Filling out paperwork. Making travel reservations. Paying bills. Shopping for groceries. Returning packages.
These are all examples of life admin — the little tasks we have to do to keep our lives moving along.
Life admin is typically pretty tedious and annoying. But staying on top of it is essential to reducing the stress and chaos that would otherwise burden our relationships, muck up the gears of our schedules, and prevent us from participating in all the fun and fulfilling parts of life.
Fortunately, there are ways to better manage your life admin. Here to share some of them is Dinah Rowe-Roberts, the co-host of the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast and the co-author of a book of the same name. Today on the show, Dinah explains what lists you should be keeping, including the 10-minute time killers list, why you should do a regular “hour of power” to stay on top of things, how to schedule your life admin, how to keep track of and divvy up chores between you and your spouse, how to get all your meal planning and grocery shopping done in less than 15 minutes a week, how to streamline your kids’ schedules and your vacation planning, and much more.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM article on shadow work
- AoM article and podcast on how to have a weekly marriage meeting
- AoM article on how to have a weekly family meeting
- AoM article on how to use Todoist to get things done
- AoM article on how to manage your life admin
- AoM article on how and why to have a reset day
- AoM article on 8 lists you should be keeping (besides the to-do list)
Connect With Dinah Rowe-Roberts
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Filling out paperwork, making travel reservations, paying bills, shopping for groceries, returning packages. These are all examples of life admin, the little tasks we have to do to keep our lives moving along. Life admin is typically pretty tedious and annoying, but staying on top of it is essential in reducing the stress and chaos that would otherwise burden our relationships, muck up the gears of our schedules, and prevent us from participating in all the fun and fulfilling parts of life. Fortunately, there are ways to better manage your life admin. Here to share some of them is Dinah Rowe-Roberts, the co-host of the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast and the co-author of a book of the same name. Today in the show, Dina explains what lists you should be keeping, including the 10-minute time killers list, why you should do a regular hour of power to stay on top of things, how to schedule your life admin, how to keep track of and divvy up chores between you and your spouse. How to get all of your meal planning and grocery shopping done in less than 15 minutes a week. How to streamline your kids’ schedules and your vacation planning and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/life admin.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts, welcome to the show.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: So you are the co-host of a podcast called Life Admin Hacks. You’ve also co-authored a book with the same name and it’s all about life admin. I love thinking about and improving how I manage my own life admin. For those who aren’t familiar, what is life admin?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Well, life admin, it’s really the homework of life. So it’s not chores which in Australia we call housework, which is really traditionally, the cooking, the cleaning and the laundry. But it often is supporting those things and it’s not parenting, it’s not about the actual physical, emotional, social development of your child. It’s actually a third piece of the domestic labor puzzle. It’s all of the scheduling, the booking, the shopping, the paperwork, the planning. It often facilitates chores and parenting, but it’s its own beast. It’s its own thing.
Brett McKay: Yeah. The way I think about life admin, it’s like the mental work that you have to do to do those physical activities. So if you’re planning a trip, the thing is like the trip, like that’s the activity. The life admin is all the stuff you have to do to make that trip happen. Planning the itinerary, rental cars, scheduling flights, things like that.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. It’s often a hidden burden and it can generate a significant portion of what people call the mental load. The kind of thinking, the planning, the anticipating that you need to do to make life work.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s give some more examples, or what’s some more examples of life admin that people might see in their lives on a regular basis.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And I think then it’s really important or it’s interesting or helpful to think about life admin being like two types of life admin. Because there’s everyday life admin, it occurs cyclically, seasonally daily, weekly. So things like planning the grocery shopping, doing the meal planning, paying the bills, all those things, they just happen over and over again, never ending. And then you’ve got what we call like life event admin. So if you have an event, you get married, you have a baby, those sorts of things, they trigger enormous amounts of life admin as well. So it can be helpful to think about having those two types of life admin and thinking about dealing with them a little bit differently.
Brett McKay: Why does it feel like we’re always drowning in life admin? Like what is so insidious about it that it seems like it’s always piling up?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I think that it has changed in recent times because of technology and choice. And I think that the more choice we have, the reality is, the more life admin it creates. So I think that’s certainly a factor. I think another thing is that the cost of communication are lower. And so what we find is our providers bombarding us with emails and text messages and all those things, who are getting more and more information that we have to figure out what to do and what to process with. And life admin grows with growing responsibilities. So as we move through life, things like buying a home, having kids, it increases the amount and complexity of life admin just if you’ve got less time because you’ve got more parenting, caring work responsibilities. So I think that that’s often why people particularly in a sort of middle age feel like they’re drowning in life admin. And I think part of that is very few people have thought about setting up systems for life admin that really optimize how to deal with it. And even though you might do it in your professional life, a lot of people don’t do it in their personal life. And so they haven’t got the systems to adequately know what to do when something hits them. And I think that makes it feel quite chaotic.
Brett McKay: Well another thing too, I’ve heard about what might be increasing life admin… We’ve written about this on our site. There’s a book by, I think it was a sociologist about shadow work. You’ve heard about this idea of shadow work?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah.
