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056: Define it to refine it
492 Plays3 years ago
It is important to have a mental model of what life admin is in order to be able to approach it in a more systematic way
Mia and Dinah start the episode by discussing how:
- for most people, life admin is a blurry amorphous bundle of tasks - and with no mental model of the different categories and types of tasks is can be difficult to approach or share the tasks in a systematic way
- their definition of Life admin - that it is not housework or parenting but it often overlaps; housework is defined as cooking, cleaning and laundry, parenting is about child-rearing and supports the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of your child; life admin is the third piece of the domestic labour puzzle - it includes the scheduling, booking, shopping, paperwork, and planning that often facilitates housework and parenting tasks, but also has its own areas of responsibility.
- life admin is often conflated with housework and parenting and that can be problematic because it can become hidden which is a big issue as life admin generates a significant portion of the mental load
- life admin often gets more complex and time-consuming at the precise time you have less time to manage it - particularly having children generates a significant amount of life admin
- their recent survey of more than 300 Australians revealed that
- the average Australian does almost 500 life admin tasks each year
- parents grapple with 33% more life admin tasks than households without dependents
- 37% of people do life admin tasks for a parent or adult relative
- most people think the reason their life admin is out of control is their lack of motivation and/or time - but usually, the problem is not having the know-how or system and/or the lack of a scheduled time to do life admin
They discuss the cost of not having your life admin in control including:
- spending more time than is necessary on it
- wasting money - it has been estimated that Australians are paying more than $11 billion in ‘loyalty tax’ by not shopping around.
- cognitive load - stress, anxiety, overwhelm - worrying, scared of forgetting, monkey mind, brain chatter.
- relationship friction - their survey showed that life admin causes friction in 85% of two-parent households
Mia and Dinah describe their framework for life admin:
- that there are two types of life admin - everyday life admin that occurs cyclically or seasonally and event-based life admin (eg getting married)
- that there are four categories of life admin and that these can help you prioritise and determine how you will share them in your household
- household operations eg meal planning, decluttering, paying bills
- personal affairs such as tax, super, other investments wills and health checks
- comparison shopping for plans and policies
- leisure and social planning eg holidays, Xmas, social life, kids extracurricular
- think about life admin tasks by how much time is required to get them done -
- Hour of Power - recurring slot in the schedule for chunky life admin tasks
- 2 Minutes Too Easy - tasks to complete as they arise
- 10 Minute Time Killer - tasks to complete in idle time - include them in a to-do list
Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook, Insta or Linked In pages to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or
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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 Diana Roberts, an operations manager who still uses a hard copy dictionary because I love looking up definitions. I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer.
00:00:22
Speaker
He loves a framework, a model, a system, a monic, a diagram to wrap my head around the essential concepts of life. This episode will help you name it to tame it when it comes to your life admin.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Life Admin, Life Hacks. If you want to embrace the new year, new year vibe that swells from the 1st of January, then pre-order our book, Life Admin Hacks. It's a super practical step-by-step guide to optimizing your Life Admin. You can work through it methodically to refine your whole system or just dip in and focus on the areas that need the most attention. It's available for pre-order now from Amazon or Booktopia or Book Depository where you can request it at your local bookstore.
00:01:04
Speaker
And listeners, we want to let you know that this is our last episode for 2021. We're approaching the Christmas frenzy here in Australia. We know people have less time to listen. So let's all have a break. We'll be back in your ears January 12th.
End of Year Reflections and Holiday Break
00:01:18
Speaker
And we really hope you have a restorative Christmas break and wish you a happy new year. And oh, bye.
00:01:24
Speaker
We all need a very, very happy brand new year. We're all hoping that 2022 will usher a new level of calm and expansion. So we'll see you on the other side. And let's hope no more lockdowns.
Mental Load and Life Admin: A Father's Day Perspective
00:01:39
Speaker
So today's topic, Diana and I will notion with interest, the lead up, the commentary and the lead up to Father's Day this year.
