To not understand claims that life admin is 'not a thing'

[LabradorsInThePond]

I keep reading this on MN threads about organisation, time management etc. And that the life admin tasks of renewing insurances and checking mortgage rates can't take up that much time. But I spend a huge amount of time in the throes of life admin. We live a pretty normal, busy family life. I work 4 days in a professional role and can easily spend the 5th day (or at least half of it) in the throes of dreaded life admin.

My list tomorrow extends to twenty three separate items. None of which involve renewing insurances, but they do include buying clothing items (Scout shirt etc.), paying instrument hire, photocopying medical reports for school, booking airport parking, collecting worming tablets, booking a restaurant, buying zoo tickets, arranging a delivery of flowers for mum's birthday, an online grocery shop, buying a thank you gift, arranging a birthday party, booking a roofer, buying new windscreen wipers, emailing the GP, updating kids' Nimbl cards, finding a way to teach DS about dividing decimals, paying various people online etc.

None of these are yearly tasks, and next week there will be another 23 items to complete. It is relentless. DH does most of the house and long-term financial admin and he's also executing his father's too-complicated will, which makes my 23 items look like peanuts.

Do we just have an over-committed life, or does anyone one else find (what others consider non-existent) life admin burdensome and time-consuming? What am I doing wrong here?

Any normal man can and should be doing all this stuff. My DH has planned and organised our holiday this year (first one in a while so all very excited!) He can take any of our kids for a haircut. He is capable of picking up worming tablets and telling nursery our kids can go to jubilee parties and buying zoo tickets. However, he’s a bit like me and sees all these things as part of daily life and not a huge performance of business.

Performance of business 👩‍💼 😂😂😂😂

I forgot that ‘business’ is where the real stuff happens and domestic life is just silly women’s drama. I also forgot it was 1892 😂

Surely if it's possible to get all of this done in a few minutes while making and drinking coffee, men could do it, right?

Of course men can do this stuff. It really isn’t very hard to book an mot or buy insurance.

Also this nonsense 😂 do you really think the rest of us don’t do most of the things on op’s list? Most of us grocery shop so we don’t starve. Lots of us have been to the zoo. Many people posting here have eaten at a restaurant. We all have birthdays and (excepting a minority of people) usually we celebrate them. The world isn’t split into those exhausted and snowed under by painfully long step by step lists of ‘life admin’ and people sitting starving in darkened rooms because they refuse to go to the shop.

Haha I meant busyness! It corrected since I guess that’s not a word. But yeah just a melodramatic over performance of being oh so so busy. When in reality most of us just do normal everyday things.

@honeybushbunch, excellent post.

Strangely enough, I used to be paid to do life admin for an individual whose professional work was too highly paid per hour to warrant wasting time doing all the little fiddly things that eventually add up to a half day and so etines more, depending on what was going on in his life.

Why would this individual waste precious time applying for a mortgage for a multi million dollar house, researching prices and specs of expensive cars, doing all the planning and booking for his golfing holiday abroad, researching prices for garage door repair and pool maintenance, booking handymen, painters, kitchen installers, researching insurance, talking to a person from the city planning permission department, buying his own flashy ties, chasing down a certain NYC cobbler who made custom footwear for people with huge feet, or making restaurant reservations to schmooze clients when he could pay someone far less than he made per hour to take care of the details?

We as women fail time and time again to realise what our time is worth in money.

And again and again we fall over ourselves trying to be the best little unpaid and unappreciated volunteer ever.

Crowing about how much you can get done while making and drinking a cup of coffee in the morning is an example of why we need to take more time to just sit and think about the big picture.

@DogdAndGin, do men not choose busy lives with children, careers, pets, holidays, house, and all the rest of what is termed adulting?

Why is it women who are keeping all of that ticking over??

Do you get any breaks at work OP? A lot of people on here saying it’s easy to just fit it in, and that’s what you’d have to do if you worked 5 days, seem to be assuming you have gaps in your working day. You may not. I know I didn’t when I worked OOH. Then it really does build up.

And it’s not logical to say that if you worked 5 days you’d ‘have’ to do the admin during those 5 days. If you were so pushed at work that you couldn’t, then you’d have to not do it then and do it at the weekend.