Brett McKay: Right. So shadow work is this stuff that used to be done by professionals or companies, but the companies have shifted it to their consumer. So I mean, like planning a trip is a perfect example. Used to be just you call a travel agent or even the airline and be like, “Hey, I want to go here.” And they’d be like, “All right” They’d just figure it out for you. But now, it’s like you have to go through tons and tons of different itineraries to schedule a flight and to the airline’s defense they say, “Well, you just have more options. You can actually figure this out on your own. We’re giving you that choice” like you said earlier. But they’re also saving themselves maybe some, some of the hassle of having to pay an employee to do that for you.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. And I think, often we want to take that control into our life. We feel like we want to be in charge and that gives you that choice, which has upsides, but with more choice comes more work, more responsibility to make those decisions, do the research, understand what you’re looking at. And so that definitely creates more life admin.
Brett McKay: And the other thing I’ve noticed too is that, sometimes it feels like life admin, because there can be a seasonality to it, you can get hit with a whole bunch of stuff all at once. So you see this if you have kids in school, seems like at Christmas right before Christmas and right before summer holiday here in the United States, that’s when everyone tries to cram everything in. And you’re signing up for things that are gonna be happening three months later. And so the last two weeks of school, before school goes out for vacation, just like I’m constantly, like there’s forms to fill out, I’m trying to manage schedules, like this kid needs to be here and this kid needs to bring this thing. I don’t know what happens. Everyone just decides to do everything at once. It causes all the life admin to pile up on you at once.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. I think that often can come in like waves and I think there’s a great saying. I can’t even think exactly what it is, but it’s something like, “You can’t catch the waves, but you can learn how to surf.” And I think that’s really what we’re trying to help people do with their life admin is actually you need to actually have systems so that you can ride the wave as it comes in and comes at you so that it doesn’t turn your life into chaos.
Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about some of your tips for how we can keep from drowning in life admin on a daily basis and surf the bigger waves when they come in. What do you recommend people do to capture the life admin they have coming into their lives?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: So one of the things we suggest to people, particularly when you’ve got other members of the household is thinking about setting up a dedicated email address for your life admin. So that means it won’t get mixed up with kind of your personal emails, which are probably much more on the social side or work emails. And what it means is, if you have a partner, you can actually move your life admin into neutral territory and sort of operate it like you would a shared inbox in a work situation. And that really means that all of your life admin in terms of the electronic stuff comes into the same spot and you can both share the responsibility of triaging everything that hits you through that inbox.
Brett McKay: Okay. So it’d be something like, in our instance, it’d be like [email protected], I don’t have that address. So if anyone tries emailing me there, they’re not gonna get anything. So you’d use that email when you sign up for cell service, when you’re doing stuff with your kids’ school, etcetera. That’s the email you’d use. So all that communication would go there.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So that’s what certainly my husband and I have, we have a shared life admin email address and everything to do with our shared life admin hits that email address. And so what it does mean is that I can happily go away for a week and know that I don’t even have to look at that email address. He can take care of it or if I’m having a busy time at work, the same thing. And it really means that we can really seamlessly share that inbox and all of the actions that come out of it.
Brett McKay: That’s a good idea because I know sometimes I’ll use my email address for something like travel reservations or something with school. So I get the email but my wife doesn’t or it’s vice versa. So one of us just ends up out of the loop. So we might have to try that. Okay. So have a shared email address for life admin stuff if you’re married. What about, what do you do to capture stuff that just pops up during the day? Stuff where you’re like, I need to remember that or I need to do that. What do you do with those sorts of things?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think in terms of the actual doing of it and capturing other things, we really like to think about life admin tasks in terms of actually how much time is required to get them done. And that really helps you think about when you’re gonna do them. And maybe we’ll come to that a bit later, but in terms of anything that you can’t do immediately. So we do love to adopt the two-minute too easy. If it hits your inbox and you can do it straight away in less than two minutes, do it, get rid of it, file the email, delete the email, move on. But if it’s something that’s gonna take a little bit longer than that, we recommend setting up a to-do list that we call 10-minute time killers for those kind of 10 minute tasks. So those are tasks that might take, like maybe something a little bit more complicated, but they’re not gonna take a lot of thinking time.
And if you have a separate list with all of those tasks on them, it means that if you have a bit of idle time, you can easily tackle those tasks. And usually that’s the time that people might scroll social media or those kind of, if you’re in between meetings or you are waiting in a line or you’re kind of watching tv. So those tasks don’t need to be scheduled, but if you’ve got them all in a list, you can know what to attack and you can add things that are 10-minute time killers as they occur to you as you go. You just use the simple reminder app on the iPhone to easily add items that I think of to that list as I go. And then I have a another list which has got more chunky life admin tasks in it that we call the hour of power.
So if they’re more complicated, like comparison shopping and those sorts of things. And that means they’re separate in a separate list. And I have a scheduled time once a week to tackle those chunky life admin tasks. So I know if I add something to that list, I know when I’m gonna be able to get to it. So we have a shared 10-minute time killer list between my husband and I. And so things in that list get allocated to one of us, but we can also see what the other tasks are that the other person’s got to do. And then the same for an hour of power list.