00:01:48
Speaker
I think because of the pandemic and because people were in lockdown all over the place, there was a lot of talk about the mental load and life admin and domestic labor and the inequity of it all, who was doing what, who was sharing what, how women were basically carrying so much more of the load, even though they were working from home and managing home learning in some cases. And we really noticed how the words around life admin and housework and domestic later and mental, they're all sort of bandied around.
00:02:16
Speaker
sometimes used interchangeably, but clearly people have very different definitions of what these things are. And in our own research, we know that when we talk to people about life admin, it is this kind of amorphous mass of stuff to do.
What is Life Admin and How Can We Optimize It?
00:02:32
Speaker
It doesn't have a very formal definition for most people. And when we actually, three years ago, started planning this podcast,
00:02:39
Speaker
and thinking this is gonna be a book, we started to think, okay, so where is the boundary of this problem space? What are we actually tackling? What do people consider life admin? Because until we understood that, we knew we weren't gonna be able to find ways to optimize it and streamline it. And we wanted to share some of that thinking with you because once you actually have a mental model of what life admin is and how it fits amongst the other type of personal and domestic labor that goes on in your life,
00:03:08
Speaker
It's hard to work out what the best approach is going to be for you. Yeah. So in this episode, we're going to talk about how we've developed a mental model of life admin, how that differs from other household and domestic tasks and parenting and tasks.
00:03:22
Speaker
and how defining it will help you approach life admin in a much more systematic and efficient way. I guess to begin with, it's useful to start with a definition of what actually a mental model is. And a mental model is simply an explanation of how something works. So it's this overarching term for any sort of concept or framework or worldview. And this is according to a good definition from James Clear, who's one of our favorite habits people, researchers and commentators out there. So he says, mental models help you understand life.
Complexity and Challenges of Life Admin
00:03:52
Speaker
For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is another example where there's that little pyramid of human needs and it has the essentials down the bottom and then it gets more transcendent. Or you might think of the concept of economies of scale and the way that
00:04:10
Speaker
the more widgets a business pumps out, the smaller the cost per unit. So you kind of have these models of how things work in life. And why they're useful is that there's just this shortcut thinking tool that you can use to make choices, decide what your behavior needs to be. It's just a new way of seeing the world and then you can make wiser choices and take better actions when it comes to life admin. So that's how we started with understanding the problem space of life admin.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah. And the problem space is also an out of control problem space for so many people. You look at that and there are lots of reasons why life admin can be out of control. But often for a lot of people, it's just as it may have mentioned before, this blurry bundle of tasks. No one really knows what they are. They pop into and out of people's head all over the place. There's so many of them. You know, our survey actually identified that the average Australian does over 500 life admin tasks a year.
00:05:08
Speaker
And so often they can feel ad hoc or random. People don't have this mental model of what are the different categories? What are the types of tasks? And so therefore you can't approach them or share the tasks in a systematic way. So life admin is not housework or parenting, but it often overlaps. And housework traditionally is defined as cooking, cleaning, and laundry.
00:05:30
Speaker
That's it. So when you see all those studies out there and they're talking about domestic labor, they're often talking about housework and childcare. And childcare is really focusing on the physical needs of a child. So it's bathing it, it's clothing it, it's feeding it, it's playing with it. Parenting, that's a whole other thing. Parenting is about child rearing and supporting not just the physical, but the emotional and social and intellectual development of your child. So if you think about the domestic labor in your house,
00:05:58
Speaker
You've got this parenting, there's sort of the childcare aspect, which is really the stuff that you can outsource. There's the housework. A lot of that can be outsourced in terms of cooking and cleaning and laundry. And then there's life admin. And that is its own beast. It's the third piece of the domestic labor puzzle. So life admin, this is the scheduling, the booking, the shopping, the paperwork and planning that might facilitate housework and parenting, but it's also got its own areas of responsibility.
00:06:25
Speaker
know, it's the tax and the super and we'll get into what it makes up but there's it's got its own stuff.
