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093: Graduating from a 'life admin day'
2.8k Plays8 months ago
Transition from a dedicated life admin day to a more efficient approach for better organisation.
In this episode Mia and Dinah delve into the concept of a Life Admin Day and its effectiveness in managing the overwhelming tasks of adult life. They explore the challenges and benefits of dedicating a specific day to tackle life admin tasks and provide alternative approaches for a more efficient and sustainable life admin routine.
For the full show notes, head to Life Admin Life Hacks.
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Transcript
Introduction to Life Admin Efficiency
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.
Guest Experiences with Family Life Admin
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm Dinah Rae Roberts, an Operations Manager, and I know from firsthand experience that when life admin explodes with kids in your household, a life admin day no one could cut it.
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm Mia Northrock, a researcher and writer who remembers when I could fit life admin into half a day once a month. But those days are long gone. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks.
Social Media Insights on Life Admin
00:00:35
Speaker
Recently, we spent some time searching social media under the hashtag life admin to see what would come up. And actually, most of the content that was revealed was about people having a dedicated life admin day.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, so we watched in Fascination on TikTok and YouTube and Insta as people described or walked you through all of the things that they would do on a day dedicated to running errands and working through their to-do list and often doing some housework as well, often doing the laundry and a bit of cleaning.
00:01:08
Speaker
And the common theme across all of these people is that they were child free and they tended to be younger and could comfortably dedicate a whole day to doing life admin. Yeah.
Feasibility of Life Admin Days for Families
00:01:21
Speaker
And so dedicating a specific day to life admin works well for some people. And, you know, that's what we did when we were younger, right? There's lots of reasons why a dedicated life admin day can be a good way to bucket things. But there's also a case for
00:01:38
Speaker
there's a season of life that you get to when it doesn't become the most efficient or practical approach for everyone. So in this episode we're going to talk about while starting with a dedicated life admin day might be a good way to address your life admin. You need to evolve your life admin processes to incorporate them sadly into every week because life admin is relentless in adulthood and there are seasons where dedicating an entire day to it are probably not
00:02:05
Speaker
viable, or even really desirable. Yeah. So
Evolving Strategies and Productivity Tools
00:02:08
Speaker
in this episode, we'll talk about what a life admin day is and the things you could tackle, the challenges of life admin day as an approach, particularly when you have a family, and our alternative approach to dealing with life admin in a more sustainable way. This episode is brought to you by our six-week course, Life Admin Foundations.
00:02:26
Speaker
which gives you step-by-step processes, downloadable editable templates, recommended apps, websites and checklists that boost your productivity and give you your weekends back. Cultivate the habits and processes to get your life had been done with video modules that help you set up foundational digital and organizational tools. Head to life admin lifehacks.com and sign up today. So, Mayor.
00:02:50
Speaker
What is a Life Admin Day? What do we mean by Life Admin Day?
Concept of a Life Admin Day
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, so people, Life Admin Day is a personal day where you get onto your to-do list and you do all the things you've been meaning to do. And often people will have it monthly and they will do some cleaning, they'll do some laundry, but they're doing things like cleaning up their places, getting to chores, going to appointments, you know, all of the usual things, responding to emails, taking clothing to be repaired.
00:03:19
Speaker
replacing things at home that need to be updated, you know, paying bills, all the life ahead and stuff. Yeah.
Proactive vs. Reactive Life Admin
00:03:27
Speaker
And I heard of a workplace recently that gives you like a couple of like those kind of days a year to like deal with those personal administrative tasks. So it's kind of interesting. But, you know, I do think that it could be a good approach to having a life admin day if you are in a situation where you've just got to a stage where things
00:03:46
Speaker
are overwhelmed, your house is like really messy, you know, you're overdue for a whole bunch of appointments. And, you know, you just really feel like you need to spend a decent chunk of time really tackling a bunch of these things to get rid of that feeling of overwhelm. Yeah, I think when you get to that state where life is feeling rushed and you have time to return phone calls or answer emails and you've just been putting off some of those important tasks like, you know, you know, your insurance needs renewing,
00:04:13
Speaker
You know, you need to take the car for an oil change or a service. You know, you need to get to the dentist and this is often the trigger of, okay, I need a life admin day. And it's great because people can recognize that they need to be proactive and dedicate some time to do this paperwork and the homework of adult life and schedule a day where there's nothing else going on. Ideally this on your weekend and you're not taking off leave from work unless they give you specific life admin days to do this kind of stuff.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah.
