Life Admin!

[Bellaboo01]

Am i missing something here regarding 'life admin'?

From what i can see, it is what people are saying they are doing to sound like they are so busy and cant work? I have worked for 30 years and managed life admin, kids etc. I'm now thinking that i need to retire and say my job role is 'life admin'!

All our bills, mortgage, kids clubs, schools, holidays etc etc get done whilst my husband and I work full time.

I could understand if it was housework as well but, what 'life admin' needs to be done every day for 7.5 hours per day?

Yeah, it's an utterly ridiculous phrase.

I don't think anyone claims they do life admin 7.5 hours a day.

Yes it's possible to fit it around a job. But different people have different amounts of life admin (eg if you have a disabled child, arranging additional needs provision and appointments can take ages if you're on hold for half an hour every time you try and contact any authorities)

What I do see people moaning about, is one partner leaving it all to the other and not taking it into account in the division of chores

Life admin depends on the life (and health) of those concerned.

I suspect you have been very privileged with a non-complicated life and high (ish) intelligence, surely it's not a stretch that other lives may be different?

Still trying to work out what I'm doing wrong that this isn't a huge issue in my bipolared, ASD, disabled life. I even manage to have more than one bank account so all bills go out of one, one off expenses from another, even if I haven't quite gotten them all on the same date (they still happen every month).

I don't like the phrase in particular.

But yes life admin can become overwhelming in some cases. Some people due to over-doing things e.g. trying to fit in too many after school activities.

In my case though its due to having autistic children and constant extra appointments for school, social services, GP etc.

Life admin is another ridiculous term. I used to pay bills, bath the baby and put the children to bed. The use of nouns to describe these tasks make them sound a much bigger deal. Life admin, do bath time and do bed time. Absurd. Likewise play dates.

Honestly the correlation I see in the people I know that talk about life admin.. is that they are generally just disorganised and ineffectual people easily thwarted by simple tasks. Basically people you wouldn’t rely on to get shit done.

As companies make it harder and harder to contact them and you can't even get to see a GP for something routine or a one-off, I do have a bit more sympathy with the life admin thing. It's not at all easy to get things done.

But people choose to have complicated and stressful lives as well. If you have 3 kids and 2 dogs and a cat alongside a full time job, life is going to be stressful. If you choose to have no kids and no pets, and enjoy good health, life will be a lot easier.

Obviously if you have to deal with health issues or SN, life is much harder than for most.

I spent 2.5 hours trying to buy a replacement windscreen wiper arm for my old Fiat today. Does that count? I have a job life admin does overwhelm me sometimes. A rucksack lost at a local weekend at the weekend involved email and DM conversations with three different people to retrieve. I didn't break the wiper or lose the rucksack. My partner does bugger all life admin and it is a huge bone of contention for me.

I've never hear anyone use the term other than on MN and believe it is totally exaggerated.

But they are one off things? I think the op means people who say they are doing life admin every day

I'm trying to think what admin I even do weekly.
Direct debits for car insurance, gas and electric, bin collection, broadband, phone plans. These are automatic so I don't even have to think about them.
Once a year I look at car insurance to see if I can get it cheaper.
What am I missing 🤔

I had a life admin day the other day … I am on holiday. It was organising appointments , dealing with messages I have just left .. that doesn’t mean I consider it like a job I need to sit at a desk for 7.5 hours. I also did laundry , went to the gym , collected a parcel…

it for me is a day trying to get on top of everything ..

it’s not a iob but I do have a teenager with additional needs , I have my own appointments , sometimes you need to sort shit out

I do a more than full time demanding job and fit all these jobs around work

However, whether or not you like the term, making out like it's nothing at all is a bit rubbish. Because it's mostly unseen unappreciated labour done by women.

I have four children in three schools. They all do multiple clubs. Two are neurodiverse. One has a serious health condition and has medicines prescribed from three different sources. Plus two cars and a campervan and a house.

Yeah the admin from all that is not unmanageable and gets done on my phone when I'm walking from my car into work, or waiting during swimming lessons etc. But it's not nothing.

