Administrative Creep Makes Work Miserable. Here Are 3 Strategies to Tame It

00:00:00.000 | All right, so now we have a question from Darcy.

00:00:04.200 | Darcy asks, "How do you get to do things you need to do

00:00:09.120 | "with an ever-increasing administration

00:00:13.100 | "or administrative overload?

00:00:15.660 | "Administrative creep is a massive problem.

00:00:17.700 | "Every service you hire, activity you perform,

00:00:19.700 | "product you buy comes with an ever-increasing

00:00:21.740 | "administrative burden.

00:00:23.340 | "For example, you buy a washing machine,

00:00:24.840 | "it doesn't work properly, you request a refund,

00:00:26.840 | "the supplier needs X form completed,

00:00:29.000 | "they then deny the refund,

00:00:30.680 | "you then turn to a government agency

00:00:32.340 | "to assist in enforcing your consumer rights,

00:00:34.780 | "they require a form to be completed,

00:00:36.380 | "each interaction is by email,

00:00:37.720 | "finally you arrive at a tribunal,

00:00:39.760 | "they give you a refund,

00:00:41.000 | "each process requires time and skill.

00:00:43.780 | "This is all time away from doing deep work."

00:00:48.780 | And again, Darcy, I would modify that to say,

00:00:51.720 | this is all time that would keep you away

00:00:54.280 | from the intentional points that you are identifying

00:00:57.520 | in your deep life plan,

00:01:00.080 | the things you wanna be spending time on,

00:01:01.960 | whether they're work or non-work related.

00:01:04.320 | All right, but it's a good question

00:01:05.400 | because administrative creep,

00:01:07.480 | that is the growing burden of small tasks,

00:01:12.480 | is a big problem.

00:01:16.000 | I think we underestimate it,

00:01:17.160 | we in particular underestimate it in the world of work,

00:01:19.720 | the actual burden of administrative creep

00:01:21.600 | on our ability to get things done

00:01:24.740 | that actually have value for the organization.

00:01:27.860 | So I have three ideas, Darcy, that I wanna share here.

00:01:31.100 | All right, first, I think you need to be more comfortable

00:01:34.460 | wasting more money, all right?

00:01:37.260 | Yes, your washing machine didn't work right,

00:01:40.220 | but man, this is crazy.

00:01:41.700 | You ended up in a tribunal with the government

00:01:45.500 | to try to get the refund back.

00:01:47.300 | I mean, part of fighting administrative creep

00:01:49.780 | is to the extent possible,

00:01:51.320 | doing less things that generate administrative creep.

00:01:53.960 | And if you can just spend some money or waste some money

00:01:57.060 | and not have to deal with something,

00:01:58.740 | to the extent you're able to do that,

00:02:00.260 | it's a good investment in time.

00:02:02.740 | I don't know if that refund was really worth

00:02:04.620 | all the time you actually just spent there.

00:02:07.140 | So that's the first thing I would suggest

00:02:10.580 | is try to reduce what you can in your life,

00:02:13.280 | even if it's not optimal.

00:02:15.180 | Like, oh man, I really should return this thing

00:02:18.580 | I got from Amazon, it's the wrong size,

00:02:20.340 | but I'm gonna have to go to the UPS store

00:02:23.140 | and print this label, I don't know what to do.

00:02:24.380 | It's like, or you just eat the $20.

00:02:27.120 | So we got a value, time and context shifting.

00:02:30.700 | That's a real cost that we weigh against things like money.

00:02:34.340 | Idea two is to automate.

00:02:37.480 | So I'm a big believer in this when it comes to small tasks

00:02:41.560 | is there's two conditions that a small task can be in,

00:02:46.560 | cognitively speaking.

00:02:47.860 | The impact of these two conditions

00:02:50.180 | is very different on your brain.

00:02:51.460 | The first condition is that it can kind of be hanging.

00:02:53.820 | It's on a to-do list somewhere, but that's it.

00:02:56.620 | And it's something that needs to get done.

00:02:58.700 | It's gonna have to, time's gonna have to be found,

00:03:00.540 | things are, information's gonna have to be gathered

00:03:02.900 | and it's sitting there as this sort of weight

00:03:04.760 | of something that needs to be done,

00:03:06.860 | you're not quite sure when and how it's gonna get done.

00:03:08.940 | The second condition a small task can be in is not hanging.

00:03:12.700 | This is when it's getting done in this time, in this place,

00:03:15.960 | here's where the information is.

