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087: Staying on top of life admin
3.1k Plays11 months ago
Mia and Dinah talk about what it means to be 'on top of things', how to diagnose why you might not be on top of things, and the essential tools, mindsets and processes to adopt to get on top and stay there.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Life Admin Life Hacks'
00:00:00
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 Dana Roberts, an operations manager who has learnt the hard way that when my life admin is out of control, I'm not a very easy person to be around.
00:00:22
Speaker
I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer who's inspired by the transformation stories that our listeners, readers and members share about conquering life admin.
Strategizing Life Admin for 2024
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks.
00:00:35
Speaker
We're kicking off 2024 with fresh eyes on how to elevate and sustain your life admin game. So in this episode, we'll talk about what it means to be on top of things, how to diagnose why you might not be on top of things and the tools and processes to get in control and stay there.
00:00:53
Speaker
For this episode is brought to you by our new monthly momentum digital calendar. Subscribe to our calendar of life admin activities and live your most organized year yet. This calendar integrates with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Calendar and any iCal compatible calendar tools to serve you up essential life admin activities for the year ahead. There are monthly, quarterly and annual tasks covering one off and recurring life admin activities.
00:01:19
Speaker
by preparing your tax return by the deadline, comparison shopping reminders for major household expenses, nudges to check your finances, checklists to help with back to school prep, all of the things. Head to lifeadminlifehacks.com and subscribe to master your schedule and master your life admin.
Digital Tools for Life Admin
00:01:38
Speaker
So Mia, one of the things we hear most commonly from people is that when it comes to life admin, they just want that sense that they're on top of things. Yeah. I think we can all agree with that idea that life feels good when it's not chaotic and we're not having to react to and cope with just a series of unanticipated events. It's just chaos is stressful and it's tiring. And it really keeps us focused on the immediate and short term.
00:02:04
Speaker
So we never get to longer term or more important projects because we're always just, you know, in whack-a-mole mode focusing on the urgent. Yeah. And in contrast, when you feel like you're on top of things, you feel organised, you feel confident, you feel like you know what's going on and you can effectively manage whatever comes your way. Look, we can acknowledge that there's plenty in life that is out of our control. I love that saying about, you know, about the surf.
00:02:28
Speaker
Can't stop the waves. But you can learn to surf. And I guess that's really what we're talking about in this episode. And really what we're saying is you can prepare for these predictable life admin tasks that we all have to deal with. Yeah. So I think we're all clear on why we want to be on top of things. But Diana, the million dollar question is how do we do it?
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the key elements of staying on top of things is actually knowing what's coming rather than constantly feeling like you're being blindsided. So we talk about life admin being like in two types, everyday life admin,
00:03:04
Speaker
the stuff that's going to keep going every week, every month, or every year. It's usually cyclical versus life event life admin, which has kind of more one-off things that happens when you get married, when you have a baby, when you get divorced, when you buy a house. Those are kind of significant life events that generate a whole heap of life. That's right. And that's what we tackled in the book. We really covered off the everyday life admin activities
00:03:29
Speaker
that you need to plan for and have the right tools for. Because when you have that everyday life admin humming, it's much easier to cope with the life events that come your
Routine vs. Event Life Admin
00:03:38
Speaker
way. So, you know, we know we're going to need to pay bills. We need to clutter our houses because the stuff just keeps on coming. We need to plan meals and buy groceries and manage the kids' logistics and school comms. We have to do our tax. We have to manage our super and retirement funds.
00:03:55
Speaker
you know, make health appointments, et cetera, et cetera. It is all pretty predictable. It's all known territory. So the key here is, you know, I guess to be the empowering frame on this is we can be proactive. We know it's coming and so we can prepare in advance.
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah. The reality is it's going to have to get done eventually. And so being on top of it and having a system to deal with it makes it much more effortless and less stressful. Yeah. So life events can also generate predictable life. I mean, the life events themselves might not be expected. So, you know, if there's suddenly someone with a chronic illness or something terrible happens, or maybe you have a surprise baby that you don't like planning, like these events,
00:04:41
Speaker
generate predictable life admin. And so there are lots of resources out there. There's this podcast, there's millions of websites that tackle things like, you know, buying a house, moving house, getting married, changing jobs, or dealing with the fact that there's a chronic illness. So there are also resources you can draw on and they outline the steps involved and what you can do to make it smooth yourself. So obviously this requires some research, but then you can apply the same system and tools you use for your everyday life admin.
00:05:10
Speaker
to manage that extra life admin.
Essential Tools for Organization
00:05:12
Speaker
Yes, but what are these systems and tools? What are the ones that you need to have in place? The first one is really having a mental model, like an understanding of what actually life admin is so you can recognize it for what it is. And I do think it's really important to distinguish life admin from housework and from parenting and childcare.
