Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
031: Tiny life admin habits
691 Plays4 years ago
This episode will inspire you to find the small steps necessary to hack your life admin in challenging times.
This episode addresses the challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the dilemma of feeling like extra time at home should lead to some major life admin overhauls versus the economic, emotional and physical impact of living in this limbo state.
They acknowledge that the answer may be small steps and incremental change, which build over time to something substantial.
Mia and Dinah discuss:
- using the current crisis as a time to think about what you wish to change and becoming clear on your aspirations
- the key steps in BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits and how these habit formation principles can apply to life admin
- how motivation, ability and triggers work to form new habits, and that realising you first need to learn a new skill and simply practising it can be a huge first step
- the small steps they have been taking to improve their life admin during isolation including changes to scheduling, meal planning and digital photos.
Podcast: The One You Feed, Eric Zimmer
Book: Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg
SHAREPlease head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
Recommended
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 to prove your household harmony.
Meet the Hosts: Diana and Mia
00:00:13
Speaker
I'm Diana Roe Roberts, an operations manager who's recently fallen in love with tiny habits. I'm Mia Northrop, a research writer who has taken many small steps and recently some major leaps and both can change your life.
Impact of COVID-19 on Life
00:00:27
Speaker
This episode will inspire you to find some small steps you can take to hack your life admin. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. We're thrilled to be bringing you Season 4 and thank you for your patience listeners as our hiatus was longer than anticipated. We're recording this in July 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic
00:00:48
Speaker
And I think we'd all agree what a year 2020 is turning out to be. A lot has happened since the last episode we published in April, which we'd actually recorded in February. And our well wishes go out to those of you who are living in hugely demanding situations at this time, if you've experienced financial loss, have had your own health concerns, or been supporting friends and family with health issues, or are grieving the loss of loved ones who've been claimed by coronavirus.
00:01:16
Speaker
For many of this, this is the most testing time to our wellbeing that we've ever faced. And here in Melbourne, we're experiencing our second wave of COVID cases, and so after restrictions eased for a few weeks, we are back under lockdown, we are homeschooling our kids, we are working from home after about four months, and we can only leave the house for essential shopping and exercise.
00:01:40
Speaker
Well, Mia, that is quite a lot going on. But for you, that's just the tip of the iceberg, isn't it? There's been some other things going on in your life which have made this time even more challenging. Well, yeah. So just for additional context listeners, I separated from my husband of 15 years and I've moved house once last year and then most recently during lockdown. So now I co-parent our two primary school age kids and we have a 50-50 weekend week off custody arrangement.
Societal Pressure During the Pandemic
00:02:10
Speaker
Yes, fair to say that life looks very different to this time last year. Some of it expected and some of it previously only seen in science fiction movies. Very true.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's been a lot of change. Everyone copes with change in very different ways. And in the media, social media, the buzzwords of this period, really, the word unprecedented, the word uncertainty and pivoting all seem to be just in everything you hear and read.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, I was quite pleased that that's not how you started off this section. To be honest, I thought you might start this episode by talking about unprecedented times. I tried to leave that word out.
00:02:53
Speaker
And so it's interesting that, you know, people have been pressured to make the most of this time at home, to use the lack of the commute, the fact that we might have more flexible working hours, or you might have unexpected downtime if you've been stood down or furloughed or retrenched. There's been all this sort of thing like, oh, now is the time to get fit and declutter your house and perfect your sourdough recipes and sort of optimize your life in all sorts of ways. Has that been your reality, Diana?
00:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's a really interesting point, Mia, because a few people have said to me, why aren't we, you know, pumping out those life admin podcast episodes because people have got so much time that they could be working on this stuff at the moment. But my experience has been so different. So, you know, I think that's saying that we are all going through the same storm.
00:03:41
Speaker
But we're in very different boats is really apt for me. At work, we've experienced an incredibly high demand for our services and the challenges of working from home have been huge.
Feasibility of Life Admin Overhaul
00:03:53
Speaker
So for me, I've been working longer hours than ever.
00:03:56
Speaker
coupled with trying to homeschool my two children and also my husband's work has been exceptionally busy. And so I don't like to complain about the fact that we're both still employed, you know, both getting paid whilst others are in obviously much more difficult financial circumstances.
00:04:13
Speaker
I do think that for some people, this time has proved incredibly hectic and stressful.
