All right, so now we have a question from Darcy. Darcy asks, "How do you get to do things you need to do "with an ever-increasing administration "or administrative overload? "Administrative creep is a massive problem. "Every service you hire, activity you perform, "product you buy comes with an ever-increasing "administrative burden.

"For example, you buy a washing machine, "it doesn't work properly, you request a refund, "the supplier needs X form completed, "they then deny the refund, "you then turn to a government agency "to assist in enforcing your consumer rights, "they require a form to be completed, "each interaction is by email, "finally you arrive at a tribunal, "they give you a refund, "each process requires time and skill.

"This is all time away from doing deep work." And again, Darcy, I would modify that to say, this is all time that would keep you away from the intentional points that you are identifying in your deep life plan, the things you wanna be spending time on, whether they're work or non-work related.

All right, but it's a good question because administrative creep, that is the growing burden of small tasks, is a big problem. I think we underestimate it, we in particular underestimate it in the world of work, the actual burden of administrative creep on our ability to get things done that actually have value for the organization.

So I have three ideas, Darcy, that I wanna share here. All right, first, I think you need to be more comfortable wasting more money, all right? Yes, your washing machine didn't work right, but man, this is crazy. You ended up in a tribunal with the government to try to get the refund back.

I mean, part of fighting administrative creep is to the extent possible, doing less things that generate administrative creep. And if you can just spend some money or waste some money and not have to deal with something, to the extent you're able to do that, it's a good investment in time.

I don't know if that refund was really worth all the time you actually just spent there. So that's the first thing I would suggest is try to reduce what you can in your life, even if it's not optimal. Like, oh man, I really should return this thing I got from Amazon, it's the wrong size, but I'm gonna have to go to the UPS store and print this label, I don't know what to do.

It's like, or you just eat the $20. So we got a value, time and context shifting. That's a real cost that we weigh against things like money. Idea two is to automate. So I'm a big believer in this when it comes to small tasks is there's two conditions that a small task can be in, cognitively speaking.

The impact of these two conditions is very different on your brain. The first condition is that it can kind of be hanging. It's on a to-do list somewhere, but that's it. And it's something that needs to get done. It's gonna have to, time's gonna have to be found, things are, information's gonna have to be gathered and it's sitting there as this sort of weight of something that needs to be done, you're not quite sure when and how it's gonna get done.

The second condition a small task can be in is not hanging. This is when it's getting done in this time, in this place, here's where the information is. You don't have to, it's not on your list of things that you have to actually exert any additional planning energy towards.

Automation, when I say automate, I mean moving as many of your small tasks as possible into that second condition. And there's a few things you can do here. One thing is for recurring tasks, you have a way they always get done. They always get done the same way, this day on this week, every month, here's the spreadsheet I go through and I pay these bills and I do the budget or whatever it is, but it's the same times, the same days, you don't have to think about it, it's just you get to that day, you see the calendar notice and you execute.

It's no longer sitting there as something that is gonna require planning energy. The other thing you can do is have set times put aside for doing these type of tasks in general. And maybe what you're actually doing is assigning tasks to these buckets. Tuesday and Wednesdays, I have a 90 minute block in the afternoon in which I'm doing, I don't know, student related, class related issues as a professor.

So students have questions, they need to know their grades, there's issues with prom sets or whatever, maybe you have 90 minutes twice a week, that's when you do that work. So when any of these questions pop up, you can just throw them on a list in a shared document somewhere.

And you just know that list gets processed when you get to Tuesday, and again, when you get to Thursday. Again, what you're doing here is moving those small tasks into the second condition where they require no further planning energy. The final thing is you could have some sort of system put in place for some of this type of work so that when a request comes in, it's not just hanging there loose, here's how we handle it.

Okay, so if this issue comes up, you have to do this, you have to put it on my shared calendar, there's a each week I put the notes, whatever it is, but you have some system in place. What I'm trying to do here with automation is get things out of that condition in which planning energy still needs to be applied.

And the reason is, is that if you give me 20 tasks, and in scenario A, each of those 20 tasks is gonna require at some point, planning energy applied, it's not clear to you exactly how they're gonna get executed. And over here, you have the same 20 tasks, no planning energy is required.

They're all in one of these types of pre-existing systems or processes, et cetera. That second scenario is going to have a much smaller negative impact on your mind, on your sense of busyness, on the sense of what load is lurking above me. It's gonna be work that's gonna get done, but almost for free.

It's like, it doesn't add up to that quota of how much work can you have on your plate before your brain fritzes out and says, I have too much. It doesn't add up to that quota, because it's not work you have to think about and plan. It's like, you know, you mow the yard on Saturday morning, so you don't think about that as, oh my God, this is something in my plate I have to figure out.

So the more you can move tasks in that condition, the least negative impact they're gonna have actually on your brain. And then the third thing I'm gonna recommend is don't ignore the impact of attached overhead. So any significant project or initiative you agree to do, so the main grist of whatever you do, you know, in your job or whatever you do, the big things that really matter, like getting this committee together and making a hiring decision, updating the newsletter software that our church uses, whatever it is, right?

Any non-trivial commitment or project is gonna bring with it a fixed overhead of administrative work. And once this is on your plate, there's gonna be this fixed overhead of we have to talk back and forth with the other people involved. There's gonna have to be some meetings. There's gonna be a background drip of emails that are gonna require answering as you're trying to figure things out.

And you don't want to ignore that fixed amount of overhead, because it does not take much of that until your schedule is overhead dominated. And again, I think this is another issue that people have is they just look at the project itself. Try to get the software updated for our newsletter.

We're trying to do a hiring decision and I've agreed to whatever, put together a new white paper that we send the clients. And you look at just a project in isolation. You're like, well, I kind of imagined this taking a few days and this taking a few days and this taking a week.

And these are the three things I'm working on for the next two weeks. There should be plenty of time. But what you don't have in mind is that each of these projects is bringing with it this attached overhead. So now each of these three projects is bringing with it multiple Zoom meetings a week.

Each of these projects is bringing with it, let's say 10 to 20 back and forth emails per week. So now you have 60 back and forth emails, and that's gonna translate to something like five to 600 inbox checks to keep up with these back and forth conversations. And the overhead with just these three projects in a two week period, this overhead itself can eat up almost all of your time.

And now you feel administrative creep and now you feel overloaded. So we have to be really careful about how many projects we have on our plate at once. I'm a big believer of pull systems. Should be working on a very small number of big projects at a time. When one is at a stopping point, only then do you pull in something new to work on.

Because if you bring them all on your plate and say, I'll figure it out, the overhead comes with them. And whether you're working on this project actively today or not, the overhead doesn't care, it's making demands of you. So that's the other big source of administrative creep. So have much fewer things on your plate because it's not the time required to write the paper or update the software that's gonna kill you.

It's the 60 emails and the seven Zoom meetings. That's what's gonna end up killing you from a scheduling perspective. So be very wary about that administrative attached overhead. Those three things, be less efficient, waste money, automate small tasks, so get them in that condition where they require no further planning attention and being very careful about the overhead that comes with projects.

So keep your active project queue low at any one point, I think goes a long ways towards keeping administrative creep feeling more reasonable. That's a good question. That's the bane of my existence, administrative creep. I do what I can, but we all struggle with it. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)