Brett McKay: What do you do with paper things? I mean, I know you’re big on, you have a whole chapter about just reducing the amount of paper that crosses your desk, but occasionally it’s gonna happen, when you get something. What do you do with that stuff?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So if it’s something that just needs to be filed, I’m big of like scanning, photographing immediately and trying to destroy it. So I’m a big fan of going completely paperless, but if it is a form that needs to be filled out, I would still add it to the list in terms of the 10-minute time killer, if it’s gonna be a 10 minute list and then we just have a little paperwork spot in the house. But to be honest, very little paperwork hits our house anymore. So once you’ve really made the effort to go paperless, you find that actually there’s really little paper still happening out there.
Brett McKay: Let’s talk more about lists. So you have the two minute, too easy list actually that’s, it’s actually not really a list. Those are things that just kind of come up to you and you do them right then. But you do have the 10-minute time killer list and then you have the chunky admin list where you’ll do stuff in your hour of power. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a minute. But beyond the to-do list, you also recommend keeping checklists and reference list. Walk us through those.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And I think when we started this whole life admin journey, both my co-author and I, Mia and I, we both had kind of our lists, we’re like a mishmash of all of these three things. And I think that that’s often what happens to people and it makes it really hard to sort of figure out what to tackle next. So, if you think about having those three categories of list to-do lists we’ve talked about. But the second one, checklists. Checklists are things that help you remember how to do things you do over and over again efficiently and comprehensively. So you’re write the steps down once and then you refer to it every time you need to do that. So, for me, the checklists that I use most often are like the things to do before you go on holiday, so all of the, you know, organize the pet sitting, organize the mail collection, etcetera, etcetera.
But you might also have checklists for things like, what to take when you take your child to daycare or something like that. And those checklists really help you not remember important steps in that task. In terms of reference lists, these are kind of the things that you often find on people’s to-do list, but they’re not actually things that they have to do, they’re more like suggestions or recommendations or it’s like sources of information. So the reference lists I’ve got on my phone or in my Reminders app is gift wishlist for family members. So thinking about things I might buy for the next birthday or Christmas, I’ve got reference lists of podcasts to listen to and one of TV shows to watch and one of books to read. So the next time someone ask you something like that, you’ll have a whole list ready to go and you know where to put that information and refer to it when you need that information.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So I keep that too. So I keep a list of things to, I need to read movies, I wanna watch, podcasts I wanna listen to. Another list I keep is, this is a new one, restaurants we want to go to. You know how like lots of time you’re driving around town and you see a new restaurant like, “Oh I wanna try that out, it looks cool.” And then the next time when you’re trying to figure out where to eat that night, you end up forgetting about that restaurant you saw. So we’ve tried to make it a habit. Whenever you see a cool restaurant put it on a list so we can check it out. The gift list is a good idea. My wife is really good about doing that. Another kind of list that my wife and I keep is a things-we-want-to-talk-about list. So this is for whenever we’re about to see a friend that we haven’t seen in a while, we’re about to catch up with them. We have a list of things we wanna make sure we hit with them and ask them about when we see them.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. That’s a really good one. I actually read an article about that recently in terms of improving social connection and how important that is. So yeah, that’s a great idea.
Brett McKay: So you can use just the Notes app to make these lists. And you use the Reminders app on iPhone?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And I think that you can get a little bit caught up in trying to get the most complicated app out there. And I think all of our advice really when it comes to technology is use what you find really easy to use. It doesn’t need to be super complicated as long as you know how to use it. And you, particularly if you’re sharing that technology with someone else, you have a shared understanding of how you’re gonna use it together. That’s way more important than having lots of bells and whistles in the particular app.
Brett McKay: Okay. I’ve never used the Reminders app because I use Todoist. That’s the app that I like to use. You can share things on that with other people?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I mean, the Reminders app on iPhone is pretty good now in terms of the sharing functionality. But I mean there’s lots of great apps out there. Todoist is a great one. And so if that’s something you’re familiar with, that’s usually the one to stick with because if you like it you’re gonna use it and if you don’t like it, you won’t use it. So yeah, we really encourage you to find one that feels good to you in terms of its functionality and even aesthetics, so that it works for you. And think about making one that you can use with a voice assistant because that’s really helpful. I don’t know about you, but I often remember things when I’m driving in the car or when I’m going for a walk and being able to just ask Siri to add them to my list, it reduces my mental load because I’ve added it to the list and I can forget about it and move on.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think with Todoist you can sync it with Siri so you can talk to Siri and Siri will add it to Todoist but it sometimes it doesn’t work. So it could… I sort of, I’ll check out Reminders app. So I wanna go back to this idea of the hour of power. So you categorize your life admin as the two minute, too easy. So if you can do it in two minutes, just do it. Don’t wait. That’s, I think, David Allen from Getting Things Done has that same idea.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. Exactly.