00:05:34
Speaker
because it is its own beast. And I think often when it does get conflated with the two, it causes confusion about the amount of work that needs to be done in the household. Yeah, housework is by definition, cleaning, cooking and laundry, which in the grand scheme, I mean, they obviously they take a lot of time, those activities, but it kind of pales into comparison to how much life admin you have and the sort of erraticness that they can be behind the life admin.
00:06:00
Speaker
So yeah, there's definitely this different, there's life admin bucket, there's the housework bucket, and then if you have kids, there's a whole other childcare bucket. Firstly, once you've got that mental model or the understanding, then we start to talk about some of the actual tools you need to deal with it. So the first one that is absolutely essential is a digital calendar where you schedule all of your life admin activities to give them visibility and get a true account of your commitments and availability across your family.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like one of the key practices is to really get real about how much time you have in your day and to have a calendar that reflects what you will actually be doing. And for some people, it feels like overkill to put in, you know, on Wednesday and Saturday, I need to do laundry for half an hour or an hour. But that is time out of your day that you don't have to be running around after kids or to do work or to do all the other things that are responsibilities for us. So
00:06:57
Speaker
putting in some of those everyday life admin activities like the laundry or like your hour of power or like the fact that you have to sit down and meal plan or plan a birthday party, whatever it is. All of those things belong in the calendar so that when you're looking at your calendar, you can see
00:07:12
Speaker
your commitments and understand your true availability. So you can say no to things basically, or yes to things, you know, fun things that come your way. And I did, it was interesting to hear one of our course participants yesterday talking about scheduling and time to actually check her email and realizing how much time that took and that if you don't have time for it in your day, that's when it can get out of control. So yes, depending on what season of life you're in and your amount of life admin, that will really help you think about what you need to schedule into your calendar.
00:07:40
Speaker
One thing you definitely need to have in that calendar is an hour of power. So it is probably weekly or fortnightly depending on the amount of life admin. Really an hour to focus to do the chunky life admin tasks that you can't slip in between other things. And that hour of power really gives you that confidence that you know when you've got big life admin tasks to do, you know when they're going to get done.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, that peace of mind of knowing that's dedicated time in the week to do that is wonderful and you can actually come and do your hour of power with us. If you head to the website, go to our resources section and you can sign up for our weekly workroom and you come and do it alongside us. It's fabulous. It's crazy how productive you are when you're just sitting there with another group of people and everyone's powering away. So come and sign up.
00:08:28
Speaker
So the next key foundational tool is really a password manager. Now, I think the temptation for a lot of people is to use the password manager that's in your browser or in your phone. But what we're talking about here is actually making a bit of investment and getting a tool like Keeper
00:08:44
Speaker
that can save all of your passwords, but also add form-filling data. And really that means it'll be able to move with you seamlessly between your devices, between a work machine, a home machine, a new machine, a new account, new phone, and also allow you to share that information with other members of your household.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, I worked with a coaching client this week to set up password managers across all of her devices because it can be painful. It's technical. We're not going to lie, but it can be done. And it's worth it because then she had her kids, her partner, all with the same password management system so the kids could access all of their games across their various consoles and devices. And both of her and her partner were equipped with the password to do the life admin they needed to do without having to bug the other person for details or
00:09:31
Speaker
or have a task delegated their way simply because the other person didn't have access to a certain account. Yeah, that definitely used to be the problem in our house. I held all the passwords and therefore all the responsibility. So the ability to share those really makes sharing out tasks way easier. OK, and the next one is thinking about having a dedicated email address for your life admin that puts all of your life admin away from your personal or your work so that you know when you're looking at that email, you know what you're looking at.
00:10:01
Speaker
and to accompany that, a cloud storage system to file any of those documents that you're going to need to keep for a bit longer that you don't want to just, you know, save in the email archive.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah. And this came up in the community this week because someone was saying how, you know, they set up this separate email account and it's the only email account where they can achieve inbox zero because, you know, it's just the providers, you know, organizations, electricity, whatever, bills coming, and he's able to work through the emails, process them quickly, and just have the little dopamine hit of, yes, you know, that
00:10:34
Speaker
helps you feel like you are on top of things. Nothing says on top of things like inbox zero. Yeah, it makes you feel very accomplished, doesn't it?
Managing Finances and Tasks
00:10:43
Speaker
The next thing is really to have a system online app that allows you to keep your to-do lists, your checklist and your reference lists in a central place so that you can easily add to them, know what you need to get done and have a really clear system for those recurring tasks that might appear in checklists and somewhere to put those ideas and suggestions you might want to keep for later.