00:03:18.260 | You don't have to, it's not on your list of things

00:03:20.300 | that you have to actually exert

00:03:23.460 | any additional planning energy towards.

00:03:26.140 | Automation, when I say automate,

00:03:28.780 | I mean moving as many of your small tasks as possible

00:03:31.620 | into that second condition.

00:03:33.180 | And there's a few things you can do here.

00:03:36.180 | One thing is for recurring tasks,

00:03:38.100 | you have a way they always get done.

00:03:40.320 | They always get done the same way,

00:03:41.900 | this day on this week, every month,

00:03:45.220 | here's the spreadsheet I go through and I pay these bills

00:03:48.280 | and I do the budget or whatever it is,

00:03:49.940 | but it's the same times, the same days,

00:03:52.220 | you don't have to think about it,

00:03:53.660 | it's just you get to that day,

00:03:55.220 | you see the calendar notice and you execute.

00:03:57.420 | It's no longer sitting there as something

00:04:00.700 | that is gonna require planning energy.

00:04:03.180 | The other thing you can do is have set times put aside

00:04:06.180 | for doing these type of tasks in general.

00:04:08.100 | And maybe what you're actually doing

00:04:09.340 | is assigning tasks to these buckets.

00:04:11.440 | Tuesday and Wednesdays,

00:04:13.580 | I have a 90 minute block in the afternoon

00:04:16.820 | in which I'm doing, I don't know,

00:04:18.900 | student related, class related issues as a professor.

00:04:22.340 | So students have questions, they need to know their grades,

00:04:24.820 | there's issues with prom sets or whatever,

00:04:27.300 | maybe you have 90 minutes twice a week,

00:04:29.040 | that's when you do that work.

00:04:30.740 | So when any of these questions pop up,

00:04:32.460 | you can just throw them on a list

00:04:34.180 | in a shared document somewhere.

00:04:37.460 | And you just know that list gets processed

00:04:38.980 | when you get to Tuesday,

00:04:40.260 | and again, when you get to Thursday.

00:04:42.060 | Again, what you're doing here is moving those small tasks

00:04:44.300 | into the second condition

00:04:45.340 | where they require no further planning energy.

00:04:49.320 | The final thing is you could have some sort of system

00:04:51.560 | put in place for some of this type of work

00:04:53.200 | so that when a request comes in,

00:04:55.480 | it's not just hanging there loose,

00:04:57.040 | here's how we handle it.

00:04:58.220 | Okay, so if this issue comes up, you have to do this,

00:05:00.400 | you have to put it on my shared calendar,

00:05:02.360 | there's a each week I put the notes,

00:05:04.280 | whatever it is, but you have some system in place.

00:05:06.220 | What I'm trying to do here with automation

00:05:08.060 | is get things out of that condition

00:05:10.280 | in which planning energy still needs to be applied.

00:05:12.680 | And the reason is, is that if you give me 20 tasks,

00:05:17.520 | and in scenario A, each of those 20 tasks

00:05:20.640 | is gonna require at some point, planning energy applied,

00:05:23.920 | it's not clear to you

00:05:24.760 | exactly how they're gonna get executed.

00:05:26.120 | And over here, you have the same 20 tasks,

00:05:28.960 | no planning energy is required.

00:05:30.520 | They're all in one of these types of pre-existing systems

00:05:33.420 | or processes, et cetera.

00:05:35.280 | That second scenario is going to have a much smaller

00:05:39.860 | negative impact on your mind, on your sense of busyness,

00:05:44.640 | on the sense of what load is lurking above me.

00:05:49.280 | It's gonna be work that's gonna get done,

00:05:51.480 | but almost for free.

00:05:52.640 | It's like, it doesn't add up to that quota

00:05:54.560 | of how much work can you have on your plate

00:05:57.100 | before your brain fritzes out and says, I have too much.

00:05:59.460 | It doesn't add up to that quota,

00:06:01.200 | because it's not work you have to think about and plan.

00:06:03.960 | It's like, you know, you mow the yard on Saturday morning,

00:06:06.920 | so you don't think about that as, oh my God,

00:06:08.240 | this is something in my plate I have to figure out.

00:06:11.080 | So the more you can move tasks in that condition,

00:06:13.300 | the least negative impact they're gonna have

00:06:15.520 | actually on your brain.

00:06:16.840 | And then the third thing I'm gonna recommend

00:06:18.360 | is don't ignore the impact of attached overhead.