Why is Modern Life Increasing Life Admin Complexity?
00:06:31
Speaker
The fact that life admin is often conflated, it's often merged with housework and parenting, it's problematic because then it becomes hidden and it becomes this burden that we all walk around with and don't know how to solve and it's actually the life admin that generates that significant chunk of the mental load. Yeah and I think not only does it generate a significant chunk of the mental
00:06:52
Speaker
load, it also can easily get more out of control because of the complexity of modern life. So things just get more and more complicated, ironically, as you usually have less time to manage it. The complexity of life admin increases across your life as you start to move in with a partner.
00:07:11
Speaker
as you start to have children, as your parents age. And often, you know, in the time you've got more responsibilities for childcare, for caring for aging parents, and more and more complexity of life admin. You know, utilities have now been privatized, so that gives you more choices, got more regulations that you need to deal with. So, you know, now we've even got COVID vaccination certificates, but you've got parking permits. I have to ask, I have to ask.
00:07:39
Speaker
Did you try and download the vaccination certificate to put into your services Victoria? I did do it. I absolutely nailed it. But my husband still hasn't managed to do it. And I laughed because we've got dinner reservations. And I was like, well, you're not going to be allowed to come. You'll have to stand outside until you actually sort yourself out.
00:08:00
Speaker
And we've not only we've got permits and licenses and COVID vac certificates, we've also got more services, certainly during lockdowns. Everyone's had more and more streaming services, more apps, more subscription services. And there's also a lower cost to communicate. So organizations send us more emails. They send us an email and an SMS. They ask us to multi-factor authenticate.
00:08:25
Speaker
All of these things are vying for our attention and response, and it can feel very overwhelming quite easily. During the pandemic, I think it's gone next level with the communication, especially, for example, from the kids' school, that now basically daily sends emails. So, you know, if you think about the life admin that we're dealing with now in 2021 compared to 10 years ago or just non-pandemic times of previous generations, it's off the charts. It's off the charts what we're coping with. It is.
00:08:55
Speaker
And that's really, really a good segue into thinking about there are two types of life admin. There's that everyday life admin that happens day in, day out, year after year, it's never going away, electricity bills, meal planning, all of those things are going to be there all the time, everyday life admin. And then there's
00:09:15
Speaker
life admin triggering events, so things that happen that trigger a whole heap of life admin, like when you get a job, when you move house, or when you get married, like our podcast producer Courtney, so congrats Courtney, but I'm sure she's had to deal with so much life admin from getting married. So yes, there's two types. There's your everyday life admin, and there's life events, and they trigger their own life admin.
00:09:39
Speaker
So as I mentioned before, we recently did a survey of more than 300 Australians. And what we also found from that survey is not only do average Australians do 500 life admin tasks a year, parents grapple with a third more life admin tasks. And I'm sure all of you who are parents won't find that surprising.
Beliefs and Procrastination: Barriers to Efficient Life Admin
00:09:57
Speaker
But not only that, 37% of people also do life admin tasks for a parent or some other adult relative, so no wonder people can feel so overwhelmed with the amount of life admin in their life.
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, so if you're one of our millennial or gen x listeners, which is basically all of you, we have that wonderful thing to celebrate being that sandwich generation where we have children in primary school or school aged children in high school and also aging parents who might require our assistance as well. Again, one of the many reasons why this became a project we were very passionate about.
00:10:33
Speaker
So Diane, I love that you sort of clarified the fact that there's these two types of life admin and the fact that it's gone off the charts. The third major reason why life admin is out of control for so many people is that they also bring some pretty unhelpful beliefs to life admin. Most people think the reason life admin is a struggle is because of their lack of motivation or their discipline.
00:10:56
Speaker
Often when we talk to people, they're like, oh my God, I'm so disorganized. If only I was more motivated, I should just get more motivated about it or I need more willpower. And there's just a heap of self-criticism. They pile on it. It's not really helpful and probably not core to quite problematic. The other big belief is that they think they lack time. The number of people that said, oh, if I just had more time, it'd be fine. I just need more time. But the kicker is at the same time, people don't plan to make any time to do it.
