Imagine losing nearly a week of hard-earned vacation time not to sun-soaked beaches or mountain hikes but to the relentless grind of life admin.
Recent studies reveal that British workers lose an average of four days of annual leave each year – not to holidays or personal time, but to mundane tasks like paying bills, repair activities, and even essential tasks like drafting wills.
Adding to this, The Independent reports that individuals manage approximately 109 life admin tasks per year, highlighting just how much time is consumed by everyday obligations.
This growing burden—often overlooked—raises an important question: how can we make life admin less time-consuming?
The first step is understanding what drives these tasks and learning how to manage them more efficiently. This article demystifies the art of life admin by first defining the concept, followed by actionable life admin hacks to reclaim time and alleviate daily stress.
What is Life Admin?
Life admin, a term coined by legal scholar Elizabeth Emens, encompasses the often-overlooked managerial and organisational tasks required to maintain a modern personal life. It is the office work individuals perform for themselves outside of their professional roles.
But what exactly constitutes this office work of personal life? Essentially, the unseen form of labour involves a wide range of activities, such as the following:
- Digital Admin (password management, inbox cleanup, changing banking details)
- Family Responsibilities (school forms, pet care, travel planning)
- Personal Finance Management (paying bills, budgeting, filing taxes)
- Health and Appointments (booking doctor’s appointments, managing health insurance)
- Home and Household (arranging cleaning schedules, grocery planning, researching home improvements)
Although seemingly straightforward, Emens differentiates between chores and life admin. Chores are physical activities—grocery shopping, cleaning, gardening.
Life admin, however, is the mental planning and organisation that precedes them, like list-making, supply acquisition, and price comparisons. Therefore, if it requires cognitive effort, it is likely admin work.
Why Life Admin Feels Overwhelming
Despite its seemingly mundane nature, life admin frequently generates overwhelming feelings for various reasons.
Hidden Time Costs
Research reveals that a significant portion of individuals' time is consumed by routine tasks like managing insurance, monitoring bank accounts, and paying credit card bills.
Adding to this burden, over half of the population struggles with household paperwork and frequently missing deadlines, as noted by The Independent. This highlights the need for strategies to streamline these tasks, as hidden time costs, when accumulated, can impact productivity.
Also Read: Best Cash Management Solution: A Complete Guide
Mental Load
Psychology Today identifies life admin as invisible labour, with tasks performed within devices and minds through planning and multitasking. Consider holiday gift shopping: the act of purchasing is a chore, but the budgeting beforehand—tracking finances, categorising spending, and predicting future costs—is pure life admin.
The combined mental exertion required for these tasks leads to an overwhelming mental strain, diminishing the ability to handle other relevant tasks and responsibilities.
Lack of Systems or Tools for Organisation
Life admin's overwhelming burden stems from the sheer volume of tasks and their unseen nature. This is intensified by the absence of systems and tools, pushing individuals into ad-hoc management, where they react to tasks as they arise rather than proactively planning.
Also Read: Powerful Apps to Take Control of Personal Asset Management
Best Life Admin Hacks to Simplify Your Routine
As Mia Northorp suggests, the right tools and systems can significantly impact life admin, transforming it from a source of stress to a manageable process.
With this in mind, below are several life admin hacks designed to simplify routine activities and promote a sense of control.
#1: Audit Your Admin Work
Auditing admin work involves reviewing all administrative tasks to identify and eliminate hidden inefficiencies and time drains. This process begins with tracking all admin-related tasks to do, which includes but is not limited to:
- Bills payment
- Booking appointment
- Emails (personal and household-related)
- Managing paperwork
- Online research
- Phone calls
- Tasks that involve planning, organising or managing information
While the initial goal here is to identify life admin tasks, individuals should subsequently analyse and categorise them by:
- Duplication: Are you doing the same thing multiple times?
- Frequency: How often do you do this task?
- Importance: How essential is this task?
- Time spent: How long does it take?
This process of auditing admin work allows individuals to move from a reactive to a proactive approach, leading to increased awareness, improved efficiency, and reduced mental load.
#2: Block Time for Admin
Todoist describes time blocking as a time management strategy involving scheduled, focused work periods. This proves very useful for administrative tasks, particularly on days dedicated to them.
As a structured approach, time blocking divides the day into focused segments, ensuring total attention to each task. For instance, dedicating 9:00 to 11:00 AM to email correspondence, 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM to bill payments, and 2:00 to 4:00 PM to filing paperwork.
By implementing this strategy, individuals cultivate a more organised and controlled life admin that reduces the likelihood of overlooked or delayed tasks.
#3: Automate Where Possible
The emergence of life admin apps has liberated individuals from repetitive tasks, allowing them to redirect their focus towards more complex and value-added activities. However, to fully capitalise on this freedom, it is crucial to identify which life admin tasks can be automated.
