Why do these tasks—paying a credit card bill, scheduling a doctor’s checkup, canceling a subscription, and updating your auto registration—all feel similarly painstaking? They are all examples of life admin—the managerial, office-like work required of us in 21st century living. Legal scholar Elizabeth Emens coined the term when outlining life admin as an area of society and the economy that’s under-measured, under-recognized and possibly under-regulated.

In the 21st century, life admin has become a self-propelling engine in our lives, consuming our time and energy, producing stress and low satisfaction, all while also driving consequential outcomes that health, financial security, and mental wellness. And unfortunately, life admin is getting worse.

It can be helpful to break down your life admin in five major categories for the sake of having examples to talk about.

🚀 Life decision-making

‍Life admin starts with the small and big decisions we make—where we live, what job choices we make, whether we have children. Decisions like these often require discernment and input from loved ones. And they can also be paralyzing. How we make decisions and set our plans is a major component of life admin.

🏡 Household management

From making grocery lists to organizing who does what chore, household management is where life admin often becomes physical and where the work depends on others too.‍

📈 Personal finance

‍From getting your paycheck to investing for the future to paying your taxes, finance can be a big stressor and usually comes with confusion because the financial system is often opaque. Service providers also come with their own sludgy forms of admin, costing us time spent managing accounts, calling for support, and making transactions.

🏥 Healthcare

‍Finding healthcare providers, scheduling with them, following up on appointments, and dealing with insurance can feel like a series of miniature projects.

🏭 Education and career choices

‍Planning the next steps of a career or an educational journey requires work. Finding a new role can feel like a full-time job; applying to school requires a leap of faith.

Why think about "life admin"

Our mental to-do lists aren’t subdivided into neat professionalized subject areas. If I have two hours to get things done, I don’t choose just the money stuff or just the household stuff.

At this point, you might be asking: What's the importance of talking about “life admin” instead of smaller categories like "personal finance" or "healthcare management."

While professionals in different areas have many terms for the parts of life they help with, as people, most people don't seem to subdivide their to-do lists into neat professionalized subject areas. If I have two hours to get things done, I don’t choose just the money stuff or just the household stuff. I try to get as much done as possible, in whatever order let's me do that.

Even if I tried, inevitably the lines between the areas aren’t clear. If I’m making a list for the grocery store, are FSA/HSA-eligible items on that list? Is anything I’m buying a work expense? Are these purchases within my budget? Will I forget something and have to go back on the way home after picking up my kids? Life isn’t sub-divisible, so while it’s important we get help from the right experts for particular areas, it’s more helpful to solve for the whole of “life admin.”

Life admin is unpaid work

One way some economists are beginning to quantify and understand life admin is by examining it as real labor—personal labor that you don't get paid for. There are several reasons why this analytical lens makes sense:

• Life admin requires the use of time—a lot of it.
• It requires skill. Life admin ranges from tasks that can be optimized with practice (like planning a meal) to those that require full-on teaching
• When life admin isn't accomplished, it can have real economic and social effects on a household.

In fact, some behavioral researchers led by Jason R. Pierce have looked into "time theft", where "mundane forms [of time theft] are either overlooked or met with quiet resignation," but they point out how time theft can be a major driver of economic inequality. While some life admin is inevitable and reasonable, today's levels may indeed be considered widespread time-thievery.

What's different about life admin from professional work is that the labor is attached to us as individuals in ways that make it far less possible to outsource to other people, especially at a reasonable cost. Extremely wealthy households hire so-called "family offices" to ostensibly maintain and grow the household's wealth. But inevitably, they often take on a wide range of tasks on behalf of their clients, from travel to household management and more. And to all of this, family offices are often given broad legal powers by the clients to act on their behalf. In short, the gross wealth involved makes it viable for the uber rich to outsource life admin.

The rest of us don't have such time-saving and wealth-building opportunities to outsource. Life admin sits on our shoulders as extra work in our time-poor lives.

