Elizabeth F. Emens - Life Admin How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing

These days, I regularly win back time from adminand appreciate it when I do. I keep my eyes peeled for moments when I can resist. With admin that needs doing, I try out an adminimalist strategy first when possible, as I did when searching for a new babysitter recently. I emailed a few former babysitters who I hoped would have contacts with qualified people. When one emailed back to say shed found me someone, without my having to post my ad and launch a big search, I celebrated the gift of Admin Savings Time by planning a leisure activity Id been wanting to try (something called floatation therapy).

I also create windows for getting necessary admin done. I aim to schedule a study hall with a friend or colleague at least once a weekeither to do admin or to exclude admin in favor of other priorities. Some weeks, scheduling a study hall is itself too much admin. When I want some extra structure without the hassle of coordination, I use the chart I made for a solo study hall.

My systems are not optimal, but they are working pretty well. The endless recurring to-do lists in my calendar are largely a thing of the past. For the moment, I have also stopped spending my time trying out to-do-list apps. Instead, I rely on the Notes app on my iPhone for my long list of tasks, and on especially busy days, I write a paper to-do list. Each days page begins with a box of several important-but-not-urgent items I aspire to do every day: meditate, exercise/yoga, write, pray. I have an actual physical clipboard labeled Current, where I put snail-mail items that need to get dealt with, and a clipboard labeled Tax, where I save donation receipts and other documents for tax time. In lieu of filing, I have a box for any papers I might need from this year (for example, bills paid with date notation, backup originals of a few essential items Ive scanned). Im still an Avoider with my snail mail, which can pile up, but at least I have places to put things when I do choose to sort. Nearly all these innovations were inspired by particular interviewees.

I try to see admin before it lands and make quick decisions about how to respond. I text or email recommendations to people the moment they ask, while theyre still standing there to dictate their email addresses. If someone requests something more complicated, I ask the person to email me the relevant information in a clean thread (an email with no history of past exchanges) that I can forward along to the desired contact. I take photos of information, and rather than scanning, whenever possible I photograph permission slips and other documents that need signing and emailing. When Im blessed by an admin near-miss, I try to savor the feeling. No lost-luggage admin, Ill think over and over while leaving the airport with my bags.

When a big admin event is coming up, like a lengthy and demanding divorce meeting, Ive gotten better at trusting my own methods. I schedule a pre-meeting with my financial adviser, to go over anything concrete, and a few minutes with my lawyer right before the meeting. I jot down notes as they occur to me. And I trust that whatever thinking and gathering needs to happen will happen in the day or two before. Admin for the big meeting doesnt take over the whole two weeks prior. But I also acknowledge that it will take some time and that its real.

The market has also given me a few admin bright spots. I discovered an app that handles divorce finances; you and your ex can each log shared expenses and upload receipts (for the cost of afterschool activities or medical bills, for instance), and the app will charge you or your ex the right percentage (according to your formula) and keep a record of it all for you both. The companys founding principle is Dont Ever Talk to Your Ex About Money Again. Brilliant. And to my delight, my employer fixed my pretax-dollar Flexible Spending Account problem by consolidating service of that with my health-insurance company. Now that company will automatically feed the amount that insurance doesnt cover right through my pretax-dollar account and automatically deposit the remainder in my bank account. These developments underscore to me the huge difference markets and employers can make in our individual admin burdens.

For happier events, like planning my daughters birthday party, I indulge the parts I like and ask myself whats worth doing. When the options overwhelmed me before party time this past year, I finally sat down and made a quick chart of my values, including things like her getting to invite whomever she wants and getting to play the way she wants. Immediately, this helped me rule out some glossy options, such as Robot Building, which charges by the kid and structures every minute. Making a chart of what matters in this endeavor is not something I would have thought I had time for, but it ended up saving precious minutes and mental energy (and money).

I continue to turn off email from Friday night to Saturday night for my email Shabbat. I scurry around frantically before this hiatus starts, trying to get everything possible done; thats one stressful hour on Friday early evening. Sometimes it feels like Im literally wrenching myself away from the to-do list to light Shabbat candles. And then, not long after, its like I remember something Id forgotten. Something quieter, more joyful. My kids look forward to and comment on this change in my energy. By Saturday night, I feel light-years from the difficulty I faced shutting down on Friday. I usually dont want to open my email, and, when I can, I wait until Sunday.

Admin certainly comes in and torments me sometimes. At other times, though, Ive come to feel it as a relief. It can even be a siren song, threatening to lure me away from my important-but-not-urgent endeavors like writing. Amidst all, it feels like a miracle to be finishing this book. Ive found that writing your first bookor at least, writing my first bookis a lot like so many other firsts. The first time you go skiing, for instance, or your first kiss. Even if you know youre doing something monumentally exciting, the sheer quantity of fear may make it hard to enjoy. On the way to my first junior-high dance, my two friends and I sat in the back seat of my mothers car, petrified. Rigid with fear. My mom said gently, Itll never be this exciting again.

As I emerge from this journey, my admin life has changed in fundamental ways. Some areas of admin have been made smaller; some, more manageable. And some admin feels very different than it used to. Making admin visible, counting it as work, and reflecting on how I feel while doing it has made the admin that I know needs doing feel better. But some of the change is the result of the particular circumstances of my lifespecifically, my divorce. Though I began this project largely as a Reluctant Doer, I have always had my strongest streak of Super Doer when it came to my kids. This was especially true for projects I found interesting, like searching for the right school. These days, even the dullest admin for my kidslike getting physical forms completed and submitted for summer camp, sayfeels pretty okay to do. I think the main reason is that it feels like work I do directly for my kids, whom I miss half the week. And so in some way the kid admin connects me to them rather than getting caught up in unrealized hopes or complications of the adult world.

Admin is woven into the very particular details and values of our lives, and so the way we experience it is intimately related to those details and values. For you, so it is for me.

Two days before the party for my daughters seventh birthday, I was in the throes of trying to finish a first draft of this book amid the admin hell that was my life. Shortly before dinner, I sat at my computer hoping to make good use of thirty minutes of writing time.