Productivity Techniques and Rewards
00:04:43
Speaker
And I think that if you do, you know, do this, it might help you, you know, get into the habit of like creating a to-do list that you would then have all the things you want to tackle on your life admin day and think about like prioritizing them that are the most important so that you really get the most important things done. Yeah. So when we looked at the various people and their videos, they were using a to-do list. So they're getting into that habit of dumping their brain into a to-do list.
00:05:11
Speaker
and categorizing them and prioritizing them. And often they're categorizing their to-dos so that they could approach them efficiently. So if they had a lot of running around to do, they'd batch all of those and go and do all the running around in the car at one time. Or if they had a whole bunch of appointments, they'd batch them and make them at the same time and then go attend all of them. So they're prioritizing things. And one of them had scheduled a recurring session. So, you know, we're all about the hour of power each week, but if you don't, you know, when you're younger, you don't have this many,
00:05:41
Speaker
responsibilities and your life isn't as hectic, then scheduling at once a month as the recurring session is also a good habit to get into. So you know you have this time set aside to focus on it and you can stop worrying about when are they going to get to this thing. Yeah, so the sorts of things you might want to have on your list for your next life admin day are like dealing with the email backlog or decluttering your email, including like unsubscribing to email
Challenges of Life Admin Days
00:06:06
Speaker
lists you don't like.
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, this is when you're donating your clothing, you are transferring your photos from your phone to your computer so you can organize them. You're organizing home repairs and you're finally getting to, you know, take the pets to the vet or visiting the doctor or paying bills. Sometimes it's about, you know, having time to go through and updating addresses and moving subscriptions around or canceling things or
00:06:34
Speaker
you know, checking on renewal dates for passports and driver's license, all that stuff that needs to be handled each year. Yeah. And I mean, I think some people think about doing like a whole day of, you know, Christmas shopping or things like that. So it might be in the lead up to big events, birthdays or things where you need a big planning session or something to really look through a list to do with that.
00:06:56
Speaker
What was a key part of a lot of the videos was using rewards as incentive and really tapping into that idea of what gets celebrated, gets repeated, which is my new favorite quote. So there was always like something fun planned for the end of the life admin day, whether it was, you know, all having fun things happen during it. So there was a lot of lighting of candles, buying of expensive coffees and planning fun things to do throughout the day at the end of their day.
00:07:26
Speaker
as motivations and incentives to get you through this day. There was so much candle lighting.
00:07:33
Speaker
And I do think that that's like a good segue into the issues with the all in one day approach. Like the reality is that's hard to be motivated for an entire day to like churn through a lot of boring tasks. And so I do think that there is a risk with a life admin day that you might not actually, you might plan to spend the entire day doing life admin, but you might very easily get distracted onto doing other things.
00:08:00
Speaker
Yeah. I can totally, I hate just remembering days where you've scheduled it and at the time like, yeah, this is going to be great. I get so much done. And then the day approaches and you're just like, especially if it is, it's on the weekend and you're like, depending on the week you've had, you're like the last thing you want to do is spend it doing chores, essentially.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah. It could be hard to stay motivated and get excited about the day and not just think, oh, I'll do it the next day or I'll do it next weekend and keep putting it off. And I think there's some other reasons why a dedicated life admin day might not be the most effective or practical approach for everyone. So
Efficiency of Consistent Efforts
00:08:40
Speaker
maybe we can chat about a few of those.
