What exactly is ‘family admin’ ?

[LuckySeventhWave]

I have a calendar on the fridge door. If there’s a parents evening, after school club or dentist appointment I write it on there.

It takes about 12 seconds.

What are mums doing that warrants ‘time set aside per week for family admin’?

Last night I spent over an hour online sorting out Christmas presents for family friends (and also DH). I do this as he works much longer hours than I do.

But is that really life admin? As in something you have to take time out to do? I cant get my head around the fact online shopping or logging into parent pay or a quick review of online banking counts as an extra chore such that it needs it's own special title.

Ringing around for the MRI scan, Actually taking child to MRI scan, Previous and post orthopaedic appointments, Orthodontic appointments but that isn't life admin. If you're doing the Mri's, orthodontic and orthopedic appts with any sort of regularity, that's part of having a complex child. Which actually is far bigger than "life admin" but def seperate

Driving to football / sport club and watching matches. Homework help.
Helping organise and transport to playdates again, not life admin, its part of childcare.

Buying stationery - 30 minutes per month minimum eh??

The thing around "life admin" is either its added into the list SAHP's do when thry feel they need to depend their life, or its used to explain just how shit their partner is at helping out.

I know exactly what family admin means. I've got a military background. We always called all the shit we had to do "admin"
Fieldcraft admin
Kit admin
Personal admin

It's just a funny term to bunch together a whole list of random tasks. Better than kit shit or personal shit!

Now I've added family admin to the list. Don't have fieldcraft admin anymore though.

My DH now refers to his personal admin. Tres funny!

What is family admin?

It’s something people claim to do to attempt to justify how busy they are. I’ve no idea either.🤷‍♀️ Although there was a poster who said that this included internet research when buying things and best of all, putting all the family photos on to the PC. 😂😂😂

SleepingStandingUp or it helps you come to terms with where the time goes when you're juggling full time work, full time study and 3 children whose needs need meeting but who you also don't want to suffein terms of having well rounded lives because it's not their fault they don't have a sahp.

Obviously time also goes in procrastinating on MN, and that should be cut out.

@Oblomov19
Booking Ds2's Parents Evening took me a good 10 minutes!
Booking my DS2's parents evening:

• realising that my DS was at breakfast club last Thursday morning which was the one day the teacher had a sign up sheet on the classroom door at 9am and this was the only method of signing up for PE
• Catching the teacher in the playground one afternoon and explaining we could only make an appointment after 5.30pm and asking to be just given the latest available slot
• Following day asking the TA and being told we had been given a 5pm slot
• Speaking to the teacher again a couple of days later to say we couldn't make that slot but did she really need to see us, or she could just email me...
• Teacher requests I remind her the week after next and we will try to arrange another appointment

Definitely a 12 second job involving no effort or brainspace...

I cant get my head around the fact online shopping or logging into parent pay or a quick review of online banking counts as an extra chore such that it needs it's own special title.
It's just an easy term to group together all these small tasks that need doing to keep family life running.

It's like saying "why does all the cleaning, tidying, washing and cooking tasks that are just part of every day life that everyone has to do given a special title of "housework" to make it seem like it's an extra chore? Loading a washing machine takes about 12 seconds!

think OP means healthy people making a meal out of booking the odd doctors appointment, not unfortunates

“Unfortunates”? What an utterly distasteful phrase.

Once again people seem to be limited by their own experiences.

Some schools don't have parent pay. So all the school trips,swimming,whatever equipment,school dinners,breakfast club etc has to be cash or cheque with all the forms that come with them.

Some people are under the breadline so budgeting,meal planning, shopping, hunting around for best deals ,switching suppliers is essential.

Some people don't have nannies or family around to help with all the random childcare needs that crop up,or even the usual ones.

Some disabilities require a higher level of involvement with schools,professionals,appointments etc.

Some work places have a no phone policy or access to a computer to enable you to do stuff when things are slow. And many people end up working through their break and/or lunch.

Some people have more than one child,sometimes at different school with entirely different dates/times for everything from parent's evening to when the term end.

And a lot of things can just be jotted down in the diary/on the calendar but they actually have to be sorted and done not just written down.

Gleam my point exactly. Yeah, 4 different conversations to try and arrange a silly Parents Evening.

12 seconds?

WTF is this obsession with how other people spend their time? Trying to justify how we spend our time, or forcing others to justify how they spend theirs (and then sneering at the answers they give)?

I have friends who work full time and have small children. I have friends who are retired and whose children are grown up and have left home, and plenty in between. If any tell me they are tired or busy or stressed, I take it at face value and express sympathy, rather than asking for a full breakdown of how they spend their every waking moment, so I can compare it to how I spend mine.

People do things differently! It is not a competition! Pretending it is in order to put down others or to make yourself feel superior more important is just weird.

Everyone has to do it, some just slot it in with work & don't make a fuss about it Others with more time on their hands make it a 'thing'

Ring GP to make appointment - 2 seconds
Write it on calendar - 1 second
Research/change gas and electric supplier - 6 seconds
Place online supermarket order - 5 seconds
Renew car insurance - 3 seconds
Etc.

