Life admin tips to save busy business owners time and money

For business owners, the regular admin of life doesn’t stop – it’s just piled on top of everything else you need to do as a time-pressed entrepreneur. Dinah Rowe Roberts and Mia Northrop, hosts of the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast, have some brilliant tips to share ahead of their live workshop, coming up at the 2022 Be MPowered conference by Mums & Co.

Time and money. Two of the biggest challenges business owners face.

We’re in business for the long haul, our financial goals and personal wellbeing. Yet, being in business doesn’t stop the administration of life. When you are busy running a business and caring for your family, the life admin burden of modern life can be the thing that pushes you to overwhelm.

It does take some effort to get your life admin system established but then you’ll have more time, money and energy to devote to the things that matter to you.

As business owners with caring responsibilities, we know that when the working day is done and the kids are in bed you still need to do your banking, sort your taxes, plan your meals, get the best deal on electricity, and go to the dentist.

Life admin: it’s relentless, time-consuming and anxiety-inducing. For many, life admin is a blurry, boundary-less bundle of tasks that aren’t assigned to anyone, not scheduled nor approached with efficiency.

We get it, we are busy working mothers with full-time jobs, that’s why we created a business by starting the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast!

Here are some tips we’ll be sharing at our interactive workshop at Be MPowered – the conference for business women by Mums & Co, Thursday 13 October 2022.

When life admin is out of control, it is easy to blame a lack of discipline, motivation or simply a lack of time

Life admin is distinct from housework, which is traditionally cooking, cleaning and laundry. It has its own areas of responsibility and is the biggest contributor to the mental load, yet social commentary often conflates the two.

When you don’t distinguish life admin from adjacent domestic activities, you don’t take stock of the sheer amount of it that exists every day, and so you don’t set up systems to tackle it efficiently.

When you don’t have an efficient life admin system you:

• Spend more time than necessary on it – time that could be better spent on your business or with your family and friends.
• Waste money – it has been estimated that Australians are paying more than $11 billion in ‘loyalty tax’ by not shopping around for household bills.
• Experience stress and overwhelm – the so-called ‘Zeigarnik effect’ – that we remember things we need to do better than things we’ve done.
• Experience relationship friction – particularly when one partner feels like they are carrying more of the mental load.

You need a mental model of life admin to prioritise what’s important and tackle it efficiently

The Life Admin Hacks approach is to develop a mental model of the dimensions of life admin, so you can set up an efficient system to approach and share life admin in a methodical way and prioritise what is important to you.

In our recent survey, we found that:

• 37 per cent of people do life admin tasks for a parent or adult relative.
• One in three respondents reported that their child starting at daycare or school generated a significant amount of life admin.

There are some practical things you can do to make it easier to manage the mental load and share the admin work of caring for someone else while running your business. Try:

• Setting up a shared digital calendar for appointments.
• Establishing a shared email address for bills and statements, to create transparency among family members.
• Establishing shared password management systems.
• Establishing shared to-do lists to allocate and track tasks.
• Scheduling monthly meetings or teleconferences to discuss the situation and share the activities.

Life admin tasks can be divided into different buckets of time so you know when you can get them done

When a life admin task arrives, categorise it by the time it will take to complete – then you can know when you can get it done.

There are three time bucket types:

• Two Minutes Too Easy – these are the fast, easy tasks that can be done as soon as they appear on your radar. If you open an email and a bill needs to be paid, open up your banking app and pay it there and then. It’ll be all over in two minutes and you can delete the message. Done. Next.
• Ten Minute Time Killers – this category of tasks can be done in idle time. You could do it on your phone while waiting in line, in between meetings, or while you’re sort of watching TV. These tasks don’t need to be scheduled, but you need to be confident that there will be some guaranteed whitespace in your week where you can get to it. You also need a to-do list to keep track of them.
• Hour of Power – this is time committed to substantial to-do list items where you need to concentrate. It may be to change the electricity provider, plan a birthday party, or review your superannuation. Schedule a recurring time slot each week. Give it a powerful name, such as a Set Me Up Sunday or Monday Magic Time, to claim this as the space when seriously useful shizzle gets done. Our brains are weird like that. Ameliorate this time with a music playlist that gets you in the zone, or pour yourself a water, wine or … whatever it takes! It all helps.

Dinah Rowe Roberts and Mia Northrop are hosts of Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you back time, money, peace of mind and household harmony.

Dinah and Mia are presenting at Be MPowered by Mums & Co on Thursday 13 October 2022. Tickets are just $99 in person for the Sydney Hub or $49 online. For all information and to book, visit https://utm.guru/ue2Nt

Mums & Co’s mission is to create Australia’s most caring business movement that helps women to start and stay in business – harmonising ambition, livelihood and wellbeing. There has been a 46 per cent increase in female business owners over the past 20 years and over the past decade, two-thirds of new businesses created in Australia have been founded by women[1]. [1] Xero Boss Insights 2021 

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