to follow us and share your thoughts on what we're doing and feel free to post any comments or certainly post suggestions that we might be able to use. We hope to see you there.
Speaker: Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks .com. If you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app.
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