Advocating for Small Steps
00:04:19
Speaker
And so tackling a major overhaul of your life admin might not be the right thing for you at the moment. So I think it's important for us to bear that in mind as we think about where to go next.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah. And there's very much two sides to that coin. Yes, we might have more time, or there might be some kind of convenience to being at home. We've also got the load of dealing living with family members 24-7. No privacy, no solitude. Or you might be someone who's living alone, which I found for one week, I am completely alone at home for seven days. And then the next week, I have the kids by myself for seven days. So that's taking getting used to.
00:05:02
Speaker
having to work in a different way and just managing the fact that we are living in a global pandemic. So this might be a time when you're just aiming to maintain some good habits and regular activities, let alone introducing new ones. So what we thought we would talk about in this episode is some ideas on perhaps some small steps you can take to reset life admin.
00:05:23
Speaker
without needing to think about having an enormous overhaul.
Tiny Habits and Life Admin
00:05:27
Speaker
And we also thought we'd talk about some of the small steps we've been taking to improve our life admin during this pandemic time. Yeah, we want to talk about how you can approach change in a way that is sustainable and tolerable at the moment.
00:05:41
Speaker
I listen to this podcast called The Wolf You Feed. It's run by Eric Zimmer. It's one of my favorites. And in episode 343, he did this mini episode called On and On It Goes, just acknowledging the fact that the pandemic and the academic downturn and this spotlight on racial justice, he says, it feels like a lot of crisis is going on now. The word crisis derives from the Greek word
00:06:03
Speaker
crisis and credo, which means a separating. And the very root of the word crisis is that there are times of severing from old ways and states of being. And it's an opportunity to ask yourself what do we need to separate from and what needs to be left behind. And he goes on to talk about this term liminal space. He says, liminal space is a waiting space. And it does feel to a certain extent that what is happening for coronavirus is this waiting. We're waiting until we can emerge back into the world.
00:06:32
Speaker
And it's a place where we can go from what was to what's next. It's a place of transition. It's this season of waiting and not knowing. So liminal space is often considered a very fertile space and that's where transformation takes place. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of business as usual and wait patiently on this threshold.
00:06:52
Speaker
And for this time to be fertile, we have to actually inhabit the space, allow yourself to feel the fears and the doubts and difficulties and pay attention. And this space is often called crazy time. And if there's one, you know, another term along with unprecedented and uncertainty and pivoting, it's crazy time and strange days. They keep, you know, they're the words that keep popping out.
00:07:14
Speaker
The metaphor that I think of and that he mentions in this episode is the caterpillar and the butterfly and the process of going into the chrysalis for that sort of waiting time. That is the liminal space. I thought that was a nice way to sort of frame where we all might be at, to have a think about, you know, what are your aspirations? What do you want to change?
00:07:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's so true. And I've been reading BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits while this lockdown's been happening. And his process for developing new habits really starts with that idea of making sure you're really clear on what your aspiration is. I had previously read James Clear's Atomic Habits, but I think Tiny Habits is much more useful when we think about how to approach life admin.
00:08:03
Speaker
Tell me about tiny habits. What's the structure or the process that BJ Fogg outlines? I've always loved his name, BJ Fogg. I know. It is a great name, isn't it? It's obviously a little bit complicated, but if you wanted to step it out in six steps,
00:08:20
Speaker
The first thing he talks about is making sure you're clear on that aspiration. So what we've already talked about, but what's important to you. So if you're thinking about life admin, really thinking about the specific aspiration that you're looking, do you want to feel organized? Do you want to make sure that dinner's on the table on time? What is the actual aspiration that you're talking about?
00:08:44
Speaker
Once you've really clear on the aspiration, think about what are the options for the behaviours that you could take that would actually achieve that aspiration. So often the challenge we have with aspirations is they're so high level that it's really unclear about where to take action. So really think about the actual steps you could take.
00:09:04
Speaker
And then you might need to think about learning a new skill so that behavior might be something you're not familiar with. So the first step you might need to take is actually improving your ability to be able to do that step. And so he talks about once you've done that, thinking about starting really tiny. So what's the smallest possible step you can take?
00:09:27
Speaker
And I liked that bit of the book because he talked about starting a flossing habit, about flossing your teeth. And he talks about just start with flossing one tooth. It's like, don't go from no flossing to I'm going to floss two times a day, seven days a week. He's like, just floss one tooth.