Brett McKay: Then you have the 10-minute time killer. So those are things you can do in 10 minutes that don’t take a lot of mental bandwidth to do, you’ll have that there to do it. The hour of power. And so tell us more about this. So you’re going to dedicate an hour is it each day, each week to doing those life admin that are a little bit more complicated?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Well, I think obviously how many of the hours of power you need will depend on where you’re at in terms of, how in control you are and I guess what’s going on in your life. So if you’re in a time of your life with a lot of life admin, you might need a few of those hour of powers scheduled in your calendar. But for me I actually, we usually have an hour of power once a fortnight and it’s really this dedicated time slot for tackling these substantial items that require concentration. So it might be things like comparison shopping a utility service, it might be planning a birthday party or that kind of thing. And what we really recommend is scheduling this recurring time slot in your calendar so that you know when you’re gonna get to those tasks. Because that is a thing that will take off the kind of stress and anxiety because you’re like, “Okay, I know I’m gonna get to that at this time every week.” And we also encourage people to think about giving it like a powerful name to claim the space. So I know that Mia, who’s my co-host, she likes to call hers, Set Me Up Sunday. So, that’s really helping her thinking about, setting herself up for a really good week because she’s tackled any of those chunky tasks that have been weighing on her mind.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I do an hour of power, Friday is the day I do it. It’s like every Friday I do it. It usually it’s an hour, I just set aside an hour. If I can’t get it done within an hour then I move on to something else. But usually I can get most of it done within an hour.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I mean, usually if you set yourself a time limit you can get most of those tasks done within an hour and I think it’s really helpful to kind of give yourself a boundary, like I’m willing to invest an hour in my life admin and then I’m gonna move on. Because the reality is it’s boring, it’s tedious but it’s important. So truly trying to knock off those tasks in a shorter time as possible means you can get back to the things you really wanna do in life.
Brett McKay: Something my wife and I do every now and then, we call it a reset day, where we take a whole day to just do stuff that’s been piling up. We do it when we need to, when we feel like, oh my gosh, there’s just so much going on, we need a reset day. So we’ll just take a day. Usually it’s during the week because the kids are at school and they’re not around and so we just get through stuff as much as we can during that entire day.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I think that’s a really good idea. I think when you realize that things aren’t feeling good, really scheduling that time in your calendar and committing to actually getting rid of those things that are stressing you out, it’s gonna improve your life overall. So that’s a great idea.
Brett McKay: You have a whole chapter about scheduling your life admin, because I think the way most people approach life admin, they just do it on a, “Well, I need to do this thing, so I’m gonna do it now.” How do you recommend scheduling out your life admin? So we have the hour of power, that’s one thing, but any other tips on scheduling out your life admin?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think a couple of things there. The first one is, I guess, going back to the sharing idea and thinking, okay, in life there’s lots of… In a household you do need to actually understand what’s going on and so you really do need some sort of cross platform calendar tool that everyone in your household can access. And so in my household it’s not just my husband, I’ve got two teenagers. So understanding where they’re going and them understanding where we are going is really important to kind of dealing with the family logistics. So we are really technology agnostic about it, but you really need to have a tool that everyone in your household can add to, can see, so that everyone can see what’s going on and understand what the logistics are of the household. So I guess that’s the first thing. I don’t know if you’ve got a shared calendar in your house.
Brett McKay: So our kids don’t have smartphones yet, so we don’t have that shared digital calendar, but we do have this giant dry erase calendar that we put on the wall, in the kitchen and we have a family meeting once a week and we go over our schedule and we have our kids write in all the stuff they’ve got going on. So that’s what we do. But maybe when they get older and they get smartphones we’ll shift to a shared digital calendar.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Oh it’s a great habit to get them into in terms of the analog system to transition into digital. But yeah, that’s, it’s been a bit of a game changer for us in terms of… I used to feel like I had to ring up my husband and ask permission of could I go to the movies with my friend because I don’t really know what was going on. And so this kind of shared calendar gives me permission to actually know what’s going on in our family so we don’t have to have those kind of consultations about who’s doing what by when.
Brett McKay: So what sorts of things are you putting on this shared calendar?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So family trips, all of the social events, who’s being picked up, who’s being dropped off, all those school events that we want to go to. And then my husband and I both put our own social events on there so that we can see what each other’s up to and we know that there’s always needs to be an adult home every night to cook the dinner and supervise. And so really making sure that we know what each other’s doing without kind of feeling like we need to ask permission to be able to have a bit of fun in life.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So speaking of syncing up with your spouse, so the shared calendar can go a long way to reducing a lot of the friction of trying to sync your calendar with your family or your spouse. Do you do anything else beyond just having the shared calendar and the shared list to make sure that you guys are on the same page?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think one of the most important things is, and you sort of mentioned it before, this kind of communication. So you really need to think about when you’re gonna communicate about life admin logistics and thinking about maybe having a meeting or a regular time slot every week where you kind of go through everything, like what’s going on in the calendar, what’s on the to-do list, what’s falling behind, what might we need help with. One of the things we might wanna talk about, like if you know we’re planning a trip, do we need to talk about exactly where we’re gonna go or those sorts of things. And so for us we have a regular Sunday night meeting with one another. We have it over a glass of wine if we’re feeling it or if it’s a sort of cup of tea kind of night and we really go through all of those things.
