Do you ever get the feeling you’re ‘working from home’ even though you’ve officially retired? If so, you’re certainly not alone. The everyday tasks of managing your own affairs (aka ‘life-admin’) are taking up more and more of your day. By the time you’ve opened up your device and attended to your banking, bill payments, personal appointments, deliveries, online orders, charitable donations, tax, and permits (the list goes on), the better part of a morning or afternoon can disappear. And we’re not just talking about a once-a-week session! Yet, the digital world was supposed to have made life easier, not harder, and to have afforded us more leisure time than ever. So what went so terribly wrong?
Part of the problem is our ‘service providers’ (our bank, the IRD, our insurance company etc) saw the opportunity the digital world offered them, too. Suddenly, by issuing customers with a platform, a login ID and a password, they could halve the number of staff they required, not to mention cut back on physical premises. Now, if we want something actioned, we fill in an online form. If we require information, we have to scroll to find it rather than wandering into a branch and asking a question. Digital life-admin is even required if we want to pursue leisure activities (the bowls club subs must be paid online, the minutes for the garden club are submitted as a PDF).
What’s more, every app or platform requires us to attend to it. We first have to set up our access to it. Then we have to store the information needed to log into it – and go through a raft of inconveniences if we can’t locate the information. We’re required to make updates, check details, troubleshoot glitches of our own or another’s making, and go through the whole procedure again when a business changes ownership. And we have to ensure our own online security. Suddenly, any notion of ‘convenience’ goes out the window.
But perhaps the most frustrating aspect of life-admin today, is it’s a monotonous and solitary experience. In the past, it was accompanied by a drive or a walk downtown to visit a few offices, often meeting people we knew on the way. Or we could hope for some sort of social interaction, even if it was just with a staff member on the other end of a phone. Now, we attend to life-admin at home, and at any time of the day (or night). No wonder it seems to be taking over not only our lives, but also our physical space, as our kitchen table, living room, or lap becomes a necessary office!
If you’re one of the many people (both young and older) who have woken up to the fact you’re now spending far too much time digitally managing ‘life’, here are some tips to help you break free of the drudgery:
- Use a trustworthy, reliable password manager. Dependable password management tools will store your passwords so you don’t need to remember them. All you do need to remember is your log-on password for the one tool.
- Set up automatic payments for everyday bills such as household utilities, club memberships, and subscriptions.
- Use your online calendar to send you digital reminders about annual appointments and events such as your yearly wellness check, dental checkup, family trust meeting, the furnishing of your tax return, and birthdays.
- Pay a one-off bill (such as a dental or car repair account) on the spot so you don’t have to deal with an online invoice and bill payment.
- Say ‘no’ to non-essential notifications. Many businesses with online platforms (such as your gym or favourite charity) want to send you regular emails and notifications, regardless of whether they are important to you. Check notification options and click only on those you know are essential or of interest.
- Designate a specific time each week to deal with life-admin rather than attending to individual tasks each time you open your device.
- Learn how to mark emails as ‘unread’ or ‘important’ so you can take a peek at them when they arrive, but still be reminded to attend to them during your designated life-admin time.
- Organise your device’s email inbox and desktop into folders so finding correspondence and digital documents takes less time.
- Separate the physical space for attending to life-admin from your leisure and living space (i.e. don’t take the life-admin to bed with you, or attend to it over the breakfast table when you could be enjoying conversing with your partner).
Life-admin is not going to get any easier, so be kind to yourself, and set some limits!