My spouse and I have long had a practice of going on “life admin dates:” Usually a weekend morning at a neighborhood coffee shop. There have also been long periods when finding this dedicated time has been impossible because of work or family or travel or some combination of the three. But when we can find the time, we’ve experienced what many other people experience: It’s hard to talk about life admin, even when you have the time.

Over the years, my spouse and I have experienced what many other couples experience with setting aside time for our life admin. Whenever we do sit down for some life admin time, one of the following situations occurs:

• Neither of us have organized our thoughts about what we should talk about.
• One or both of us isn’t in the mood to talk about life admin
• We realized that things we meant to talk about actually require more research of information from one or both of us
• Some items are objectively time-sensitive, but we’re more interested in talking about other things
• Some things on our list require some more thought than we have time for
• One or both of us isn’t emotionally ready to talk about certain topics
• Things one of us would bring up feel like surprises to the other, and it’s hard to react on the spot

The scenario my spouse and I face is very similar to many households, based on the findings of researchers, like Elizabeth Emens, the author of "Life Admin." According to her interviews, couples tend to fall into one of three camps when it comes to their relationship with life admin: 

• One person feels like they do most of the admin work in the relationship. (Sometimes both people feel this way)
• Both people can acknowledge they don't do much life admin work (avoiding it), so they're often scrambling.
• Both people feel that they divide up the work equally.

Notice how these options are phrased: Whatever the real behavior actually is, sociologist Alison Daminger points out that there can be major differences in how each person in a couple feels and thinks about the life admin getting done.

We define life admin in how we share and divide up the work as a couple

Part of why feelings are more important than facts when it comes to life admin is because most people don’t share a common conception of what life admin actually is. For instance, in your relationship, what do each of you think about this example: Writing thank you notes—a requirement of life or a nice-to-have?

This is a small example raised by Elizabeth Emens in her book, Life Admin, but there are many like it. In any committed relationship, what’s important life admin to one person doesn’t always match the other.

One way to define “life admin,” may just be to look back at your most recent arguments as a couple. Life admin is probably inclusive of everything you’ve ever argued about!

The key here is that in a relationship, we each bring expectations of life admin to the table. One of you is likely more particular about money; somebody else might be more on top of healthcare. What you don't want is to let these inclinations lead to too much of divide-and-conquer approach to life admin.

According to multiple life admin researchers (sources below), when couples mostly rely on silo'ing life admin, it can lead to a number of problems:

1. Too much hidden labor. Because you're each taking accountability for a different area, the other person has a hard to time understanding in detail how much work you're putting into it.
2. Not recognizing cognitive labor. So much of life admin is in our heads—details that keep us up at night; logistics that we must figure out in between work and errands. If you're not sharing the cognitive labor, it can be hard to know it exists in the other person's head
3. Risk of losing one person's capacity. What happens if one person gets sick or worse? Many older couples have learned this firsthand: One person, often a woman (in heterosexual couples) has been handling the vast majority of life admin. When she gets sick, her husband, then struggles to keep everything together and has to learn how to manage affairs he never knew she was taking care of. This is a very common situation.
4. Failing to equalize across paid and unpaid labor. In any household, you rely on both paid and unpaid forms of labor. Life admin is always unpaid. So are physical forms of labor like childcare, cleaning, home maintenance, and more. In a capitalist and consumerist culture, it's easy to over-value paid labor, but it's definitely not the only thing that matters. As a couple, you may want to catalog about all the ways you spend your labor, both physical and cognitive, paid and unpaid, and consider how equal or unequal it is.

While some division of labor is critical, finding your way of sharing life admin—doing some portion of it together and communicating about the parts you do separately—can be vital for a healthy relationship.

How to keep two brains on the same wavelength

As I said at the top, the challenge of course, is figuring out how to keep two brains on the same wavelength about the life admin that needs to get done. It takes effort. And here we're going to call this effort: "building a life admin agenda." Whether it's a physical document, a constant line of conversation, certain text messages, or a digital to-do list, somehow there must be a way that both people's brains can access what life admin needs to happen.

Most couples have something in place, whether it works well or not. It might be a simple as a certain of tone of conversation that you use. The question I'd challenge you to ask yourself is this: Does your way of having a life admin agenda work?

Common problems with how couples develop their agenda:

• It's not unified. The agenda exists across a range of different docs, notebooks, thoughts, and backs of envelopes.
• It's not shared. It relies exclusively on one person in the couple to exist; the other person doesn't really participate in creating it.
• It doesn't have permanence. It's just recorded in one person's brain, which means the other person can't go back and reference it.
• It's not accessible. It might be unified, but you have to be in a specific place or have a specific password to access it. I've met multiple couples where there's a great document, but it's only on one person's laptop.
• It's not continual. If you're only adding to your life admin agenda once in a while, then you're almost certainly missing the stuff that comes up throughout life. It's just very hard to remember the things you have to do if you're sitting there asking each other what's important. Continuity in today's age can often mean "asynchronicity" — meaning having a way that each person can add to the agenda even when you're not together or focused on it at the same time.
• It's gate-kept by one person. To put things on the agenda (again, proverbially and physically), one person decides what's important enough or not. This can often be unintentional and benevolent, but it can prevent all the important life admin from being recognized.
• One person opts out of adding to it. If only one person adds to the life admin agenda, it's only going to reflect one perspective of the household. Participation by both sides of the relationship is critical.