So check that the inbox is kind of inbox zero, check in on what the to-do list items are and check in on the calendar for the next week. And that really helps us stay synced and also helps us talk about something which is important is like the standards of doing something. So I think one of the problems that people get into challenges around is around expecting their partner to do it to the exact same standard or an exact same way that they would do. So, in those meetings we can talk about, okay, well what’s an acceptable standard for doing that? Like what will make us happy, make some compromises and then I can kind of let go of things and give it to my husband and vice versa so that we can kind of divide and conquer so to speak. Because the reality is, there’s a lot of life admin in our family and you really wanna be able to divide it up and share it out and those communications really help actually make that happen.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Something my wife and I have done for several years now, we’ve had a podcast about this and I’ve talked about it on the podcast a lot. We have the weekly marriage meeting as well. We do it on Sunday, takes about 20 minutes. Our four parts of the marriage meeting is we get together, first, we express appreciation to each other. So we just say thank you for all the stuff that each of us have done throughout the week and then we do to-dos and that’s just like the business stuff. That’s when we discuss life admin, here’s what needs to be done, these are the bills that need to be paid, here’s what needs to be repaired in the house. And then we have plan for good times. So this is good times as a couple, good times as a family and also good times as individually and then we end with big concerns. So if there’s like big concerns in the family, that’s where we discuss that. And it’s really it’s a big game changer for us.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I mean I think it’s amazing that you do that and I love those additional elements. I guess, our meeting tends to be a little bit more on the practical side, maybe that’s because I’m a life admin expert. [laughter] But, yeah. It is a huge game changer in terms of checking in on your own behavior and any resentments you might be holding about not sharing tasks fairly, et cetera. And it really makes sure it brings it out in the open on a regular basis rather than kind of storing up this inner resentment about, if you are feeling like you’re holding more of the mental load, it’s really an opportunity to kind of express that in a calm way, in a much more productive way than perhaps in the heat of the moment.
Brett McKay: And then we also do a family meeting once a week. We usually do that Tuesday night, is our family meeting night. And that’s same sort of thing, we just discuss like what’s going well in the family, what could we improve and then just discuss the kid’s schedule. Speaking of figuring out who does what, any advice on how you determine who does what life admin because that can get complicated. And I think the way a lot of times how couples approach life admin is they just, they don’t really talk about it. Like one person decides to do this, the other person decides to do that, but neither of them are really sure like what is and isn’t getting done.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: And I think that often happens because it kind of evolves as your relationship evolves and often in relationships one person might have certain systems and certainly you know, in our marriage I had kind of systems but they were all really designed for me and they weren’t really designed to let my husband in. And so, when we started this whole journey, I was fed a lot of resentment that I was bearing all this mental load and doing all of this life admin and feeling this huge burden. But the reality was a lot of it was on me was my own behavior, this kind of over-functioning, like I was over-functioning and then just feeling resentment because my husband didn’t know how to do it. But the reality is he didn’t have access to any of my systems. He didn’t know all the things I was thinking about.
So I think the first thing is really to think about agreeing on some tools and systems that you’re gonna both use and the rules of the game of how you’re gonna use those systems. So things we’ve already talked about today, like a shared calendar, shared to-do lists, shared storage, shared email, all of those things really set up systems that enable you to share. And then setting up those systems in and of itself facilitates that discussion of how we’re gonna handle it when an email comes in, who’s gonna handle it, in what circumstances, etcetera. And so those are really the beginning of starting to think about how you can better share the load and it opens up those conversations for, “Oh you know what, I’ll take charge of all of the utilities because I’m really good at that. And do you wanna take care of this?” And really dividing it up so that it’s much fairer and it’s open and transparent about who’s doing what. And it really gives that conversation about that visibility of who is taking care of what in the relationship.
Brett McKay: And then having those regular meetings can just, as things come up that are new, you can have the conversation like, “All right. Do you want this or do you want me to take this?” And then, yeah.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. Yeah.
Brett McKay: So another recommendation you have that I really liked was keeping a folder that has information that you use regularly to fill out forms like health insurance, doctor info, kids, sports info. Tell us more about this reference folder.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Oh gosh. How much of your time is like dedicated to filling out a form?
Brett McKay: So much. I had this, this happened a couple months ago when I was filling out the application for our kids’ school. And like I filled this thing out before and they asked for the same information but I had to like go and like, okay, I gotta find this thing in this file folder that I used last year. I don’t know where it’s at.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. So, there’s a few different strategies here. So you can either like save all this info in a spreadsheet, like in cloud storage, like in Google Drive or something. But for me I actually have all of that information saved in my password manager and then it’s all shared with my husband. So that really gives a little bit more security because it’s got like MFA on it. And it also means that it’s really easy to fill in online forms, because when you are filling in an online form, the password manager just automatically fills it in for you. So really encourage you to think about setting up a system that allows that. And I’ve even got like the secure, even my password manager, I’ve even saved all the things like copies of my passport, my driver’s license, those sorts of things. Because increasingly you need those to fill in forms. So being able to have access to those documents on the go just means that a lot of those form filling tasks can become two minute, too easy tasks because you’ve got the information at hand and it really just takes that pain away.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah. The one that I see a lot and I always hit myself in the head, like why I haven’t figured out how to do this. Is like when you’re filling out a form for signing your kids up for a sport or a camp and they ask for the doctor’s info like the name and the the phone number.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Address, phone number.