I don't spend any more than 30 seconds per week on family admin. Some of you are terrible time wasters.....

Barbarafromoopnorth

I would love to be where you live. 2 seconds must last a long time. That you invest 6 seconds in reviewing your energy suppliers. Amazing really. Takes me 3 minutes to just log in to current supplier and find the years total for comparison.

And you must never adapt and change your groceries to what you might need.

Lucky you! Please share your superpower.

I always remember my mum sitting at the kitchen table every Sunday with the calendar, working out logistics for the following week including hers and my dad's working hours, who would pick kids up, take them to after school clubs etc.. and then getting all the receipts out and sorting finances. This is all automatic online now of course.

Thanks @Winesalot

I was thinking about writing a book. Bit like Mrs Hinch but for productivity.

No reason why none of this stuff should take a few seconds max. That way everyone can be a bit more like me working 80 hours a week with five kids.

BarbaraFromoopNorth

Great idea. While you are at it you can shame anyone else that takes more than a ‘few seconds’ and make them feel that they just are missing the necessary skills to make the very best informed decisions for their family.

Love it! I guess you will make a fortune.

Everyone has to do it, some just slot it in with work & don't make a fuss about it Others with more time on their hands make it a 'thing'

^ this! Those who feel the need to justify what they do of a day tend to make it a 'thing' - the rest of us multi task and get on with it.....

Actually to be fair it does take ages to get a GP appointment now.

1 minute of voicemail telling you options, receptionist will ask what's wrong to direct you to correct service.

1 minute waiting for someone to pick up when you get dialling tone.

The 2 seconds is the amount of time for them to tell you they have no appointments available in the 21st century!

1 minute waiting for someone to pick up when you get dialling tone.
1 minute of a message telling you that you are 13th in the calling queue and your call is important, then 25 minutes on hold before being told there are no slots available and a doctor will call you back later so please stay by the phone all day...

God I spend ages doing "life admin". It consists of budgeting, shopping/research, booking appointments, filing and scanning, opening and responding to post, booking and organising tradesmen, complaints, meter readings, paying bills, researching and booking holidays. I could go on and on and on.

As we are coming up to Christmas life admin increases although I am minimising this this year.

It is also the more one off things like at the moment I am looking into LPAs and wills.

My DH doesn't do any of this. It's all me and takes up a lot of time. My earns all the cash though and I work part-time

I always htink of family admin as filling out the interminable permission slips for DC to do anything at all at school, followed by checkig diaries to see who can go and drop them off for/collect them from/watch them do whatever the permission slip was for, as well as dental and GP appointments (booking a dental or GP appointment round here includes an average of 20 mins on hold by phone as the internet booking is always down and there's no face to face bookings any more. Then there's the inevitable: get the car/boiler/cat serviced?MOTd, chimneys swept, radiators bled, piano tuned, gutters, carpets , oven cleaned, windows replaced, house painted etc - all of which happen once or twice a year but there's a fair few of them and they all need to be priced and agreed and chased and paid for etc. If you add it all up it is several hours a week and if I don't set time aside I forget to do important things like agree that DC can go on a school trip only to find it's booked up because I didn't get round to the family admin.

If I'm in a queue on a phone call I put my phone on loudspeaker and carry on with what I'm doing. If that's housework or just watching TV I don't sit for half an hour doing nothing. What a pointless waste of time.

People do things differently! It is not a competition! Pretending it is in order to put down others or to make yourself feel superior more important is just weird.
But that's what people are doing at both ends of the spectrum.

You've got the "I'm so busy with all the family admin... Look at this list of entirely normal mundane life tasks I've done today" types.
And you've got the "I'm so efficient that I can sort my insurance out in 12 seconds despite being on hold for 10 minutes" types.

Both are a bit ridiculous, but personally I find the first group more irritating as the ones prone to that approach seem to love finding things to add to their list to make it seem whine-worthy.
E.g.
Person A
I've got to do the food shop. I better make a list and see what we're eating this week.
Goes shopping/puts online order in and buys food.

Person B
Just today I've spend an hour researching the best slow cooker meals so I can appropriately batch cook, I've made a full meal plan for the week, then consulted with the children about what snacks they want between their clubs, then put our shop into 4 online supermarkets to compare prices, then ordered them to click and collect, then decided that we really needed to get an ingredient that is only available at a different shop so had to call in via that shop. Then I've come home and audited the cupboards and sorted the tin rotation out and ensured the freezer is stacked according to my personal preference, then consulted my meal plan for the week before starting my batch cooking. It's so exhausting and I've got even got as far as recording the receipt amounts on the colour coded spreadsheet that I have on the laptop so that's a job for another day.

Person A = most people
Person B = the sort of person who loves a good old fuss about how draining "family admin" is.

I dont set aside separate time to do "family admin" or anything, nor make a big deal out of it, but I do have to spend some time every week making sure im on top of all the school texts and emails and the stuff for dd's dance classes. I'm a very disorganised person so if I don't sit down and check everything, I will definitely miss something.