00:11:26
Speaker
They think it can get done in magic time. They think it can just happen whenever in some fantasy time period where they're also, you know, reading more books, learning the piano, practicing French, all those other things that you think, I'll just do it when I'm in the mood or I'll do it when I'm less busy. But we all know that things theoretically can happen at any time.
00:11:45
Speaker
tend not to get done at all. Yeah. And I think that lockdown has really illustrated that because I know that experience hasn't been the same for everyone, but a lot of people have had a lot more time on their hands over the last 18 months.
00:12:00
Speaker
And we know that often for many people, those projects that they thought they just needed more time to get done or those life admin tasks that they just needed a bit more time, they still haven't got done. So it's not usually about time. A lot of it is about know-how and knowing when to do something. Yeah. So yeah, fascinating that in our research, only 4% of people had actually time dedicated in their schedule to sit down and do life admin.
00:12:29
Speaker
95%. There's no set date, no set time, no rhyme or reason. Just on that point of, you know, it's the ability, sort of mastering some of the skills around it. Once you get good at something, it's actually much easier to get motivated to do it because it's not such a massive deal. It's not such a hurdle. So there's some interesting
00:12:47
Speaker
behavioral science wrapped up in the way that ability and motivation and the trios all work together. I think almost all procrastination is about trying to avoid the pain of the task. So if it's not so painful to do, if you know how you're going to approach it and you can just get on with it, then you're much more likely to get started. Yes.
00:13:07
Speaker
So when you don't distinguish life admin from other domestic activities, you don't take stock of the sheer amount of it that exists every day and that balloons around life events when you don't set aside time for it. So when that happens, and this is how we were living before three years ago, you don't explicitly talk about it or plan for it. You don't educate yourself about it and you don't set up systems to tackle it and share it with your partner.
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, we were definitely spending more time than we needed to on task because we didn't have a tool, we didn't have the approach. We didn't know how to choose between different products because we didn't know what the decision making criteria would be. So yeah, that's where a lot of that procrastination came
How can Life Admin Affect Relationships?
00:13:52
Speaker
about. And sometimes there are literally things on my to-do list.
00:13:56
Speaker
that I'd thought about longer, like for months. And it would have taken me like 20 minutes to do it, but I just stared at it and procrastinated about it for a really long time. Yeah. And we were definitely wasting money. Had policies and plans that were out of date and not competitive. And, you know, there's studies that say that Australians are paying more than $11 billion a year in loyalty tax by not shopping around, you know, home loans, private health insurance, house and contents insurance.
00:14:23
Speaker
You know, all of those things can so easily be forgotten in set and forget mode. And if you can save some money on those things, they can be really helpful to outsource or to spend on things that improve yourself or your relationship. And then, of course, that was just sort of carrying this cognitive load of trying to remember everything and being stressed out and anxious and worrying about things, worrying that you're going to forget about things. Just having all that monkey mind, it's hard to shut off.
00:14:52
Speaker
So one of the costs of life having being out of control is really just having this constant distraction where you can't be mindful and you can't relax. And finally, the cost is often relationship, friction and tension. Anger.
00:15:05
Speaker
So when there's unfair responsibilities, that can really cause a lot of arguments in a household. And our survey showed that life admin causes friction in 85% of two parent households. When it comes to life admin, what can often happen is that one person in a relationship can over function. And that was certainly me and probably me too. Leaping to make decisions, take control of tasks for the both of you. And then the under functioning person in the relationship can kind of zone out.
00:15:35
Speaker
adapt to lazy or incompetent stance while the other person might quietly fume and this way of relating can cause lots of negative emotions for both parties.
00:15:46
Speaker
The over-functioner can feel exhausted, exasperated and consider things to be unfair. That's certainly how I felt. And the under-functioner actually can feel unheard or railroaded or feel like their opinions don't matter. And I certainly think my husband used to feel a bit like that. So getting on top of your life admin can really help with your relationship as well. Yeah.
