What is Life Admin?
Life Admin has been termed “the office work of life.”
The type of work that personal assistants or office managers the world over, have been doing for the managers for decades! Not everyone can afford a personal assistant to manage their lives for them. However, to be able to function at optimal levels in business/home, sometimes we need a bit of assistance with keeping our lives ticking over seamlessly.
Life admin isn’t someone doing your chores for you, like grocery shopping, cleaning the house or gardening for you. However, it is having someone who organises those tasks for you. Creating a shopping list, researching the best-reviewed and cost-effective cleaning company in your area, and selecting the day/time they will magically appear to clean and tidy your home, having a gardening service come in with a list of jobs that need to be done and take the green waste away with them. These are all life admin tasks. It involves the mental work to get something done.
How to Better Manage Your Life Admin
Let’s face it, life admin isn’t hard to take care of. However, it does take motivation and time. We know it can be tedious and as business owners and/or parents, the struggle is real to find either of those some days!
Not doing life admin incurs an obvious cost: stuff that needs to get done doesn’t get done. This can cost you opportunities and money, as well as precious mental capacity; and keep you constantly distracted. You drop the ball!
But doing life admin incurs costs too. Completing these tasks takes time and energy, leaving you with less time and energy to invest in things like hobbies, relationships, and family, and directly paid work.
Given that there are costs both to not doing personal admin and to doing it, you want to get it done, but get it done as efficiently as possible and minimise its impact on your life.
Men’s Perspective
I recently went to a networking event, where I had to ‘peddle my wares’ to a room, filled with men. They asked lots of questions of the services I provided and each one had a different take on life admin – but what summed it up ‘nicely’ for me, was that most men assume Life Admin is a task fit for women and one, even joked that was why he got married in the first place, he didn’t have to focus on any of the “home life work” dramas that came with marriage, mortgage and kids - Not at all surprising that it ended in divorce!
Life admin isn’t just a task your EA/PA does at the office for you or your wife/partner does while juggling their career and raising your children. It is a very necessary and it affects us all in some way or other.