00:09:43
Speaker
And the research bit of that, the learning part, might be deciding, am I going to go with the toothpick? Am I going to go with those little flossy sticks? Am I going to use flossing tape? That might be the first step, just making that decision, deciding what's right for you, and then just committing to flossing one tooth.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, and celebrating success every time you achieve that very small step. And so building on
Building Abilities Through Tiny Habits
00:10:07
Speaker
it. So he also talks about them thinking about the prompt to remind yourself to actually do this habit and then celebrating success, victory and building on it. And I really like the idea of this celebrating success and celebrating those really small victories. Don't feel like you need to wait till all of the digital photos are sorted to celebrate success.
00:10:29
Speaker
Just celebrate even those very small successes. Exactly. You don't have to wait till you've done the Boston Marathon to celebrate the fact that you now are a runner. It's like the fact that you got up and trotted around the block a couple of times a week. You can celebrate that. So what for you, which bit leaps out to you as being the most crucial bit of the process to crack?
00:10:51
Speaker
So the thing that has really inspired me to think about some of my challenges in life admins is this idea of thinking about the small step can just be learning the new skill. So then you can reduce the mental effort to do that life admin task. So doing the research in and of itself and thinking about learning. So for example, if setting up a shared driver cloud storage system is something that you've decided is an action you want to take.
00:11:20
Speaker
to achieve your aspiration. Think about, for example, learning about how to use Google Drive and practicing it like saving documents or really just practicing seven times, saving something might be a huge first step.
00:11:34
Speaker
in moving you towards that cloud storage system. Yeah. And for me, I can't think about meal planning and cooking with dinner because that for me was just the daily challenge of getting a meal on the table. It's hard for me to crack. And I realized that was for me, that was that ability step of
00:11:51
Speaker
I've actually got a really small cooking repertoire. I don't know how to make that many things. And so just practicing the same recipe week in, week out, until I know it off by heart. It's turning out how it's supposed to turn out and just focusing on that and building that ability that helped establish the habit of cooking more regularly. And even something like getting one of those meal kits like HelloFresh, where I was giving you those instructions and trying techniques.
00:12:19
Speaker
Aha moments when I was making some things was like, oh, I didn't realize I was supposed to be doing it like that. And again, building the ability, build the confidence. And then, you know, it's easy to do something more regularly when you know you have, you know, you have the confidence in the ability knowing how to do it.
Digital Photo Management Tips
00:12:36
Speaker
Sounds so basic. So Mia, did you have life admin goals that you thought you'd be able to achieve during this isolation COVID times?
00:12:45
Speaker
Oh yeah, digital photos came up for me as well. I thought, finally, how many years have we been talking about this? I'll have plenty of time to do my digital photos. I haven't even thought about that. For me, I spent some time thinking about what was in my calendar. Everything, you know, grinds to a halt.
00:13:03
Speaker
And I had to think about, all right, I mean, I now need to exercise differently. My original habits of going off to a body pump class or a Pilates class or relying on exercising with other people, all of that had to change. And for a while I did nothing. It was just all exercise just stopped. And I started to have to think, all right, I need to dial this up. But I moved house.
00:13:28
Speaker
Even the fact that I had a different house and I couldn't exercise at home in the same room, I would have exercised at home just through me. It just made me stop exercising. I couldn't get my head around, oh, now I'm going to have to exercise in this space. And that feels weird. And so I'm not going to do it.
00:13:46
Speaker
It was that all or nothing. If I can't do it like I used to do it, I'm not doing it at all. So small steps of, okay, I'm going to go for a run. I don't really know where to run around here. So I'm going to research it, raise that ability factor so I know where I can go running and where there's a track that's the right distance for me. So I haven't accidentally launched myself on some 9K run.
00:14:08
Speaker
So things like that, food shopping, meal planning, same thing, new house, new kitchen, new supermarkets, new markets, new schedule, shopping for myself for a whole week and then flipping to shopping with kids for a whole week. Again, just taking small steps, meal planning,
00:14:29
Speaker
a week at a time and then expanding that to a two week time frame and just taking small steps to know, you know what, I'm just going to go to the supermarket, get stuff there, work out where my other options are later and know that I don't have to solve everything immediately. I can do it sort of week by week and take it on that way.
00:14:51
Speaker
How about yourself? Well, I actually use this Tiny Habits book to really inspire me to get cracking on my digital photos. And you know, definitely only small steps so far, but I really realized that I needed to actually decide on the system we were going to use. So I realized from reading Tiny Habits, I actually need to work on my ability because I don't know what to do.