00:06:23.360 | So any significant project or initiative you agree to do,

00:06:31.460 | so the main grist of whatever you do, you know,

00:06:34.920 | in your job or whatever you do,

00:06:37.080 | the big things that really matter,

00:06:38.600 | like getting this committee together

00:06:40.180 | and making a hiring decision,

00:06:41.760 | updating the newsletter software that our church uses,

00:06:44.860 | whatever it is, right?

00:06:46.020 | Any non-trivial commitment or project

00:06:48.500 | is gonna bring with it a fixed overhead

00:06:51.640 | of administrative work.

00:06:52.940 | And once this is on your plate,

00:06:55.800 | there's gonna be this fixed overhead

00:06:57.340 | of we have to talk back and forth

00:06:58.700 | with the other people involved.

00:06:59.780 | There's gonna have to be some meetings.

00:07:01.260 | There's gonna be a background drip of emails

00:07:04.540 | that are gonna require answering

00:07:05.700 | as you're trying to figure things out.

00:07:07.220 | And you don't want to ignore that fixed amount of overhead,

00:07:10.780 | because it does not take much of that

00:07:12.960 | until your schedule is overhead dominated.

00:07:16.860 | And again, I think this is another issue that people have

00:07:20.120 | is they just look at the project itself.

00:07:22.300 | Try to get the software updated for our newsletter.

00:07:25.600 | We're trying to do a hiring decision

00:07:27.640 | and I've agreed to whatever,

00:07:31.040 | put together a new white paper that we send the clients.

00:07:34.400 | And you look at just a project in isolation.

00:07:36.160 | You're like, well, I kind of imagined this taking a few days

00:07:39.000 | and this taking a few days and this taking a week.

00:07:41.140 | And these are the three things I'm working on

00:07:42.700 | for the next two weeks.

00:07:43.540 | There should be plenty of time.

00:07:44.360 | But what you don't have in mind

00:07:45.200 | is that each of these projects is bringing with it

00:07:46.920 | this attached overhead.

00:07:48.460 | So now each of these three projects

00:07:49.820 | is bringing with it multiple Zoom meetings a week.

00:07:52.020 | Each of these projects is bringing with it,

00:07:53.700 | let's say 10 to 20 back and forth emails per week.

00:07:56.660 | So now you have 60 back and forth emails,

00:07:59.300 | and that's gonna translate to something like

00:08:00.940 | five to 600 inbox checks to keep up

00:08:03.140 | with these back and forth conversations.

00:08:04.500 | And the overhead with just these three projects

00:08:06.780 | in a two week period,

00:08:07.840 | this overhead itself can eat up almost all of your time.

00:08:11.840 | And now you feel administrative creep

00:08:13.280 | and now you feel overloaded.

00:08:14.560 | So we have to be really careful about

00:08:17.320 | how many projects we have on our plate at once.

00:08:19.840 | I'm a big believer of pull systems.

00:08:22.040 | Should be working on a very small number

00:08:23.800 | of big projects at a time.

00:08:25.400 | When one is at a stopping point,

00:08:27.280 | only then do you pull in something new to work on.

00:08:29.600 | Because if you bring them all on your plate

00:08:31.160 | and say, I'll figure it out, the overhead comes with them.

00:08:34.240 | And whether you're working on this project actively today

00:08:36.760 | or not, the overhead doesn't care,

00:08:38.720 | it's making demands of you.

00:08:40.840 | So that's the other big source of administrative creep.

00:08:42.560 | So have much fewer things on your plate

00:08:44.360 | because it's not the time required to write the paper

00:08:46.780 | or update the software that's gonna kill you.

00:08:48.800 | It's the 60 emails and the seven Zoom meetings.

00:08:51.860 | That's what's gonna end up killing you

00:08:53.800 | from a scheduling perspective.

00:08:55.160 | So be very wary about that administrative attached overhead.

00:08:58.400 | Those three things, be less efficient, waste money,

00:09:01.720 | automate small tasks, so get them in that condition

00:09:03.640 | where they require no further planning attention

00:09:05.480 | and being very careful about the overhead

00:09:07.320 | that comes with projects.

00:09:08.160 | So keep your active project queue low at any one point,

00:09:11.880 | I think goes a long ways towards keeping administrative

00:09:14.480 | creep feeling more reasonable.

00:09:16.960 | That's a good question.

00:09:19.920 | That's the bane of my existence, administrative creep.

00:09:21.800 | I do what I can, but we all struggle with it.

00:09:25.780 | (upbeat music)

00:09:28.360 | (upbeat music)

Administrative Creep Makes Work Miserable. Here Are 3 Strategies to Tame It | Deep Questions Podcast

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