Listed below are common areas of life admin help that are ideal for automation:
- Bill Payments (payments for utilities, rent or mortgage, subscriptions, and credit cards)
- Budget Tracking (sync bank accounts and categorise spending)
- Calendar Reminders (appointments, birthdays, and check-in reminders)
- Cleaning & Maintenance Schedules (car servicing, filter replacements and other repair activity reminders)
- Document Backup (document storage)
- Health Appointments and Refills (prescription refills and appointment scheduling reminders)
- Password Management (auto-fill credentials)
To effectively implement these automations, a range of life admin apps are available, each designed to simplify specific aspects of life admin.
Task Management and Organisation
- Any.do: An application that enables people to track their progress, manage events in a built-in calendar, attach files, and share items with collaborators.
- Todoist: A task management app that allows creating to-do lists, setting reminders, and organising tasks into projects.
Personal Finance Management
- MyAssets: A comprehensive asset management platform designed to organise, track, and manage all assets—including finances, property, collectables, and belongings—in one place.
- NerdWallet: A personal finance app that empowers consumers with financial information, insights, and expert guidance.
Read More: MyAssets: The Digital Asset Management App That Get Things Done
Time Management
- Amie: A productivity app that combines calendar, tasks, and email management into a single platform.
- Calendly: A software that automates appointment scheduling, allowing users to book time slots.
Although life admin apps automate many tasks, proactively monitoring, reviewing, and updating them is essential for continued alignment with evolving needs and effectiveness.
#4: Outsource Tasks
Given the amount of tasks associated with life admin, whether budgeting, managing paperwork or maintaining property, a valuable life admin hack is to outsource tasks. This viable solution allows individuals to offload repetitive and time-consuming tasks, freeing up their time and reducing stress.
This naturally leads to the question: What are the life admin roles individuals outsource? Before anything else, when hiring life administration roles, it is crucial to prioritise the tasks that significantly deplete time and induce stress.
To gain a clearer understanding of potential roles and their associated responsibilities, here's a breakdown:
Virtual Assistant (VA)
Operating remotely, a virtual assistant handles various administrative duties, encompassing calendar organisation, email management, travel coordination, online research, and data processing.
Financial Planner
According to Investopedia, a financial planner’s job is to develop and implement strategies that address their clients’ financial needs, covering areas such as debt, retirement, investments, risk, taxes, and estate planning.
Home Manager
According to the home maintenance company Prefixinc, a home manager is a professionally trained individual who oversees all aspects of residential property maintenance, including routine tasks like plumbing and pest control, while tailoring services to each home's specific needs and requirements.
Ultimately, delegating and outsourcing tasks allows individuals to focus on higher-priority activities, which can help improve productivity and achieve a better work-life balance.
Mastering the Art of Life Admin: A Simpler Way Forward
Life administration, far from being a collection of trivial and recurring duties, encompasses the mental planning, demanding paperwork and tasks associated with everyday life and unexpected major events. From budgeting and property maintenance to navigating the complexities of serious illness and estate planning, the sheer volume of these responsibilities can create a significant burden.
As a proactive approach, understanding the nature of life admin and recognising why it feels overwhelming is the first step towards simplification. To complement that, individuals can reclaim valuable time and reduce stress by implementing hacks, such as auditing administrative work, time blocking, automating routine tasks, leveraging life admin apps and delegating or outsourcing tasks.
Nevertheless, mastering the art of life admin is not just about streamlining tasks; it is about creating a simpler, more manageable life for greater focus on personal well-being and meaningful pursuits. By applying these strategies, individuals can transform life admin from a source of stress into a manageable, even efficient, aspect of life.
Life Admin Help: Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a life admin?
Life admin refers to the mental planning and organisation that precedes the performance of routine tasks needed by individuals to maintain their modern personal life.
2. How to deal with life admin?
Effective life admin relies on routines, prioritisation, and streamlining tools; batching tasks, scheduling dedicated time, and delegating when necessary are also key strategies.
3. Is cleaning life admin?
While cleaning is generally considered a household task, its scheduling and integration into a routine can be considered a component of life admin. Life admin focuses on the more complex and organisational aspects of daily management.
MyAssets: Redefining Life Admin–One Asset at a Time
Navigating the intricacies of life admin, from cataloguing assets to organising documents, often feels like a constant battle against chaos. What if there was a centralised solution to simplify it all?
Introducing MyAssets, a life admin app that catalogues everything from finances and properties to collectables and belongings—all within a single platform. Whether noting a substantial collection of rare collectables, tracking the location of global properties or monitoring credit card balances, MyAssets ensure that users are always informed and in control of their entire portfolio.
MyAssets transcends a basic repository, it is a personal organiser for life’s essential assets. Instead of scrambling to find missing certificates of authenticity or property deeds, MyAssets provides a centralised, secure vault for all vital documents, keeping them readily available.
With MyAssets, individuals can simplify complex administrative tasks and gain peace of mind, knowing valuable assets are efficiently managed and easily accessible.
Turn chaos into clarity. Try MyAssets and unlock a 14-day free trial of Life Admin.