My DH manages to get all his "life admin" done just as easily as I do - without all the drama, lists and complaining about how hard it is.

Like me, he runs his own business, sorts all the paperwork, does his own taxes, sorts his own MOT's and appointments and days off for various things.

He also manages to sort the food shopping, do laundry, mow the lawn and do anything else that needs doing without all the drama that MN seem to attach to everything 😉

Most of this stuff is just life. It only takes over if you let it and choose to take on loads of unnecessary shit that automatically adds to your workload.

Yes, some people will have disabled children or illnesses that require extra work and nobody is doubting that, but the majority of the rest is just "life" - and there's really no need to make it such hard work!

People who are genuinely busy won't have time to post on these threads IMO.

I don't know how they do it. I mean you have to:

• go to your computer or phone
• navigate to a browser
• navigate to MN
• click on a thread
• read the thread
• then there's the mental load of thinking of a response
• formulate the response into proper words
• type out the response
• press post
• wait for the page to load to confirm your message went through

It's pretty much a full time job.

🤣🤣

@mathanxiety I know right? I can't really get my head around people just accepting spending their free time ( like lunch time) whittling away the jobs to be done.

We talk about mindfulness- being in the moment, enjoying life, connecting with nature and others - how the hell are you meant to do this whilst we are constantly chasing our tail?

I manage life admin fine, but I hate the constant to do list.

I agree.

I have pets and also foster small animals so add to your list 90 minutes of dog walking and 30 minutes of cleaning out per day and I don't even consider those things life admin either, they are just my life. Part of the life that I chose. I don't need to take a day off for them.

www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/woman-greatest-enemy-lack-of-time-themselves

@Kanaloa who said it was exhausting work? PP asked what admin a 3 year old could have, I was giving my examples from this week. They also have siblings, again wasn’t the question but as you imply otherwise…

mathanxiety and dreamylemon yes - the performance of efficiency and competency on this thread is staggering - and really it’s just women beating on other women for not putting up and shutting up. It’s depressing.

I repeat my earlier point - if your life is simple enough, or your chores and admin are divided fairly enough, or you are mega-efficient enough, that this stuff is easy for you - then that’s fantastic. Go you. But you might want to take a long hard look at yourself if you feel the need to belittle the stress of other people’s lives - and to gaslight people you have never even met by denying that what they find hard is actually hard. How the heck would you know, anyway? It’s not always the nature of the work - but the sheer quantity of it, or the way it fits into the rest of your life, and everybody is different. Projecting your own moral superiority because it isn’t as hard for you is just bad manners.

and I also love the people who moan about other people moaning. How dare all these people make a fuss about how much they have to do? I don’t make a fuss about anything except how much other people are inclined to make a fuss!

Well said. Spot on.

Yes, I have a never ending list of life admin.

Yesterday I spent about 3 hours claiming health expenses for 2021 (in Ireland, so no NHS).
My company has moved to a new health provider, so needed to find out the process for how to claim. Then find all my receipts (some in email, some paper) and submit the claims. Then ring any doctors to get copies of receipts I couldn't find. Then go to pharmacy to get amount spent on prescriptions, so I can claim tax back. Then claim dental expenses from a different company.
I'm still only half way through it all. Once it's done, I then have to submit a tax return.

Then today, I submitted forms for my kids' savings account and renegotiated my TV package (and saved €450 over the next year).

This hasn't even scratched the surface of the life admin items on my to-do list.

From my observations of this thread at least the life admin people seem nicer than the sneering boil-your-tickets-while-booking-the-kettle brigade who get off on calling other people idiots.

Yep. 3 children, work full time, have afterschool clubs/childcare/weekend sports. Just kind if do it. I think people who moan need to really think if they are putting too much on themselves and maybe need to pull back. It's not for everyone!

Ha! Exactly!

Absolutely!

Why is it necessary to sneer at others and call them "hapless", "blithering idiots", "ridiculous" and "silly" , to name but a few insults on this thread, because they happen to find something burdensome that you find easy?

We all have different strengths and weaknesses. There's no need for the judginess and superiority.