Avoiding these kinds of pitfalls is part of building a healthy approach to life admin where both people can grasp what needs to get done, what they can do, and how to do it effectively.

In our 2:1 couples life admin kickoffs, one approach we take is to set up a simple, digital to-do list that's shared and pinned as important for each person. Google Keep and Apple Notes are both easy, free platforms for this, but a shared doc also works.

Both partners then practice adding items to this list. It's asynchronous and dynamic. Then, we suggest having a regular digital reminder or set calendar event to have a brief life admin check-in to groom the agenda and identify which of the items need a direct conversation. It's a really basic tactic that can have all the right qualities: Unified, shared, permanent, equally accessible, continually added to, without a gatekeeper, and mutually usable.

Setting goals for how you do life admin together, not just what you do

A little digital tool usage can go along way, but of course, it will always depend on you two as a couple actually using it. More important than any tool is agreeing on how you want to do life admin together.

This is probably the part of being a couple that takes more time than if you were each just doing life admin on your own. Recognizing that how you do life admin—how it feels to each of you—matters more than the life admin itself is a big step.

The old cliché, "it's about the journey, not the destination," applies well to life admin. You may be part of a couple where one person is inclined (and maybe even okay for now) with doing all the life admin work. But the problem is that that robs you both of sharing in the journey. What happens over time is that couples find out they weren't really on the same journey after all, and they've ended up in different places.

So, for any couple, I think it's important to set goals for how you do life admin together, not just what you do.

Here's an example from my own life:

• My spouse and I had started building a pattern of collaboratively setting our life admin agenda.
• Each life admin date we'd take to a local coffee shop, we'd take a look at the agenda items we had set, and agree to what we should talk about.
• Over several of these dates, I noticed that she kept adding travel planning ideas and events to the agenda. These were agenda items I felt were less important to talk about and distracting to my own worries about life admin.
• One day, I got frustrated and said the travel plans weren't that important. She got offended, and after arguing, we started talking about where travel fell in our sense of priorities. I learned a lot about why it was important to her, and I realized some of the reasons I didn't want to talk about it.
• We agreed that travel planning should absolutely be part of our life admin agenda on a regular basis, but that we should balance how we spend our attention on it.
• We also agreed that part of our goal for life admin together is to enable each other to bring new thoughts and agenda items to the list without judgment.

Through list-gathering, conversation, and even at-times argument, figuring out what you want from the journey of life admin can help you do the actual admin work much better together. Deciding on your level of collaboration and sharing is part of defining what "good life admin" looks like to you in your household.

Continually building your life admin agenda together

The troubling thing about life admin is that it doesn't go away. It's ever-present. So, this work of defining how you want do life admin doesn't go away either. More likely than not, you'll have to adjust your goals as life changes. It's going to look different if you have kids, as you age, as events like illness come up, and through different mental phases. That's why practicing flexibility is a must.

One couple in their 40s I interviewed had had a reckoning several years back. Previously, much of their life admin had fallen on one of them. And that worked for them for many years. Then, one of them lost their job, and the dynamics of the relationship started to shift. There was arguing and sadness, but ultimately, they came together to rethink their relationship with their life admin—to figure out how to share the load more effectively.

Being able to rethink and reset the ways you collaborate in life admin is critical to maintaining a relationship over the long term. Maybe you have time now for regular check-ins together. But will you next year? What can be helpful is to always time-box your goals for how you share life admin.

I've heard of some couples writing down their goals and set an expiration date, so that they know to revisit.

• "From now through to when our first child is born, our intention is to..."
• "Since we both expect to be employed, our goals for the next 10 years are to...."

While these may seem overly formal and legislation-like, there's something to that level of clarity. Writing down dates when the two of you can revisit your decisions is a way of giving you both the permission to discuss and rethink your decisions together. It's a way of building in flexibility. It's also something you can just say to one another and remind each other of from time to time.

In this explainer, I've shared some of the insights about how couples are dealing with life admin, and I've brought together a few tips and tricks too. We didn't touch on the numerous ways people navigate life decisions from religion to educational pursuits to self-reflection. Couples have the complexity of discerning their direction in life not just as individuals and as a household.

So, if you find that you want a sounding board for how you're tackling life admin in the midst of all that complexity, it might be worth a 2:1 session. I offer two starter packs for couples:

• Newly Partnered Life Admin Kickoff
• Starting a Family Life Admin Kickoff

If neither of those fit, we could always develop a tailored session, focused on tackling the life admin you're currently facing.