Life admin / mental load - let’s have your outsourcing inspiration!

A repetitive, rough meal plan which cuts down on cooking. We also eat the same thing for two dinners in a row, for example.

A few SOS dinners always in the cupboard/freezer so a meal can be on the table even if you’re back late / arriving home after a holiday / whatever.

If something sounds uncomfortable, unnecessary, expensive and/or frankly even not fun at the point of offer/invitation, just say no then. (Rather than saying yes and dreading it and hating yourself in the weeks that follow.)

I’m baffled by the meal prep videos. I suspect the secret might be irradiated vegetables or no tastebuds

I wish I could do this but I can't. Radio maybe, but I find it impossible to watch TV and do anything else at the same time except eat! Even that is a bit distracting and hard. I'm very impressed at that level of multi-tasking.

I have sent you support (not sarcastic!) I would not be impressed with a PA company that couldn’t use the correct spelling

I am down to 4 days a week now (although still 35 hours) I have teenagers so tend to do all my cleaning etc on my day off. When I worked FT I had a cleaner and an ironing lady. But purely because my partner can be offshore for 2-8.weeks at a time. Loads of companies in my area do gym/protein meals delivered. About £7-9 a serving but I've not tried it. I cna see why people would though. Surely they a private chef gives you more work since you have to order the ingredients etc? I definitely find cooking a way of decompressing so I don't think I'd rate that much. on pay day I do all the bnak transfers to savings etc so all the finance admin done in one go. I just do renewals for things when they are first due. I don't find any of it too taxing but my boys aw 16 and 12 so don't need as much attention as wee ones!

Ha, crossed posts on Charlie Bigham! He'd be thrilled!

Alongside my regular job I work part-time as a childminder and general 'mother's help' for a couple of high earning friends and acquaintances who are really stressed.

I've noticed a few things and here's what I'd say to them, though I won't as it would be rude:

You're trying to do too much. Have more downtime, don't keep on going on holiday/staying with family/having people stay over. You're constantly knackered.

Instead of paying me to batch cook, it would be just as good to buy fancy ready meals, eg Charlie Bingham. Much cheaper and you wouldn't have someone else in your kitchen.

Have more routines and reminders. (I have a list of "things to do on Sundays" eg sort uniform for the week, clean fishtank, and the same for the first day of the month, eg. Look at budget, put air in tyres etc. I'm a single mum so every job is on me).

Take more time for yourself then you might get some valuable perspective on ways to make life easier or just unwind. Your high income could allow you a lot more quality of life than you're getting. Have a bloomin massage once a week.

Have date nights if possible (relevant to the end of my own marriage)

Even though you have a cleaner, get everyone to clear up after themselves, otherwise you're having a couple of tide hours twice a week then living in a mess the rest of it.

That's way out of most people's reach. But for busy single parents or both parents in FT work, I think it helps to use some healthy ready meals like Waitrose curries or Charlie Bigham or COOK, with fresh pasta or filled pasta and a ready made fresh pasta sauce and bagged salad. That way, several dinners per week need almost no prep. Same effect but less expensive than a private chef.

You need a family command centre which in my case is a combination of a whiteboard on the wall, Google calendar on line and a large A4 diary open on the kitchen island. It is very satisfying to put things due on the whiteboard and then rub them off.
For instance you may have an email stating that the house insurance will auto renew on x date, but I personally have to check the money has actually been taken for peace of mind.

I don’t think I’m in the same tax bracket as some of these suggestions but something I’ve found super helpful is used a shared calendar app! We no longer have the “are we busy this day?” or “you didn’t tell me that!” conversations as we can both see and add to the app. If it’s not in the app it’s not happening (or if we end up double booked the one not on the app is the one we don’t do!)

Its particularly useful for things like “did you book the cat into the vets?” because we get notifications when group events are added

You can also add in solo events so useful for me to put in eg hairdressers so DH doesn’t ring halfway through wondering where I am!

making time to invest in relationships with parents who might swap childcare with us

You sound like 'Amandaland'!

Well done you for having the time and brain space for this stuff. Some of us can manage without help and others need help. We’re all different.

We've all capable of doing what we need to get by in life.

I outsource a lot of this stuff because I work very long hours in a high stress job plus do various voluntary roles, have elderly parents needing help themselves and have three kids and a dog

Cut your hours down and chill. Why are you doing voluntary roles when you're struggling to cope?

Stop referring to everyday life as "the mental load" for starters.

We also have the same diners Mon-Fri which takes away any planning. Monday is pasta, Tue is curry, wed is nachos, Thur is sausages and tatties/something out off the freezer and Friday is pizza! At the weekend we make different stuff if we can be bothered.