00:11:06
Speaker
So having a clear system where you separate those three types of lists, but that's easy to access on your devices and ideally also to share with other members of your family. Yeah, we do deep dives on mastering to-do lists and other apps, so troll through the archives and find those if this is an area that you'd like to get better at.
00:11:25
Speaker
The next thing is really to be on top of your money. There is definitely nothing more stressful than feeling like you don't know what your financial situation is or that you don't have enough money to pay the bills. So having some sort of money management system, a budgeting tool or something to monitor your finances is really essential to being able to keep on top of knowing what's coming in and knowing what's going out and really figuring out where you're spending your money.
00:11:50
Speaker
Yeah, okay. So they're the tools that you need. And I would point people to specific episodes that we have that deal with each of these things, because we've given a lot of detail about how to set them up and what the true benefits are. So this is the first thing, do I have the right toolkit? Do I actually have my environment set up so that I can tackle life admin in a more effortless way and remove all the friction of having to find a password or
00:12:18
Speaker
chasing down things on sticky notes or not having things in the calendar. Get your environment set up.
00:12:24
Speaker
And I think, you know, if anyone's read like things like atomic habits or anything around changing habits or adopting positive new habits, half of it is setting up your environment for success. So this is what this is all about. You want to set up your environment for success. So if you're not feeling on top of things, you might have some of the systems, but it might be worth taking a moment to diagnose what else might help. Yeah.
00:12:50
Speaker
So what I find interesting is this idea of, you know, at what stage do life admin tasks appear on your radar? Like, can you see them a hundred meters out before they're like up in your face and critical? You know, do you know they're coming? Do you have time to deal with them?
00:13:06
Speaker
So if you're being surprised or you can't keep track, you need to sort of pause and think, okay, why is that? Am I not recognizing that this is life admin and it's going to, you know, this is going to trigger a task for me to do? Is your email inbox just overflowing? And so you can't identify things that you need to action or respond to. Do you have piles of unopened mail in your house? And I've certainly worked with clients where we just have to open up a stack of envelopes that's just got intimidating and too hard.
00:13:37
Speaker
but there's always a lot of admin tasks working in there.
00:13:40
Speaker
And sometimes there might be a communication problem with your partner, if you're partnered and they're like either lobbing you things last minute, just chucking a couple of bombs your way, like little time bobs. It's like, oh, great. You could have told me about that some time ago. Or you could be having that, I thought you were dealing with that. Are you dealing with that? Didn't you do that conversation? So there might be a communication problem. You might not just have a to-do list and be writing these things down, or you might not have an hour of power in the schedule.
00:14:08
Speaker
You're going to feel on top of things when you notice incoming life admin before it's super urgent and you have a plan on when you'll tackle it. So have a think about, you know, at what stage of life admin tasks coming on my radar, how can I get a bit more sort of lead time or runway, just mixing metaphors here so that it's not, yeah, you're not in urgent mode. You're not in urgent washing a mole.
00:14:32
Speaker
expire extinguisher mode. Yeah. It's definitely that. But I think one of the other things, and I guess, you know, form a tax accountant here, so people often telling me about the many years of taxes that they've failed to do.
00:14:46
Speaker
So I think that that's related to one of those people that you might be in the past. I think that there's what sometimes people don't recognize is the reason that they're not doing something is because they actually don't know how to do it. And so they get kind of paralyzed by not knowing what the next step is to actually to do the thing.
00:15:05
Speaker
So I do think that then you actually need to start to accept that that is the problem and to take the time to do a little bit of research about what it might be or to ask a friend about how they might deal with it or to seek help from a professional.
Proactive Life Admin Management
00:15:19
Speaker
We'll read our book. Read our book. Listen to our podcast. Of course. We're here to help.
00:15:25
Speaker
So I do think that that is a very valid first step. And I think particularly when you've got large, chunky tasks like due taxes, it's partly like breaking it up into steps, but also thinking about who might you need to ask or what research might you need to do to know how you might need to deal with it. Yeah.
00:15:41
Speaker
And this was like, this was the core part of our journey. Like we had to learn all this stuff. We didn't even realize we didn't know, you know? You're kind of, you're like, I'm a functional adult. I've got a degree. I can, I hold out a full time job. I know how to do this stuff. But in reality, when you look under the hood of some of it, it's
00:16:01
Speaker
you know, understanding, OK, actually, if I use this tool or a third of this website, I've just saved myself three hours. And if I follow this process and just replicate it instead of reinventing the wheel every time and taking so long. I mean, that's that's a major change. So, yeah, we had to learn a lot the skills involved.
00:16:19
Speaker
And I think another thing to think about is have you taken too much life admin on? So if you're single, you've got no choice. But if you're a partner or a family, what's actually shared in your family? What have you delegated to others to do or maybe outsourced? Have you really set some clear boundaries about what you're going to be responsible for and what others are responsible for?
