Life Admin: The Office Work of Life

Joeita Gupta:
I am Joeita Gupta and this is The Pulse. Looking for an apartment, filing your taxes, sending a thank you note, filling out forms, making doctor's appointments. The list of household administrative tasks just seems to get longer and longer. If you live alone, you likely have to deal with your paperwork on your own. If you live with someone else, a partner or a roommate, you might be the person who either fobs off the paperwork on someone else or ends up being the person drowning in administrative tasks. But why talk about paperwork at all on a show dedicated to disability issues? One of the least glamorous aspects of living with a disability has to be the bureaucracy and the administrative burden. Today we discuss life admin. It's time to put your finger on the pulse.
Hello and welcome to the Pulse on Air My Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm joining you as I always do, from Accessible Media Inc, the studios in Toronto. And it's great to talk to you today because I had a really interesting conversation with an author that I've been trying to get in touch with for quite a number of weeks. And the reason I wanted to talk about this book, Life Admin, is that although it was published in 2019 and I missed the boat, otherwise I would've invited Elizabeth, the author on to talk about it in 2019. But I missed the boat, but I thought, you know what? It doesn't really matter. I'll see if she's available and can talk to me now because I've had a lot of informal conversations with friends of mine who live with disabilities. I live with a disability and one of the things we've all said and lamented is just the amount of time we spend doing paperwork and chasing down forms and getting doctor's notes, just on account of living with a disability.
I know there's a lot of work involved in everybody's lives, there's just no getting away from it. But when you live with a disability, I feel like the administrative burden gets even heavier. Elizabeth Emens teaches at Columbia Law School and is the author of The Art of Life Admin: How to Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More. And she joins me today and we're here to talk about your book. Elizabeth, hello and welcome to the program. It's so great to have you with us today.

Elizabeth Emens:
Thank you so much Joeita. I'm just delighted to be here, thank you for having me.

Joeita Gupta:
In your book you coin the term life admin, what do you mean by that?

Elizabeth Emens:
So life admin is all of the office-type work that it takes to run a life and a household. So it's the kind of work that managers and support staff do in an office. On the managerial side, things like planning, organizing, supervising, decision-making. And on the support staff side, scheduling, phone calls, emails, photocopying, faxing, working with paperwork of any kind and so on. And so it's the kind of work that people do in offices for a living, but that most all of us do in our own lives for free. And I'll just start too, I wanted to say Joeita, I'm a white woman wearing glasses and a black blouse and gray and black sweater and I'm wearing a headset as well, against a backdrop of books. Happy to be here.

Joeita Gupta:
It's great to have you and I love having your books in the background, that's really nice. What got you thinking about all this invisible paperwork and administrative work that we do in our day-to-day lives?

Elizabeth Emens:
Well this project really came out of my own life. There was a moment after my second child was born where I was sitting in the chair where I used to go to meditate and I was trying to meditate. One of the other parts of my life is I now run a mindfulness program at the law school where I teach. And I found that my head was filled with a million details of things related to parenting especially, but also a lot of other aspects of life that I hadn't realized though were going to consume so much of my mind and time once I became a parent. And at a certain point for me when I am thinking that hard about something and it seems to be invisible in some way or was to me before, I start to read about it, research about it and think about it. And in this instance I started to conduct interviews because I really wanted to understand what this labour was and how it's distributed and who it hits hardest.

Joeita Gupta:
It's great that you're talking about it as labour at all because as you mentioned, it is invisible. A lot of people don't think about this as work. Why is it that although administrative tasks take up so much time and energy, no one is really talking about it or thinking about it? Until now of course.

Elizabeth Emens:
Why is it? It's a great question. I mean I think part of the reason is that this work is often coded as female labour of a certain kind, that is of a piece with other kinds of labour coded female, not always done by women, but often associated with women in a way that's devalued. So that isn't unique to life admin, but it's characteristic of it. Support staff are predominantly female and historically even more so. In addition though, admin has some features that make it even more likely to be invisible in that so much of it happens in our minds. So grocery shopping for instance, is a traditional chore that I don't count as part of life admin because you don't go grocery shopping in an office. But the part of grocery shopping that I do think of as admin is making the grocery list, which is very much like any number of other lists you would make in an office.
It's part of the planning and organizing side of things. Well, when someone's grocery shopping you can see them in the grocery store shopping. When someone's making a grocery list, they may be doing it in their head or they may be writing it down in their phone and you don't have any idea whether they're making a grocery list or they're texting their friends. So there's a way that it literally can be invisible, in a way that some other kinds of chores are not. It may be part of why it has remained especially, behind a veil as it were.

Joeita Gupta:
What sort of things do you think about when you think about life admin? So you talked about the grocery store, but what are some of the other common examples that come to mind?

Elizabeth Emens:
Sure. So medical admin is a huge area. I should add that, so I've written and thought about disability issues for a long time and disability law especially. And when I started this project I had always wanted to zero in on thinking about disability admin in particular. And so I was really glad to be able to write an article focused on that and thinking about the legal implications after I finished the book. And so there I talk about some particular features of disability admin or most common kinds which include medical admin, benefits admin and accommodation admin, or discrimination admin more generally. And of course those can be present or absent for any individual person, but they're especially common for folks with disabilities.
That whole realm of medical admin can affect anyone and is a huge area of admin, and of especially burdensome admin. Because typically when you're doing insurance admin or trying to find a place that one can afford if one doesn't have insurance or can get help without insurance or finding the right doctors. All of those things you're usually doing when there's something else that you're concerned about, which is the underlying medical issue or the need for some kind of documentation. Rather than your focus being this admin that you're being forced to do.