My sister may be crap at life admin but she can paint a beautiful portrait! I'd rather have the skills to do that than be a whizz at filling in car insurance forms.

Some of those things are more just life than life admin. Everybody does things like go to the petrol station, buy milk, phone the bank, etc.

I think there are loads of things being listed on this thread which aren't "life admin" - or at least what I would call life admin. It's either parenting, or just part of life. In my mind, life admin is the pesky tasks that you need to sort out not your regular stuff like walking the dog, shopping or making stuff with your child.

Also, lots of people are describing irregular, big tasks and listing them as if they're stuff they have to do all the time. It just feels as if this thread has turned into a big competition about who has the most "stuff" to do and who's the most put on. It's all a bit ridiculous.

Lots of tasks can be automated now so your true life admin really shouldn't take much time at all. If you're spending ages every week it's worth considering whether you're working smartly or whether there are things you could do differently - such as having the worm tablets sent to you automatically, as an example.

I have two autistic DC, one with high needs, and they're both home educated now (long story) which requires me to work with them 1:1 to provide support. I work full time in my own business which has strict deadlines. But I just don't see where there is all the life admin. And it was no different when both the DC were in school. It's worth me pointing out that I am spectacularly unorganised and SHIT with getting things done (my combination of autism and ADHD do not make me the best at admin!) so this isn't a brag in any sense of the word.

In my experience, I don't think life admin takes up much time at all. But I'm only talking about the physical length of time it takes to click on a couple of buttons or print off a form. In practical terms it takes no time at all, provided you've automated what you can. However, the mental load is enormous especially if you don't have a partner who's bearing their fair share.

As I said, I'm absolute dogshit at life admin. I struggle to make a phone call and I can find it difficult to respond to messages if I don't reply straight away. But I manage OK eventually and I really don't spend much time doing the necessary. But the mental load is a different matter. I feel like I'm always carrying around a mental list of things to consider, investigate or do. In reality, the list of things might all take no longer than 20 minutes in total if I actually just sat down and did them alll, but it's the pressure of HAVING to remember everything and not let any of the balls drop. While personally I can't really see how life admin takes up much physical time, the burden of having to be the one to organise/remember everything is really weighty. And for me at least, that's where I find the load is very unequal. I do find it hard making sure I remember the admin. And I'm getting increasingly pissed off that everyone assumes that I'll be the person to remember to get everything sorted. For me, that's the bit that I resent rather than the actual time that admin takes.

I think one of the problems we have when discussing 'life admin' is that we all imagine that we are talking about doing the same things but in reality we aren't. Most of the kinds of tasks discussed on this thread can theoretically be done very quickly if required, but I don't think you will necessarily get the same outcome as someone that has taken more time to complete the task.

People say buying presents take 3 mins max but this just mean you haven't really put much thought or effort into the gift. Sure, we can all go onto Amazon and order a generic gift in seconds but that isn't the same as someone spending time actively looking for a thoughtful and more personal gift for the recipient. On paper, both approaches tick the box of 'buying a gift', but in reality the amount of appreciation and joy the gift is likely to bring will increase if you take more time looking for a gift specific to the recipient.

Birthday parties can be beautifully organised affairs with lots of bespoke elements that are relevant to the birthday girl/boy or a generic party at a venue that supplies everything. Again, both people get to tick the 'organise a birthday party' box but both will require completely different levels of time and effort to organise and two parties will be very different experiences at the end.

You can book the first holiday you see to a place you would quite like or research more widely to find something that meets your need better or is better value. You can automatically renew your insurance or search for the best deal each time. You can repeat the same meal plan over set periods or be more adventurous etc etc

Most things have a low, medium and high level effort options. Lots of people prioritise efficiency and ticking the box. They don't get enough value out of the more time consuming options to make it worthwhile for them to spend more time doing a task. Other people would not be happy simply doing what is most efficient and therefore spend longer doing 'life admin'. Neither is right or wrong and both have positives and minuses. If you are overwhelmed and stressed then taking the easy option is probably necessary, but over efficiency is also not great and doesn't often achieve the same results as those that devote more time and energy to the little activities that often add an immense amount of meaning and value to our lives.