Brett McKay: And address. And I’m like, oh I have to get, okay. I then go Google. Okay. What’s the name of the doctor, I gotta Google it and then okay, then I… It’d just be easier if I had like just in a spreadsheet all that information.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And emergency contacts is another one.
Brett McKay: Oh, that’s another one.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: And I think I used to fill out all the time and I’m like, why haven’t I just written this down so I can just copy paste or auto fill. And it is a huge time saver when you think about how many forms you’ve gotta fill in during your kids’ life to get that nailed early on.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One thing I did do, so my in-laws take our kids on a vacation every now and then, take them on a trip. So I actually created a folder with like documents that they’ll need and that my mother-in-law has access to that. That was nice because I don’t have to think about that anymore because it used to be like I have to get gathered together every single time, now there’s like a folder there. So I have learned, but I need to do better. So you mentioned paperwork, you’re big on eliminating as much paperwork as possible and you said you just scan it with your phone. Is that all you do? So if you get like a bill that’s paper, you just scan it and then it goes somewhere?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I mean, I just use Google Drive, super easy. You can scan directly from the app straight into the folder. So just go paperless, really move everything to the cloud. It means that you’ll be able to access it from anywhere, anytime and it really just saves that, I don’t know about you but I used to have a pile of filing. I was never quite sure whether I should keep it or not keep it. And so now I just kind of keep it. We have a shared Google Drive between my husband and I, and so we just add things as we go. It makes tax time super easy because all of our receipts are saved in a folder. So, yeah, it’s been a huge game changer in terms of just reducing one more task to do in terms of managing paperwork.
Brett McKay: So you have a chapter about meal planning and cooking and this part of life admin can just suck up so much of your time. Cooking can take a long time sometimes, but it’s like preparing for meals can just take up so much time. Any advice on how to streamline meal prep?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think, a couple of things there. I think the first thing is to think about establishing like this habit of meal planning. So it, whether it be once a week or every couple of days depending on your lifestyle and how many groceries you can buy and thinking about when you’re gonna do it in your calendar and maybe even scheduling it in so that you know you’re gonna do it then. And thinking about okay when does that fit with when I’m gonna do grocery shopping and that kind of thing so that you make sure that it’s a habit that happens, you can easily aimlessly wander around the grocery store picking things up, which can just be a huge time waste and actually it can often result in a lot of food waste. And then once you’ve got that habit, thinking about putting that meal plan into a tool that other members of your family can see.
So going back to that kind of sharing again. So in our house it’s actually, that’s something we do have analog, it’s a magnetized list on our fridge and that means that the teenagers can also contribute to the cooking, not just the adults. And that that meal plan takes into account your household schedule because there’s no point having a meal plan to cook a complicated meal on a night when you’ve got three extracurricular activities. You kind of really need to factor your meal plan around your schedule. And then in terms of what to put on it, I think you can sort of waste a lot of mental space trying to think about, oh my god, what are we gonna have this Tuesday? So one of the things that we suggest is maybe thinking about having themes for certain nights because it can just give you one less decision to make. I know a lot of people like to embrace Taco Tuesday, but you might wanna also think about, like Monday night might be Italian and Wednesday night might be chicken and Thursday night might be pasta. And then it just means, okay, well, I’ve got a repertoire within that category and it’s just, I can easily think of something if I’ve got a category, it really reduces the sort of mental load of thinking what to cook.
Brett McKay: And then yeah, you you’ll have that on the schedule and your kids will never have to ask you what’s for dinner tonight?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. Well they can have a look for themselves and on our meal plan we also have who’s cooking. And so we’ve divided it up amongst the four of us and each of the teens gets a night to cook as well. And so that really shares the load of that. And so I’ve definitely embraced handing more of the household chores to them the older that they’ve got.
Brett McKay: So the grocery shopping that’s just, like, you just set aside a day for that? Like you just try to do it all in one day for the week?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. In our house we do our meal plan on a Saturday morning and then I do my grocery shopping online immediately after that and the groceries arrive the next day. And so that means I can do it on a Saturday when the teens are at home and I can say, “what do you wanna cook on your night?” So that means that they’re contributing in terms of that. And we do an online shop. I’ve got a saved shopping list in my online app, so I can literally get my groceries done in five, 10 minutes. So the whole thing can be over in 15 minutes and we’re set up for the week, we all know what we’re doing, meal plans displayed on the fridge and it really just reduces any of that friction around thinking, “Oh my god, what are we gonna have for dinner tonight?” It’s a 15 minute a week task that really just reduces my mental load considerably.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I like the idea of having team nights that just reduces a lot of having to think about things. We don’t have to do that. So we talked about kids, how it can increase your life admin significantly, when they’re born there’s life admin. But I feel like something that my wife and I have been noticing as our kids have gotten older, the life admin has just gotten more and more with them because they’re signing up for sports, they’re doing camps, there’s all this stuff at school. Anything that you found useful there in managing your kids’ life admin?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Interesting. I think we’ve already talked about a few of them. So definitely the visible weekly schedule. So depending on how old your kids are, whether that’s analog as you said, like the weekly planner on the wall so everyone knows where they need to be and can start to get themselves organized as they get older and the forms, oh my God, the forms of children. So really thinking about not only getting all that information set up so that they’re easy to complete but also maybe dividing up the form burden between you in terms of, you do soccer and your wife might do ballet or whatever it is, so that you know who’s responsible for what in terms of those things. Another thing that I think you can find is, with kids comes a lot of stuff. So really thinking about how you’re gonna deal with keepsakes, so items like art or other certificates and prizes.