Life admin is born of sludge

The Nobel prize-winning behavioral economist Richard Thaler known for his research on the effectiveness of nudging also has an inverse concept: sludge. In one sense life admin is the outcome of sludge.

Thaler and his colleague Sunstein describe sludge as all of the extra work consumers have to do to get serviced by a firm or public sector agency. A few examples from Thaler's 2018 editorial in Science:

"Firms offer a rebate to customers who buy a product, but then require them to mail in a form, a copy of the receipt, the SKU bar code on the packaging, and so forth."

"The earned income tax credit... is intended to encourage work and transfer income to the working poor. The Internal Revenue Service has all the information necessary to make adjustments for credit claims by any eligible taxpayer who files a tax return. But instead, the rules require people to fill out a form that many eligible taxpayers fail to complete, thus depriving themselves of the subsidy that Congress intended they receive."

"The state of Ohio...purging from its list of eligible voters those who have not voted recently and who have not responded to a postcard prompt [thereby making it harder to vote]...despite the fact that people who intentionally vote illegally are rare."

The outcome of these kinds of "sludgy" decisions by institutions and companies is that as consumers we have to spend our time picking up the life admin work in order to get what we need—whether that's a rebate, a tax credit, or just utilizing our right to vote.

Life admin is getting worse because technology puts work back on the consumer

Thaler and Sunstein have been writing about sludge because they see it getting worse, generating more and more life admin. Perhaps the biggest reason why sludge is becoming more common, not less? The rise of consumer technology.

While technology has certainly produced magnificent conveniences in life admin—to name a few: banking without physical branches, online scheduling, and electronic medical records—it's also has had the opposite effect. Technology has become a major source of life admin.

As a digital product manager in consumer finance, I know this issue well. Much of what consumer technology does is replace human service providers with screens and automations that try to mimick all of the nuance that customer service people have traditionally handled.

Human service has historically dealt with an infinite number of situations that consumers bring when they're looking for help from companies. The problem is that humans serving us customers also produce three major issues for companies:

• Humans can make judgment calls in favor of serving people, at the expense of the company
• Humans behavior isn't uniform, creating mistakes and unforeseen situations
• Humans have high costs, relative to interfaces

While these are problems for companies; they are the definition of helping us, the people. In practice, getting tailored, empathetic non-stardardized service from a person is exactly what most people describe as "feeling helped."

So, as companies deploy technology to replace human beings where possible, they cut the edges of those three problems, and in doing so, cut out the labor we consumers received. Where an user interface replaces a human, you get:

• A standard set of computerized services, whether or not they perfectly fit your situation
• Few mistakes internal to the company, but a higher onus placed on you providing the information correctly to get the right output
• Less and less ability to access human beings, especially if you're not a select client

In short, as consumers, more and more of the work is pushed back to us. We get the benefit of stronger user interfaces, but at the cost of human interactions, some of which are vitally important.

Take tax filing software as an example you've probably had to interact with. If you've ever completed your taxes without 100% certainty you've done them correctly, you're not alone.

TurboTax and TaxAct entirely rely on you inputting the information you have correctly, and generally, you sign terms of service stating that you understand that you are responsible for inputting your information correctly. This is almost the exact opposite of working with a tax professional—somebody who's going to know when to second guess you about whether you forgot a source of income or a deductible expense.

When I first began researching life admin, I found the term to be a very apt catch-all term, and one that resonated with me. But the more I researched, I began to see its human centricity too. As much as the professions that service our lives are specialized and appropriately classified—doctors, nurses, financial advisors, therapists, real estate agents, childcare workers, travel agents—Human beings experience their to-do list in emotional, not categorical terms.

We don’t really have our “financial lives, our “medical lives,” and our “family lives” — most people report fitting in those kinds of tasks in between working a job, eating meals, commuting, and everything else in life. A to-do list of life admin that's endless and too-often stressful.

So, talking about "life admin," I see it as a way of centering the work back to you. You may work with any number of companies, services, and agencies asking you to use your time on tasks they need from you, but remember it's your life and your time. And the important thing is that you're able to shape a practice of life admin that fits the life you want to live.