We use the tasks app to keep a running shopping list and because we eat roughly the same stuff we have a list to buy on Monday and a list to buy on Thursday and then a list for irregular stuff like washing powder and so on.

We have a joint email address which we use for all house stuff so renewals, reminders, quotes, logins etc all go to that email address. There's a Google calendar and Google drive associated with that email which we put all appointments in and save any documents in drive. No hunting for evidence of a no claims bonus or insurance info!

I don't quite understand how a PP divides up doctor and dentist appointments, don't you just make another dentist appointment when you pay for the one you just had?

Well, I think mental load is a real thing. My dp and I both work full time in demanding jobs, but it's generally me who's juggling work with planning dinner and whether to stop for ingredients, thinking about if the dc have their PE kit or lunch money, making time to invest in relationships with parents who might swap childcare with us, noticing whether we've seen gps recently and remembering their medical appointments, and a thousand other things. It isn't nothing.

Luckily my dp can see it, and we've been on a journey together to make things more equal. He uses a lot of reminders on his phone to think about things that in the past he wouldn't have considered.

My tip for this thread is that setting a regular pet food redelivery takes away a job.

I'm a lone parent of 4 so the whole load is on me.
I agree about the online shopping pass. I pay £7.50 a month for unlimited deliveries which helps massively. I pay for someone to mow my grass ( not much of it but still gets out of hand and I hate doing it ).
I'm not a fan of batch cooking but I do prepare a meal in advance of if I know it's going to be a busy evening etc and I can ask one of the kids to put it in oven.
I have had people in to do jobs that I could perhaps do myself but really don't have the time or inclination eg painting the downstairs loo.

See, this is the kind of tip I’m here for. I hate changing the beds. I don’t know how it hadn’t occurred to me to get the cleaner to do it for me. Thanks!

Well done you for having the time and brain space for this stuff. Some of us can manage without help and others need help. We’re all different.

I outsource a lot of this stuff because I work very long hours in a high stress job, plus do various voluntary roles, have elderly parents needing help themselves and have three kids and a dog. I need help with life stuff and have the cash to buy it. Others have less cash but more time/brain space, or are just better able to cope. Mental load might be guff to you, but you do understand that everyone’s circumstances are different, right?

Back on topic, a friend of mine swears by her virtual PA. She just pays for the hours she needs. The PA does things like pay bills, research insurance renewals, put school and social events in the diary etc. I haven’t tried it because I think it only works if you hand over all of your logs ins etc, which I’m not comfortable with, and I think it probably takes as long to instruct someone to buy a kids birthday party gift as it does to order something from Amazon. But my friend loves it.

Well apart from being significantly less financially well off then OP I never understand the whole mental load.

Diary has all information re: school holidays, appointments, holidays, trips away, medical appointments, car appointments, birthdays and so on.

Check it on a Friday. Plan anything that needs organising for the next week.
All bags etc are packed and kits sorted for the week. Shopping ordered etc. Done and dusted. No more thought needed and all four of us know what is going on.

House is cleaned regularly by us and surprisingly we all survive and are fed. Just takes a small amount of planning.

If booking holidays, activities or meals out is stressful dont do it. Simple.

And me! 😆

I can manage my own life admin but draw the line at anyone else such as neighbours and randoms. Earlier today I was sorting out my Tesco shopping (a job I absolutely loath) when someone tapped at the kitchen door. It was a neighbour wanting something. I told her I cant open the door there are bags of shopping on the floor to be sorted out. Come back later. If she does she will find the drive gate locked and no way to access any door without being on one of my cameras. I wont be answering. Oh dear, I forgot all about you/didnt hear you.

At 82 weaponised incompetence/deafness /poor memory works a treat.

Absolutely agree, especially the whole school group WhatsApp chats. I saw on a post someone suggesting adding their husband so they could see just how much goes on, but isn't the chat group usually just a repeat of information the school sends out anyway? Apart from the year 6 chat where parents had to organise the leavers party and vote on options, the other years it's pointless as long as you are on the school mailing list. All messages get sent via them, the parent group is purely screenshots of information that is readily available (term dates calendar off the website for example) and mums getting into a frenzy over nothing!

Doing less is rarely on these list, there is less load if you and the family do less. The kids don't need endless afterschool activities which require outfits and lifts, pick 1 each. There is less to tidy and clean, if you have less stuff in the first place. School whatap groups etc can all be ignored.
Finding a tricks for the things that bother you the most is helpful. Cleaner, ironing, meal boxes all help. Although a chef, butler and chauffeur would be great, Id need a huge lottery win!

I have outsourced the floor cleaning to a robot hoover and the preclean tidy to DD8. Ours was quite cheap and dumb so it needs to be tidy before it can start but the reward is a clean floor.