00:16:42
Speaker
I really thought about saying no and saying, no, you've agreed you're going to be looking after that. So I'm not going to leap in and rescue you with this task. Yeah. And for those of us who are signal or co-parenting or solo parenting with life, I mean, you do have a choice about how much you take on in terms of
00:17:00
Speaker
how frequently you decide to do some life admin tasks. You know, there are some things that you think, ugh, in an ideal world, I might give this monthly or quarterly, but hell, I'm just going to do it twice a year or once a year. Or you might think, I'll do it, but I'm going to do it to 70%, not 100%. You know, you just ratchet down the quality and lower your expectations. That's the only sort of way that you can, you know, exert the control that you have in terms of how much effort you can apply to it.
00:17:28
Speaker
reset your expectations if you think you're on sort of superwoman or superman mode trying to do perfection. Just ratchet it back. And it's really interesting the difference it makes you feel when you reframe that as opposed to I'm feeling bad because I haven't comparison shopped my house and contents insurance this year versus I've decided this year that I don't have time
00:17:50
Speaker
And even though I might save some money, I've decided that my time is more important this year and I'm going to do it next year. Like that reframing can make a huge difference in how you feel about yourself and your sense of control. Yeah, it brings that intentionality to it. Instead of just thinking, oh, I let that slide. You're like, no, I just made the decision and you can move on. Nice, nice reframe time.
00:18:13
Speaker
And then I think it's what else might be getting in the way of time to do your life admin. So yeah, definitely something I've fallen into the trap of before is taking on too much in other parts of your life. So helping others before you've helped yourself by getting organized and feeling good. You know, it might be volunteering in your community. It might be too much additional responsibilities at work. It might be helping out others. So it's really important to raise the priority of doing your life admin.
00:18:42
Speaker
as it's key to you getting back that feeling of being in control. And if you do let the wheels feel off, you know you're feeling disarray. Yeah. And some people might think, oh, this sounds a bit selfish, but, you know, I hate to wheel out the oxygen mask in the plane analogy again, but you can't be effective if you're saying yes to everything.
00:19:03
Speaker
and you're constantly deprioritizing this need to actually do your own life admin so that you actually feel on top of things, that you don't feel stressed out, that you don't feel
00:19:14
Speaker
Like you've got this lurking homework and sort of chaos lurking at the door. Another thing, another part of this in terms of what's getting in the way of time to do it is just how consistent are
Consistency and Long-term Success
00:19:25
Speaker
you? You know, showing up each week for an hour might seem like it won't be enough, but it's actually transformative because it's a focused hour where you get to do some of that important stuff. And you don't have to be comprehensive. You don't have to get through your whole to-do list every week. You just need to be consistent.
00:19:42
Speaker
And that consistent effort over the long run is essential to staying on top of things. I mean, consistent effort over the long run is the key to success for most in life, right? If you want to be healthy, if you want to
00:19:54
Speaker
get fit, if you want to have good relationships, it's just that consistent each week and just putting in a little bit of effort. I think that like, that's where, you know, there's this kind of the payoff of doing that as opposed to, you know, when you end up doing a big super session to try and catch up on, on something. And then you have that short moment of feeling in control and then it's gone very quickly because you're not keeping on top of things. So I do think that that's where, you know, being little and often is way better than big batching of these things.
00:20:22
Speaker
And in a similar advice you hear about, you know, nurturing relationships and friendships, it's better to sort of catch up with someone for half an hour every couple of weeks rather than have one weekend away with some friends and hope that that's, you know, going to be enough to help friendships sort of survive and thrive. Is that consistent showing up? That's crucial. So I guess that's, you know, something to work on yourself if that's, it might be just life admin where that's
The 'Art of Adulting' Program
00:20:49
Speaker
falling over. It might be a few different things.
00:20:51
Speaker
But if you want to surround yourself with a group of people who are determined to get on top of things and stay on top of things, then make sure you join the waitlist for our February intake of the art of adulting. We had our first group go through the program last year and we've expanded it to include monthly masterclasses, including decluttering and organizing digital photos.
00:21:11
Speaker
weekly co-working sessions, monthly mindset sessions to deal with procrastination, motivation, and perseverance. Yeah. So instead of a 12-week course, it's evolved to be a monthly membership. So there's no intense time period to work through everything, and yet you still get the accountability and support of the private group. So head to lifeadminlifehacks.com to check it out and jump on the wait list.
00:21:35
Speaker
So we hope these hacks will make life a little easier. Our top hacks are to adjust your radar so you have better visibility of life admin tasks. Aim for consistency over comprehensiveness and take a hard look at your commitments and assert your boundaries if there's too much on your plate. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com. And if you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend
00:22:03
Speaker
or review us in your podcasting app. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.