So thinking about setting up some sort of system of how you’re going to keep those in an orderly fashion and whether that, be it keeping the physical item or for some people even just taking a photo of it so that they can remember it and let it go, I think that can be a huge thing. And I guess related to that is really thinking about, and having a regular rhythm of decluttering. So when you think about, they grow out of their clothes, they grow out of their toys. So how are you going to start to have a rhythm of, is it every season we go through the wardrobe or every Christmas we go through the toys so that you can really make sure that you don’t get inundated with all of the stuff, and that you share it with people, and hand it on to others who can use it rather than your house piling up. And this is in the gray area. Is that a chore or is it life admin? There’s quite a bit of life admin involved in potentially selling things or figuring out where to donate it to. So, I do think that decluttering is one of those ones that falls in the gray area of whether it’s life admin or a chore.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve done that with the kids’ art. So you know, when your kid’s are little they’re always bringing home art and you hang it up on the wall, there just comes a point where it’s just like, okay, I gotta take this down because it’s just gotten too much. Yeah, I took pictures of them before I threw them in the trash can. So I still got it, and which is nice.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I mean you can’t keep them all so you really gotta embrace that reasonably early on because you can’t keep the first piece of hair, the first pair of shoes, the first, and so you’ve gotta decide how much is important to keep and what you are gonna keep, what’s your system so that you can easily add to it over time.
Brett McKay: You said your kids are teenagers?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah.
Brett McKay: At what point did you start offloading their life admin to them? Like, “Hey, you gotta fill out this form now, I’m not filling out this form.”?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think that you can give them this sort of, what I call the junior version of the game, if that makes sense. So you can kind of adjust it as they go through. So if you do happen to have a paper form, you can get them to fill in what they can, if their handwriting’s good enough, or if it’s a digital form, same thing. You can say, “Hey I’ve got this school form here for you, can you start doing part of it?” Because really that’s just helping them, teaching them what it means to be part of that. I already mentioned, we’ve got the kids contributing both to deciding what they wanna cook and then cooking one meal a week and now that my kids are a bit older, certainly the digital calendar, if they wanna go somewhere, they’re responsible for checking the calendar, making sure it can work, adding it in so that therefore they’re responsible for making that happen.
And if they can see that there’s a clash. So in particular my daughter, she’s got a bit of an active social life and extracurricular she’ll go, “Oh, I really wanna go to this party. I can see mom and dad are going out, I’ll be responsible for finding a ride.” So she will contact her friends and organize a ride and then she’ll note that in the calendar that she’s going to so-and-so’s place and she’s organized this ride. So that just means it’s one less thing for us to organize and it’s really helping her learn like the realities of life and how to organize herself.
Brett McKay: You have a section about the life admin that comes when you’re doing comparison shopping for various products and services, like, a new car insurance, cell phone service. This is really interesting because your book is geared towards an Australian audience. So I learned a lot about how the Australian insurance industry works and that was really interesting because I had no clue about that. But what is some general advice because I know when we’re thinking about buying a new product, we just kind of, I was get sucked down this rabbit hole. I was like, “Well should I get this one or that one?” And now you read all the reviews and you spend two days trying to decide on a vacuum cleaner. Any advice there to streamline that?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think the first thing is really thinking about what’s your criteria. So thinking about establishing that criteria before you kind of dig too much into the comparison in shopping because to make a decision it’s much easier if you know what good looks like. So if you think about okay, what is gonna be my criteria upon which I’m gonna decide and then I actually think you absolutely have to write it down. So get yourself out a piece of paper or a spreadsheet and put the criteria down the left. So set yourself up a comparison table because that really helps you be able to pick the best offer or the best option rather than going through each option one at a time and you can get really confused. So I think that’s probably tip number one.
And I think the second one is really to think about limiting yourself to how many you’re gonna compare, because in lots of things there are infinite possible options and you start to go down this rabbit hole of comparing absolutely every product out there. So really try and think about using some sort of search to find the sort of three that you’re gonna compare and then just picking three options. Because the research shows that the more options you compare, the more confused and dissatisfied you’ll actually be. And often, when you compare a lot, you actually might not make any choice. So really try and limit yourself to how many you’re gonna compare. And then, particularly if it’s not a high stakes decision, compare three move on and that will stand you in good stead.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And something I’ll do too is I’ll, when it’s like a big consumer purchase, like an appliance, I go to consumerreports.org. I don’t know if this works… Does this work in Australia?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So we have something called Choice, which is the same kind of thing. So yeah, very similar to that. Yeah.
