I’m pretty sure I came across this concept of ‘Life Admin’ a couple of years ago on YouTube or social media. And being a ‘productivity’, organisation and planning kind of girlie, I was intrigued by this from the get-go.

It really started to make a lot of sense once I adapted it to my own life, and since then, life admin has stayed on as a routine I still take up from time to time.

I like to call this the ‘Life admin reset’ and have found it quite helpful in reducing the mental overload and overwhelm that comes with the ever-growing lists of errands and life admin tasks one needs to deal with!

What is Life Admin, and why a life admin reset can help

I like to think of this as a ‘reset’, as it not only helps to get things done and back in order - but depending on the tasks done - also helps in clearing a lot of physical, digital and ‘mental’ clutter and gives one the space to, literally and figuratively, then focus on more important tasks at hand.

Think of life admin tasks as a bunch of errands that are piling up – you know – cause often they are either not very urgent or not very important to do at a given time.

And then there are those important admin tasks that are too boring (or torturous even!) – hello, taxes – or maybe those tasks we are just being lethargic to do. Like booking doctor’s appointments, for example! (which we really shouldn’t be procrastinating on btw).

And hence, such tasks and all the other mundane and ‘oh so boring’ tasks start taking a back seat. But wait, you might have a question then – if these are not so important or urgent tasks – then why do we need to do them in the first place?!

Fair point, and to that I would say – that’s the beauty of realising this – now one could ‘really’ look at their list, and delegate or simply do away with the tasks that don’t add any benefit.

But even after tidying up our list, I’m pretty sure we’ll still have some life admin stuff that we need to take care of, things like:

• Having a decently clean digital inbox so that you don’t miss important emails and yes, run out of memory! (Gmail users, I know you know what I am talking about here)
• Clearing your phone when needed, again so that you don’t run out of memory
• Clearing the physical crap that accumulates in ‘that corner’ of your space gathering dust and what not
• Canceling unnecessary subscriptions because you don’t want your hard-earned money to be going into something you no longer use or need

……and things like that. I hope you get the gist of what kind of activities we are talking about here.

By not taking care of such ‘life admin’ tasks or not having a proper system to deal with them, we inadvertently face side-effects like:

• such things to-do are often stuck in the back of our minds, leading to unnecessary mental clutter and at times even sheer overwhelm
• they clutter our day to day to-do lists – often never getting done and just sitting there clogging them up!
• and they end up directly or indirectly fighting for our time and attention when we could be handling all this very differently

So yes, there is a dire need to properly handle these life admin tasks especially for those of us, whom these side-effects impact the most.

And just to be clear, taking the example from above of having a ‘clean’ digital inbox, I’m not talking here about maintaining an ‘inbox zero’ or anything like that. While I like being productive and organised, I’m more about being intentional and smart in the way we do things – so yes, no inbox zero set-ups are coming from me anytime soon!

And, hey, if you’re someone maintaining an inbox zero right now, kudos to you, no judgements at all! It would be lovely to have, and I must admit, it would be easier to maintain if we had started the process of being on top of our emails from the get-go. But for those of us who have inboxes that are 10-15 years old or have 10K+ unread emails – yeah, let’s not shoot for an inbox zero!

How often should you do a life admin reset?

So yes, coming back to the topic after that tangent – the point here is to be intentionally selective with the activities and tasks we choose to do in our life admin resets, and to come up with our own frequency or schedule for how often we might want to do them.

For some, it helps to do this once a month; for others, once in a quarter – it’s up to you really to pick and choose a schedule that works for you.

Depending on how often you choose to tackle this life admin stuff, you might want to allocate a few hours, half a day or even a full day to get it all done. Or at least cross off what is urgent and important to do at the moment.

And it really helps to combine all such tasks and take care of them together during the ‘life admin’ window we choose to set aside. This way, such small to medium-sized tasks do not have to eat up our time every other day and we don’t have to keep sinking into this feeling of always trying to play catch up!

Secondly, having to do such tasks during our workdays or spread across many days amongst other important and cognitively demanding tasks – leads to a lot of unnecessary ‘context switching’, which honestly often leaves one feeling depleted and plain tired.

That’s why it’s a much better idea to set aside a dedicated time to combine and do all these activities together. Plan it out ahead of time, put it in your calendar if you maintain one – so that you know that such life admin tasks will be taken care of in that window. We don’t then have to keep carrying these tasks around in our heads, consciously or unconsciously.

Make it enjoyable!

And I must say, from personal experience, there is something really fun about going through these tasks altogether, and even if I’m dead tired by the end of it - it feels good and refreshing to be finally done with it!

But hey, I understand if you think, ”No, this doesn’t seem that fun to me!”. I would still encourage you to think of this time as some fun activity or challenge that you’re taking up and see how much you can conquer!

Maybe put on some fun music and get on with it. Perhaps you could even treat yourself to a hearty meal from that favourite place of yours once you are done. I often like to end my life admin resets that way.

This kind of system helped me a lot by taking the mental load off me - I could focus on other things instead, knowing that there was a space for these tasks to be done and that they’ll be taken care of when the time comes.

The way I see it benefitting us is like this – instead of having to do all the different small and big life admin tasks on 12 different occasions in a month, you intentionally choose to club them together and tackle it on a single day and be done with it.

I’m sharing a life admin list below. Many of these are generic and should be helpful for everyone, but feel free to customize this list to suit your individual needs and requirements. Choose what makes sense, skip what doesn’t and add to it as needed.

And it’s not necessary to go through all the items in this list every time. It really depends on when you took care of these activities last time and when it is time to do it again. But yes, do give yourself some tough love and get to those 1-2 tasks that you’re actively avoiding but that need to be done! (telling that to myself as well, often)

And one last tip, especially for the more open-ended tasks like clearing your inbox etc., I highly encourage you to set a timer, say for 30 mins and get on with it. That way, you can stop once the timer goes off and move on to the next things on your list.

Life Admin Checklist:

• Clear digital email inbox as feasible
• Clear phone as feasible
• Declutter social media by unfollowing or muting irrelevant accounts
• Clear laptop/ desktop/ tablet as feasible
• Back up important data to the cloud or a hard drive
• Clear note-taking apps and screenshots
• Clear junk data stored in apps you use regularly
• Clear physical inbox as feasible
• Clear wallets/ purses/ bags
• Clear pending bills, payments and cancel unnecessary subscriptions
• Take care of any tax and/or insurance related actions
• Track expenditure and review your budget
• Clean, deep-clean or declutter areas of your choice
• Clear expired items - food, medicines, cosmetics, toiletries, cleaning products etc
• Clear any accumulated trash
• Send items for recycling or donation
• Clean gadgets/ accessories
• Check calendar and commitments, book any important appointments
• Restock essentials - groceries and supplies
• Replace any broken product or supplies and get repairs done
• Take care of any home or vehicle maintenance tasks
• Return any borrowed items

I would love to know if you like doing such life admin days, or if this is something new to you – is this helpful and is it something you’re willing to try?

PS – If you would like a simple system for checking off your life admin resets and automatically creating a fresh list whenever you need it, you can access the Life Admin Reset checklist here, a done-for-you free Notion template. It’s customisable too!

Cheers!