00:16:08
Speaker
And we learned about under-functioning and over-functioning via the wonderful Brene Brown who talked about this book, The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner in one of her podcast episodes. And I jumped on that pretty damn quickly.
00:16:22
Speaker
And we talked about this, we were like, Oh, wow. Yeah. This is some of the things you need to learn about when you first get married. That'd be helpful. Okay. So yeah, the costs are high. We know the costs are high. We know that they're tangible, that they're not sustainable, that they can lead to burnout. Relationship collapse. You know, we also know that when people have life having them out of control, they
00:16:42
Speaker
might hold back at work. You might take leave from work because it's just you just need that extra time to get stuff done and some space. You're not alone if you're experiencing those things and once you get a firmer grip on defining your life admin, you can refine your approach to it. The first methodical way to think about it is, as Diana said, when you're naming it, taming it, you're thinking about it in terms of two types. You've got your everyday life admin, that occurs daily, weekly, monthly, just keeps coming at you.
00:17:12
Speaker
And then you've got those occasional life events that trigger life admin. So everything on your to-do list, everything in your mind right now, the life admin related things is going to sit in one of these two camps.
How to Categorize and Manage Life Admin Tasks
00:17:23
Speaker
And ideally, you're going to be motivated to get your everyday life admin humming and under control because it makes addressing any life events that pop up way less overwhelming.
00:17:33
Speaker
And if you don't have that everyday life admin under control, when a life event does come along, it just tips you into overdrive mode. Some life events obviously have an ongoing lasting impact. So if you have a child, you know, there's the admin related to all of the health appointments that you need and the actual birth and the forms that you start feeling it out. But then from then on, you know, you've got a whole other life to administer.
00:17:57
Speaker
Similarly, if you move house and you move into a bigger house, it might have a pool, it'll be two storey. And suddenly you've got new activities that you need to be doing to maintain that new property. Once you've thought about putting it into those two areas, the everyday and the life events,
00:18:15
Speaker
The second step is thinking about your everyday life admin and putting that into four categories. So these are four buckets that encompass various types of tasks. So the first one is household operations. So keeping your house running smoothly, things like meal planning, decluttering and paying their bills as they come up. The second one is your personal affairs.
00:18:39
Speaker
Those are kind of your finances, your tax, your super, your other investments, but also include things like making sure that you're on top of your health checks or any other medical appointments. And wheels, good old wheels, but you just get the glint. Yeah, they do. The third bucket is comparison shopping. So we talked before about the loyalty tax, but comparison shopping is a thing. It's something you're going to have to really get good at and get having a methodical approach.
00:19:07
Speaker
there's so many things you're going to have to comparison shop for in your life, plans, policies, but also when you buy household items. And the final bucket is leisure. The fun stuff, but unfortunately there's often live admin associated with the fun stuff too. So holidays, planning your social life, getting your kids extracurricular activities sorted, even planning for events like Christmas that come year in year out or birthday parties,
00:19:33
Speaker
making sure that you're on top of that life admin is important so you can have more fun in your life. At this time of year, you know, gift giving, I had a conversation with someone and they were talking about gift giving and they're like, oh, that's not really life admin. I'm like, hell yeah, it is. Cause you got to think about, you got to remember that there's an event, you got to think about the gift, you got to buy it, you got to wrap it. There's a whole sequence of tasks. And if you're the person in your family that does all the gift buying,
00:19:59
Speaker
That's a huge chunk of your mental space and your time. So these kinds of things that are supposed to be fun, Christmas, wedding birthdays, they are fun, but they also work. So yeah, it's worth recognizing that that is a component. Yeah. So once you can start thinking about your everyday life admin in those four categories,
00:20:18
Speaker
will help you put boundaries around it and it will also help you decide whether the tasks in that category are a priority based on what's important to you. So if you think about household operations getting that streamlined is really going to help you predominantly save time. If you think about personal affairs that's going to really
00:20:35
Speaker
impact on your peace of mind and comparison shopping is much more linked to saving money. So also if you think about it into those buckets you can also really decide to put your focus on the things that are important to you at this time in your life. It can also help assign responsibilities
00:20:52
Speaker
You can decide which of the buckets of activities must be shared for logistical reasons, or because of the values in your relationship, or which could actually be 100% allocated to one partner, or which ones just need to be visible to both of you. So thinking about it in those categories can really help with that sharing of the load. And I definitely have friends where there'll be one person in the relationship that are all over comparison shopping. They love it. They love nothing more than going and getting a deal, finding a bargain.