Brett McKay: I like that because it’s a nonprofit, it’s independent. I feel like if you Google best pillow, you’re gonna be sent to some website, like Good Housekeeping and it’s gonna be a bunch of affiliate links that are just gonna try to sell you an expensive pillow so they can make some money. I feel like with consumer reports I can trust it a little bit more. So I’ve used that to narrow my options significantly. I think that’s been helpful. So I like that idea, get three and then you gotta be a satisfier, like what’s good enough and then just go with that.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. Definitely. Don’t try and find that elusive optimal solution because you might still be here next year. [laughter]
Brett McKay: So we’ve got some friends that have a saying, “Having fun is a lot of work.” And the idea is that if you wanna make memories with vacations and outings, there’s a lot of admin you have to do to make that happen. So what are some tactics people can use to take the tedium out of our vacation planning?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think when it comes to holidays, like talking to an expert here, it’s kind of like my quest in life is to travel as much as possible. So, for me, my personal advice is this kind of real merit in taking a year long view on your holiday or vacation plans, because the people you know who are always off doing something fabulous are probably the people who made that plan a year ago. So planning for the rolling year ahead let’s you do the groundwork early, you get better choices, you get better prices and also it gives you something to look forward to. So I like to always book my next holiday the minute I get back from one. So as soon as I get back, it’s kind of like the next weekend my hour of power is dedicated to booking my next holiday, even if that’s a year out.
Because actually the research shows that anticipating those happy moments or those holidays is actually gives you more good feelings than actually thinking about the past happiness. And so, I love to have the anticipation of the next trip coming up. So I think that’s probably my number one tip. And I think secondly, it’s really like share the load. So divide the tasks between you, because it can be a lot of tasks. So I book the flights, my husband will book the accommodation and if that feels overwhelming, as we sort of mentioned before, there are still travel agents out there, there’s like specialist travel agents. We used one when we came to Disney, it was a huge win. They knew exactly what to do, they helped us with all the hacks. So think about using a specialist travel agent or a travel agent to just, you know, you might pay a little bit more, but this is where you’ve kind of gotta decide what’s the most important to you in your season of life. Is it spending a bit more money or saving a bit more time? And if saving time is really what’s, find a good travel agent and they’ll look after you and they can book your holidays for you.
Brett McKay: What about planning social events with friends? That’s another thing that can be tedious.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Oh yeah. And I mean, when you’re the life admin expert, everyone expects you to be the one who’s organizing all of the things. So, for me, I really, I try and batch the planning. So, if I’m gonna be the one organizing it, I’m really thinking about, okay, what suits me, what really works for my calendar? And then I’m looking ahead, maybe a month, two months ahead and I’m firing off a bunch of emails, texts, WhatsApp messages to my various groups of friends. I’m being really specific with the date and time and venue that suits me. And I’m really saying, “This is what’s happening. Are you in or you’re not in?” And kind of letting go of the idea that you have to find, particularly when you’re thinking about group events, that you don’t have to find a date that suits everyone. There’ll always be another time.
And if you’ve batched it and sent out a whole bunch of things all in your one hour of power, that means that if a few things don’t come off, then you’re not gonna be disappointed. So if your calendar’s feeling a bit empty or it’s kind of not working for you in terms of the sorts of things you’re being invited to, that’s where you sort of take control in terms of batching out those invitations. And I guess going back to what we talked about before, thinking about having a reference list of maybe people you wanna catch up with or the things you wanna do and that can help you kind of really think, okay, if you’ve thought about it in advance, you can start to really think, I’ve spent some time thinking about what’s gonna really enrich me and I’ll use that reference list to design my social life rather than just let my social life happen to me.
Brett McKay: My wife and I, we host a Christmas party, or it could be a New Year’s party. We’ve done New Year’s too, but we’ve done it so many times. We’ve established some check, like having the checklist of, we know we gotta do these things. And then also a reference list of the supplies that we have has come in handy as well.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah, that’s a great tip. And certainly, I think one of those things is I love having those regular social events that happen every year in and out as kind of traditions. We actually in Australia have what we call Christmas in July, because obviously it’s hot for Christmas in us in December. And so if you wanna have kind of that like, open fire, kind of cold Christmas feeling, we have it in July and we host a Christmas in July every year with the same bunch of friends and it’s a great tradition. Just kind of happens on autopilot. So yeah, I really love that too.
Brett McKay: Well, Dinah, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: I mean you can find us on our website @lifeadminlifehacks.com and you can also find us at the same handle for Instagram and Facebook.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Dinah Rowe-Roberts, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Thanks so much for having me.
Brett McKay: My guest, it was Dinah Rowe-Roberts. She’s the author of the book “Life Admin Hacks”. It’s available on amazon.com. You’ll find more information about her work at her website, lifeadminlifehacks.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/lifeadmin, where you can find links to resources and where you can delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure you check at our website @artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us review up a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