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the first is if you do have that one day, it's kind of high stakes, right? If you have one day a month where you're doing it and something comes up and you can't do it that day, unexpected events can always disrupt your plans. So what does that mean? Is that going to stress you out and frustrate you if that day then doesn't happen and you don't have many other options to do it?
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think it can feel very overwhelming. I think that you start to put together this list and think that you've got to do everything on this one day. And so it can just lead to, as we talked about, the procrastination, but can actually stress you out. I think the thought that you have to try and do all of this stuff in one day, because this is the only day you've got to do it all in. That's right. And it can just be exhausting, like spending a day doing this thing, running around, depending on what it is.
00:09:32
Speaker
and how much thinking's involved and how much driving around's involved, you can be mentally and physically exhausting to try and cram it all into one day. You might find that you start strong. And you know, it's a good practice because again, a lot of the videos will like do the big complex things in the morning when you're fresh or know when you're fresh and alert and time those activities for that part of the day. But you know, often at the end of an hour of power, I'm like, well, that was good. And now I'm ready to move on to the next thing.
00:09:59
Speaker
The idea of doing alcohol day at that, I'm like, geez. Okay. And I think that the other thing is that temptation is then that you don't do anything else. Don't do life admin at all in between your life admin days, which, you know, I think a lot of life admin tasks are best managed through consistent, smaller efforts. And if you put them off, you know, to your life admin day, it might actually result in a mess or charges or overpaying, and then it requires even more time and effort to address. Yeah.
00:10:28
Speaker
Some things, you know, the deadlines or the urgency or the importance of them might not fit into your monthly approach or your one day, one day and done approach that regularly consistent.
00:10:40
Speaker
ticking away at things is often most effective and going to reduce those stress levels. And I think an important one for me is family dynamics. Like if you really want to share the load with your other family members, you often need them around to participate in this kind of life admin day. So if you are trying to find a day where everyone's available and willing to contribute to like a whole day, I think it can be a huge challenge to find a day that's going to work for everyone that needs to be involved.
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah. And I think this is why I think if when you're younger and or if you don't, if you are child free, then you have a lot more.
00:11:19
Speaker
time, basically, and having a day where you do the life admin, it's a lot more desirable and viable. Once there's kids in the mix, dedicating a whole day of doing anything, and undertaking often, it can be there's a lot of organizing to make that day happen. And they should happen, you should be able to have a day doing whatever you need to do. But relying on that approach to do your life admin, which is so essential and
00:11:46
Speaker
is probably a lot higher once you have kids. It starts to fall over as a good approach. If you've had a week with the kids or a week working and then you get to the weekend, you just want to do fun stuff and being able to dedicate a whole day or the majority of a day to doing life admin is just not what you want to be doing on the weekend.
00:12:07
Speaker
I think there's a few things to talk about here actually. One is also the idea that people live for the weekends and they don't do anything fun during the week and they save up all their fun stuff for the weekend. I wouldn't suggest that's a great approach of living either because there should be fun things during the week that you can look forward to and not just having fun for two days, seven days of our lives. But on the flip side, you know, sprinkling some life admin during the week
00:12:37
Speaker
freeze up the weekend to do more pleasurable things and also do nothing. Another thing to factor in is that having a whole day dedicated to life admin can be a really inefficient use of time.
