Life admin, we’ve all got it.
And I’m not talking about housework either. Cooking, cleaning and laundry are its own kettle of fish.
Four Categories
The Life Admin Life Hacks podcast had an awesome episode on the topic which I thoroughly recommend a listen. They divided life admin into four different categories:
- household operations – meal planning, decluttering, paying bills
- personal affairs – tax, super, other investments, wills and health checks
- comparison shopping for plans and policies
- leisure and social planning – holidays, Xmas, social life, kids extracurricular
Prioritise
Having these four categories in mind can help you prioritise and determine how you will approach each. I admit it can sometimes be painful to think about tackling such stuff after a day’s work. Personally I find that allocating them to a weekend works best. Depending on what’s going on for you and your season of life, it doesn’t have to be every weekend. For some people a Saturday morning slot works best, for others it’s a Sunday afternoon slot. Experiment and see what feels right to you.
I helped a client recently tackle her resistance to doing her life admin. What we did was pop a recurring calendar event for Sundays titled “Life Admin” into her calendar. Sundays worked best for her as the kids would be with their Grandparents. We then prioritised her current load and divided them out across the next month and a half. Over time, she got in the habit of capturing things as they came up in her Life Admin time. This simply meant that every time something came up during the week that fit the life admin category, she’d go into one of the events and make a bullet point in the description area.
Blast through it
I say ‘one of the events’ because although she was on top of her current load, she continued to spread out the tasks depending on due dates and urgency. That way there’d be time put aside for life admin but she wasn’t having to attend to all of them at once, which would undoubtedly lead to resistance again.
She tells me now that when Sunday rolls around, she actually enjoys sitting down and blasting through her tasks. Initially she put aside an hour and a half each week but sometimes she finds that she doesn’t need the full allocation. In those cases she gets a second reward of getting “an early mark”. How good is that?!
If life admin has you tearing your hair out, give me a call. Let’s sort it out and get you set up so you don’t feel this way again!
