Apparently one of our most pervasive fantasies when sitting next to a stranger on the bus or in a bar is not that they are having more sex than we are, but that they are doing more admin. In our deepest shame about our inability to pay a bill before it turns red or book a six-monthly dental hygienist appointment more than once a year, we assume that everyone else is performing at peak efficiency. So says Elizabeth Emens who is a professor of law at Columbia University in New York, and has made a study of the way that “life admin” – best defined as “the office work of life” – sucks the joy out of daily existence and leaves us feeling as if Something Terrible is about to happen and, worse still, that it is All Our Fault for failing to return a form on time.
Before we can start to dissolve this toxic cloud, Emens argues, we must first acknowledge life admin for the major burden that it is. Indeed, she argues that we should think of it as a “parallel shift”, a whole extra job that we do alongside the one we get paid for.
The problem with life admin is that we are expected to accomplish it without any of the resources that we take for granted at work. When our printer breaks down at the office we call a person from IT; when it happens at home we have to fish out the manual (good luck with that) and start banging the printer’s drawers noisily in order to teach it a lesson. And then there’s all that “soft” life admin, which is even less legible: fixing your ageing father’s iPad (Dadmin); arranging a child’s party (Kidmin); ordering a running buffet of hard-to-source hypoallergenic petfood (Catmin). Not until we recognise these tasks for what they are – a daily tax on our resources – can we start taking steps to reduce them.
The first stage, Emens writes, is to work out which of four “admin personalities” you fall into. Category one is the Super Doer, which describes the sort of people who can think of nothing nicer than a quiet night in with their filing cabinet. Admittedly it’s a pretty small group: Emens reports stumbling across a website called “I Love Filling in Forms”, which has only seven followers.
Then there’s the Reluctant Doer, which includes all those people who just about get their admin done, but feel huffy and a bit sick about it all the same.
Next comes the Admin Avoider, the sort of person who stuffs credit card statements down the back of the sofa and feels horribly guilty about it all, not least because they know that a partner or a colleague will have to step in to pick up the slack.
Finally, there is the Admin Denier, who honestly doesn’t notice admin, still less do it. One can only assume that the admin denier lives in some kind of institution.
However, the initial clarity that comes with wearing the admin sorting hat is somewhat undercut when Emens goes on to announce that “most of us are really hybrids”. It’s at this point that the whole admin personality exercise starts to feel like just another bit of life admin – an annoying imposition akin to paying a parking ticket that you have to endure in order to get back to the place from where you started.
In contrast, Emens’s solutions to reducing the admin mountain come with a certain dash and swagger. She suggests adding “NNR” – No Need to Reply – to the bottom of your emails. This seems sensible enough, a way of shortening an exchange that is in danger of becoming like a polite snake, with “great”, “thank you”, “will do” pinging back and forth for longer than is strictly necessary. But then the professor explains bafflingly that she sometimes also appends a poem to her emails. This sounds so time-sucky for both parties that you begin to wonder if it isn’t actually a cunning way of scything through the number of people who can be bothered to correspond with her.
Emens’s next solution turns out to be even more niche. She suggests setting up something called Admin Study Hall with your similarly admin avoider friends. The idea is that you all meet, either in person (but who books the room I’d like to know?) or online (again, who juggles the electronic diaries?). Then you commit to spending the next 30 minutes or so tackling something truly unpleasant – tax stuff, researching a nursing home for ageing parents, writing a stern letter to your ex about the mortgage. There’s something about knowing that you are staring into the admin abyss alongside other people doing exactly the same thing that is meant to be cheering.
Honestly, it all sounds more trouble than it’s worth. As does Emens’s revelation that one of the benefits of converting to Judaism is that observing Shabbat means that she can take an email holiday every seven days. Where her book does start to move beyond the memoir-with-benefits genre and into something original and interesting is when she tackles the issue of admin “across the privilege divide”. She is informed and eloquent on the way that poor people’s admin differs from hers.
People with means typically do admin that involves private entities, choice and influence over others. People without means mostly do admin that involves public entities, obligations and submission to authorities.
It’s not just that it is humiliating to have to jig around to other people’s tune, it’s that the penalties for non-compliance are so very severe. If you’re on means-tested benefits and you avoid opening an official letter for just a week then you could end up missing a deadline that leads to losing your home. If you’re rich then stuffing a bossy looking communication to the back of the desk drawer might result merely in your kids failing to get into the school of your choice.
This mapping out of the “bureaucracy of poverty” is important stuff, so it’s a shame that Emens fails to follow through with some sustained suggestions about what might be done to bridge the admin privilege divide. There is talk of the system in Sweden, where each citizen has one number to use for everything from the bank to the doctor. Or Chile where, surprisingly, they have a really slim system whereby the government sends you a draft of your tax return and, assuming you agree with their calculations, you simply sign it and send it back. These, though, sound like solutions for the time-poor rather than the poor-poor.
Indeed, most of Emens’s suggestions involve privatised solutions to rich people’s problems. One idea is for harassed friends to give each other admin coupons as presents along the lines of “for your birthday I will research and shortlist bathroom towels that best match your new colour scheme”, or “for our upcoming wedding anniversary I will delve into the bottom drawer of what you optimistically refer to as your filing cabinet”.
If you don’t have any friends, or at least any friends daft enough to play along, then you could employ an admin coach to phone you up at regular intervals to nag about your forthcoming VAT return. If this sounds even more unlikely, then Emens suggests finding a romantic partner who loves nothing more than getting on your case about the mountain of unopened snail mail piling up on your desk. Apparently – and Emens has an academic study on hand to prove it – people who are good at admin are also good in bed.
• The Art of Life Admin: How to Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More is published by Viking. To order a copy for £11.43 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