I think life admin is probably pretty manageable for one household of people (and pets) who are all in good physical and mental health, in a relatively modern house with no major repair / maintenance issues, with vehicles in good nick, and PAYE jobs and a straightforward tax / visa / residency situation and enough money that they don’t have to deal with the benefits system.

Add one or two people to the mix - elderly parents, disabled children, a partner with chronic health issues - who need support of various kinds to live their daily lives, and the admin mounts up exponentially. Particularly if you are the only one doing any of it.

But sure, OP, it’s probably just that other people are shitter than you.

I think that it's good there's a term to describe it. I've only ever seen it here on MN though. Like 'mental load'. My ex H seriously didn't bother to understand all the little things I did regularly to keep our lives running smoothly. Now he's living on his own I think he's finally getting it. Consequently he's only just realised he needs to buy house insurance after 2+ years...the basic logic of needing to renew things when they run out is a new one to him. When one partner is doing it all on top of managing the day to day house stuff, plus working, plus pets/kids etc, it's like another job when you add all the hours spent doing it. For me I have 2 disabled kids as well as a job and sometimes spend a good chunk of a day sorting out their appointments, as well as my own. I think the label brings recognition that these things don't get done magically. It's actual work in some cases.

At one point I would have agreed with you but this year has seen DS being formally added to the SEN register at school, DH's chronic health condition worsening, MIL being diagnosed with moderate cognitive difficulties, DM going into a home, DF not really managing living alone, best friend being evicted etc. This means that actually I am struggling with working 30 hours per week, especially as I am the only driver out of all of the people listed above. Add in perimenopausal brain fog and my to do list is out of control!

Having a phrase for ‘life admin’ is a way to categorise a large portion of often overlooked domestic work that tends to fall to women. Categorising it enables a conversation about the unfairness of the domestic labour division, especially within families where both parents work full time. I’ve never seen anyone imply it’s a full time job, more that for a lot of women it’s something they do in addition to their full time job that their partner doesn’t do. It helps with understanding why so many more working mums than working dads seem to suffer from burn out.

Most women I know with young children spend some amount of time each evening doing some mix of the following sorts of things - facilitating homework, paying for school dinners/after school club, sorting out medication/eye tests/dentist appointments, sorting out costumes for dress up days, answering party invites and ordering presents, filling in forms for field trips and parents evenings, on top of the usual stuff that comes with running a home e.g finances, meal planning, any day-to-day one-off things like some of the examples given above. Yeah it’s just life stuff, yes it’s not all that onerous, but in most couples I know the men aren’t doing any of it.

@WhatALovelyWayToBurn exactly. And if you’re supporting elderly parents as well - fixing the printer, the wi-fi, installing updates on their computers, helping them navigate online banking and their GP surgery’s new patient portal, troubleshooting missing repeat prescriptions and having their new spectacles adjusted and getting their boiler serviced, etc etc it becomes a LOT quite quickly.

And the more involvement you have with the NHS, the LEA, the bureaucratic structures of the home countries of any non-British-born family members, the most time and mental energy it all takes up.

And that’s before we even think about things like birthday cards and party RSVPs and swimming lessons and World Book Day.

I don’t understand all the fuss about it, but I can see that if you work full time but not desk-based, it must be difficult. No truck with people who don’t work who claim it’s time consuming though.

But why in your thinking are the men not doing it?
They refuse?
They don’t know how?
They don’t know what needs doing?

Or are the women just doing it without explanation and then moaning about it?

I'm doing because my DP does seem to actually find life admin challenging. He cannot multitask so can only complete life admin given a quiet afternoon to himself, which he doesn't get often. I like to have things organised well in advance and ensure we have car insurance, the kids have school lunches booked etc and so I do it. I don't particularly moan about it and see it as us playing to our strengths in that as a team I am way better at this stuff but it would massively irritate me if this work wasn't recognised

Oh this again. So many snarky threads on here about people's use of language. 'Life admin' is just a name designating tedious admin shit you have to do at home, as opposed to tedious admin shit you have to do at work. It's a pretty common term, used by both people who have jobs and people who don't. I work ft and don't call it that, but I don't think anything of it when other people do.