00:21:21
Speaker
Yeah, we all know people like that. All right, so we have two types, we have four categories. Let's talk about the third step of naming it to tame it, which is to start to think about your life admin tasks in terms of how much
00:21:33
Speaker
time is required to get them done. And this is something that we've spent a few episodes talking about because we think it's really crucial. So we want you to start thinking about your life admin tasks in three buckets of your time. And whenever one of these tasks looms onto your radar, you're going to size it and you're going to decide whether it's a two minutes too easy task, a 10 minute time killer, or whether it requires an hour of power.
00:21:57
Speaker
As we mentioned before, most people feel like they don't have enough time to do life admin or that they spend too much time on it, but they don't have a dedicated slot in their schedule to do it. And you'll find that this usually is one of those types of activities when you look at some of these tasks, they actually take way less time than you think you need. So we've got our hour of power. This is that recurring slot in your schedule.
00:22:21
Speaker
where you do your substantial life admin tasks, like comparison shopping, like birthday party planning. If you know that that slot is in your calendar, it actually takes away a whole bunch of worry because you can stop thinking, oh my God, when am I going to get to XYZ? When am I going to have time to do this? And we've all had three o'clock in the morning wakeups when you're like, oh my God, when am I going to get that done? Now, you know, when you're going to get it done, you're going to do it in your hour of power. So pop it in your schedule. On the other end of the scale, there's little tiny activities, the two minutes too easy.
00:22:51
Speaker
And these are the things that when they pop up and they pop off and just pop up out of the inbox, because it's usually someone asking you to do something quickly, respond, fill in a form, and you just do it then and there. You take the naki approach and you just do it. So if an envelope comes in, you open the envelope, you pay it, you read it, you shred it, you recycle it, whatever, whatever's in the envelope usually is quick. Then in the middle, you have the 10 minute time killers.
00:23:18
Speaker
And these are activities where you can find time in the white space of your day to do these sort of medium sized tasks. These are the kinds of things I actually put on my to-do list. So I have a to-do list that's called 10 minute time killers and all of those medium sized tasks get plonked on there. And then I have a separate to-do list that's called hour of power and things I think I need to sit down and either have a discussion with someone about that or reflect or research or whatever that goes on that to-do list.
00:23:48
Speaker
And those 10 minute time killers, these are the perfect kinds of tasks to do when you might reach your phone to kill some time and you end up zombie scrolling on social media or doing something that's not particularly restorative or productive is just filling time. Instead, you can make that time actually a bit more beneficial to yourself and knock over a few tasks.
Benefits of Effective Life Admin Management
00:24:10
Speaker
Yeah. So hopefully all of this, we can bring it all together and think about it as four, three, two, one. So we've talked about the four categories. So the four buckets, household operations, personal affairs, comparison, shopping, and leisure and social planning. We've talked about the three sizes, hour of power, 10 minute time killer, and two minutes too easy. The two types, everyday life admin and life event admin.
00:24:37
Speaker
And the one, the one's you. So you and your life. We've all got better things to do than life admin. So refine it, get it sorted. We guarantee the payoff is worth it. It'll give you more free time, more headspace, more money and more household harmony. That wraps us up for today. And we hope better defining life admin will help refine it in your life.
00:25:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeagminlifehacks.com. And if you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.