Swapping and Celebrating Habits
00:15:19
Speaker
The task just feels so overwhelming. So my first step is simply going to be just to do a bit of research on what systems could I use and to try out a few and decide which one I'm going to use. So I knew that my aspiration was to be able to relatively easily produce photo books of our holidays in particular, but also other key events.
00:15:41
Speaker
But I knew that one of the blockers for me was being able to get photos from my daughter and my husband, because if I don't get photos from them, I'm never in any of the photos if I just use my own photos. Alright, so in terms of getting it out of their devices. Yeah, so I realised what I actually needed to do was set up a really easy way for them to share photos with me in a systematic way so I could get to them easily. And I realised that just setting up shared albums
00:16:09
Speaker
on the iCloud using my phone was such an easy system to create and then to create the folders in a very
00:16:17
Speaker
specific event. So for example, to say, I'm setting up a shared album about your 13th birthday, please share all of the photos you've got that you liked from your 13th birthday into that folder and make it so simple that the folder was a very short event so that it can become a massive task. It just became a small step that they needed to take to be able to get that album working.
00:16:43
Speaker
And have you ever, have you done any other sort of habit swapping or resetting? So one of the other things that people often talk about is finding the time to do this kind of stuff. So that's another thing that I took from this idea of the tiny habits was replacing a habit that I used to have with this new new step or this new task to sort out my digital photos.
00:17:06
Speaker
So I used to scroll mindlessly through Facebook in the morning while I was having my coffee. And also sometimes in the evening when I was on the couch watching TV with the kids, particularly if it was a show that I wasn't that keen on. So I used the screen time settings in my iPhone to limit my Facebook time to five minutes a day.
00:17:27
Speaker
So as soon as the warning came up on my phone that my five minutes was over, that was my prompt. OK, this is digital photo time. Start working on your photo project. And even if I could only do it for a few minutes each time that prompt came up, it really made I made quite a significant progress because I was doing just a little bit every single day.
00:17:48
Speaker
So that's your trigger. So that's your new trigger for this. It's the end of Facebook time, iPhone, get it out of here, little message that comes up. Yeah, so it was such an easy step to take. And I realized that I was probably spending 15, 20 minutes a day on Facebook. Now I'm spending five minutes on Facebook and 15 minutes a day on my digital photos. That's quite a lot of time over a week to actually start making some progress in sorting things out.
00:18:14
Speaker
And usually my husband and daughter are sitting there with me in the morning having breakfast. So I get them roped into it too. I've just started this album about our trip to Bali. Do you want to add some photos to that? And they often will do it right then and there. And have you found that it doesn't take much time to build momentum? Like after a few days, you realize, oh my gosh, I've got through several hundred photos already. And that sort of is helping build your motivation to keep going.
00:18:41
Speaker
It is. And it's also inspiring me to do some of those photo book kind of things on the weekend. So to take the habit and really build on it and extend it and just say, wow, now I've got all these albums set up so quick to do a digital photo, like a photo book and have it printed because the albums are already organized into groups of, you know, 20 or 30 photos. And so you can very quickly automatically populate a photo book and send it off to print. So pretty exciting to get those photo books arriving in the mail now.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, well, everything arrives in the mail now. So we'll put a link out to BJ Fogg's tiny habits in the show notes.
Conclusion and Resources
00:19:18
Speaker
I know I borrowed it from the library. It's really useful read. And we're going to try to include some of that behavioral science about starting small into all our future recommendations around life admin, because we realize that, you know, getting started can be 90% of the challenge.
00:19:36
Speaker
So we're going to try and structure the recommendations and the suggestions and the steps so that it reflects this sort of latest thinking about how you make change and how you embed habits. So good luck out there with this chrysalis period, this liminal space and changing some of the things that you're aspiring to.
00:19:55
Speaker
So we hope these hacks will inspire you to make some small changes in your life admin during this time of metamorphosis in the pandemic. So our top hacks are to think about what your aspiration is and just pick one thing that might have an impact and to start there. Also consider that you might need to start by improving your skills or learn a new system or
00:20:18
Speaker
some digital techniques, but that's still an important step. And celebrate success, no matter how small, and everyone, be kind to yourself. 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.
00:20:44
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.
00:20:58
Speaker
When you love someone, seeing them struggle with their mental health can be one of the hardest things in the world, especially when you know they need help, but don't know where to turn. That's why 988 Lifeline is here. 988's trained crisis counselors are available 24-7 by phone or text to provide you with the resources and support you need to help the people you love. No one should have to struggle alone. Call or text 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline day or night 988.
00:21:27
Speaker
has a new number.