Task Categorization for Efficiency
00:12:49
Speaker
So some tasks can be addressed much more quickly and efficiently during short breaks or downtime. So dedicating a full day might be really inefficient for those smaller, less time consuming tasks. Yeah. Everyone needs to be aware of the downtime or the white space they have
00:13:06
Speaker
in their normal day and often this is time when you pull out your phone and you're kind of scrolling mindlessly or it's just kind of evaporates and so tuning in to the time and being intentional about your time can mean that you can do these little life admin tasks in that white space and it's not a big deal and it means that when you get to the weekend again you have that clear runway to do more fun things so
00:13:33
Speaker
the idea of saving up some of those smaller tasks or doing a big hit on the weekend when you'd rather be with your friends, with your family, at the beach or reading or exercising or something else, possibly not making the best of some of those little moments of downtime during your week. Definitely. So what we recommend, instead of having a life admin day, so when your life gets busier and so you've got more life admin that would fit one day once per month,
00:13:59
Speaker
really, or if you've got important things that need to come up that you need to address more urgently, or as we talked about, if it's not feasible or desirable to spend this whole day on Life Admin, we suggest approaching your Life Admin and thinking about them into three buckets. Yeah. So this is all about the two minutes too easy, the 10 minute time killers and the weekly hour of power. So when Life Admin tasks come onto your radar,
00:14:25
Speaker
You're essentially thinking about them in terms of size, like how long does it actually take me to do this thing? The smallest is the two minutes too easy where you're taking the Nike just do it approach and you're just doing it immediately. So an example of this would be if an email comes in and there's a bill and you're going through your emails, you open the bill, you pay the bill, you delete the email, you move on. You don't leave it there accumulating, watching your inbox pile up
00:14:53
Speaker
to deal with some big mega session later on, you just nip it in the bud right there, right then.
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, the next category of tasks are what we call the 10 minute time killers. So those are the ones that, you know, they take a little bit of time, but not an enormous amount. And we really think you can squeeze these into those, you know, white spaces in your day, maybe when a meeting finishes earlier at work than expected, or when you're, you know, waiting to pick your child up from an activity, or when perhaps you would otherwise might be sitting scrolling on your phone, looking at social media.
00:15:25
Speaker
really think about if you've got a list, a dedicated list of all of those little life admin tasks that need to be done. So think about one that hit me yesterday ordering the books for school year, thinking about fitting those life admin tasks into those 10 minute white spaces.
00:15:42
Speaker
And then finally, we have our weekly hour of power. And this is a recurring meeting in your calendar where you can sit down and do some of those chunkier life admin tasks. So these might often be the things that you would push aside and wait for a monthly life admin day. But the thing is, these things, too many of them. And I want to spend four hours sitting down, comparing electricity, gas, car insurance, and home and contents insurance.
00:16:11
Speaker
You obviously can spread these things out. But having these hour of power in your calendar each week means you can sit down and approach these things sort of one at a time. You're not going to overload yourself in terms of cognitive overload and decision fatigue. And you can park things on your to-do list knowing that you've got this time dedicated in your week to sit down and tackle it.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah. And sometimes you need to like space these things out too. Like sometimes there's a phone call or a bit you need to, you know, to deal with to be able to go to the next step. And so breaking up life admin tasks into those one hour, like, you know, might take you three, one hour slots over three weeks to get something finished. But often that might be more efficient than trying to do that three hours sequentially when, you know, you might not be able to get the information you need or speak to the person you need to sort those things out.
00:17:01
Speaker
That's so true. And it's much easier to find one hour in a week of 168 hours than to find one day or half a day a month to do this kind of thing. It's a lot more feasible. Yeah. So consistency and sustainability are the core things to think about with your approach to life admin. Yeah. I want you to take on, you know, the Desmond Tutu approach where it's like there is only one way to eat an elephant. It's a bite at a time.
00:17:29
Speaker
instead of sitting down and feasting on that elephant once a month. Yeah. So,
Adapting Life Admin to Life's Seasons
00:17:34
Speaker
I mean, if a life admin day is working for you in your season of life, go for it, but make sure you're making the most of your day. But, you know, if it's not the right approach, think about adopting our more bite size approach with hours of powers, 10 minute time killers and two minutes too easy. Yeah. Potentially going to hit a season of life where you basically outgrow, outgrow having the one life admin day.
00:17:57
Speaker
So we hope these hacks will make your life a little easier.
Engaging with the Podcast Community
00:18:01
Speaker
Our top hacks are to make sure you plan a life admin day in advance to make the most of the time, and to transition from a life admin day to hour of powers, 10 minute time killers, and two minutes too easy when you feel like you're no longer on top of things or want to preserve weekends or days off work.
00:18:28
Speaker
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