Joeita Gupta:
You conducted interviews and spoke to a number of people. So the book is written from your perspective, but it also tries to bring in these other points of view. How much time do people spend on average dealing with life admin?

Elizabeth Emens:
It's really hard to get good numbers on that, because so much of it happens through multitasking. So there are various time-use surveys that are done and they tend to woefully underestimate how much time people spend on admin. People going through admin onslaughts though, for instance, one prompted by a divorce or the death of a loved one, something really painful can bring upon a person this invisible weight of labour that can consume their whole days. People talk about it as feeling like a full-time job and it sometimes is.

Joeita Gupta:
Right. And when we talk about admin work, now of course there are a number of apps that are available on your phone. A lot of forms used to be paper forms and you would fill them out and you would go and drop them off in the mailbox. All of that can now be done online. Has it become easier to do admin?

Elizabeth Emens:
I think some things are easier. So I find that the fact that I'm carrying around a phone that can take pictures of things means I can take pictures of documents. And some people will accept a photograph of a document of something I've signed. And I can record information that way, I can take a picture of my parking spot if I'm driving somewhere, to remember where I parked. But I think the fact that we can do these things on our devices, is also part of why admin has come to feel like a parallel shift to everything else we do. Because people can now reach us with these admin demands at day, night, depending on how much we put our phones away, which can be hard, especially if they serve us in useful ways.
I use mine for meditation, which means if I wake up in the middle of the night and need to try to go back to sleep, my phone may be the thing that will play a meditation that will help me get back to sleep. If I haven't turned off notifications or email, turning on my phone may also mean though that I get some admin demand that's come through to me. So there's a way that this work ends up feeling like something that happens, labour that happens in the interstices of everything else in our lives because of these devices that supposedly make our lives easier but also make us full-time 24/7 employees of the admin demands facing us.

Joeita Gupta:
Right. And unacknowledged work, unpaid labour at that. How do you suggest people go about managing these administrative tasks so it doesn't feel like it's an ongoing 24/7 demand on us?

Elizabeth Emens:
One part of it can be managed with our devices, in the sense that most of us, a choice about whether we turn them on do not disturb like I just did before this interview so that I won't get notifications during the interview. I'll say though that the push to turn off our phones is sometimes I think too strident and too...
Even unwilling sometimes to see the labour of admin and the admin obligations that some of us have. So as a parent, entering spaces where people tell me I have to turn off my device can really make me feel not seen as somebody who... As happened this morning, my kid forgot their lunch so I was rushing around this morning dropping the lunch off that was left in our fridge and I guess it wouldn't have been the end of the world if no one could reach me. That wasn't an emergency. But emergencies happen and some of us, we have all kinds of different obligations. People take care of people in their lives and have other responsibilities that mean they need to be reachable and so simply telling people to turn off their phones also isn't a solution.

Joeita Gupta:
But do you have other tips or strategies you might be able to suggest for someone, apart from turning off their phones, that might make the work a little more manageable for them on a day-to-day basis?

Elizabeth Emens:
Sure. Some of these include, well, so you mentioned apps that help people. I have tried so many different apps. I have still not found one for me that tends to beat the paper list when I'm really overwhelmed or just a simple list in the notes app on my phone. I think sometimes we can get caught in trying to do solving my admin, of trying out tools and techniques and thinking we're going to find the perfect thing. I don't think there is a perfect thing. But I think finding what works for you is what's crucial and trusting the habits that you've developed when things are going well.
I think finding support from other people. So the technique that I developed during the writing of this book that has stayed with me, I suppose the longest, is a study hall. So it started out for me as an admin study hall when I was in a terrible admin onslaught during my divorce and I had so much to do and it was so painful to do it. And I started meeting on Zoom with friends and they actually were in different parts of the world, these friends and we would get together to do our admin. And over time it became a space where actually I would carve that room out on a study hall with moral support from someone else to not do my admin, to block out the admin, to do the things that I valued differently and to be really intentional about it.
But so that sense of, can I make a study hall with someone? Can we make a date and then make a priority of the things that we really care about doing and make sure that's what we do in that time, I think can be extremely helpful. Other small things include just taking pictures of information. As I mentioned before, you can do any kind of event you can do in a high admin or a low admin way. So planning to meet some friends in a particular park or in a particular bar and just telling people that's where I'm going to be, is going to be low admin. As opposed to trying to coordinate with a whole group of friends and find the perfect time that works for everyone. So we're always making choices about whether something is high or low admin and so being aware of that is crucial. Really the first step and the most important thing is to make it visible to yourself, and sometimes to people in your life if they're putting demands on you that are challenging too.

Joeita Gupta:
Yes, let's talk about that. How do you make this conversation happen? Because in most households people don't want to talk about it, because it's invisible, somebody's doing it. If you're not the one doing it, then you're taking for granted that the person that you're living with is likely doing it. So how do you get a conversation going about admin and maybe trying to... We've talked about division of labour in the home between men and women especially. I think feminists have had that conversation for a really long time. Maybe do you have a conversation about division of labour of when it comes to admin or is it better to leave it to one person who's good at it, versus trying to divide it up knowing that one person doesn't want to do it and they'll leave it to the last minute or they'll make a mistake that you then have to go back and fix?

Elizabeth Emens:
Wow, there's a lot packed into that question. I wish we had more time and I could hear more about how you think about this, because I imagine that you have some insights from what you just said. I think it's hard if it remains completely unsaid and unspoken. Because in our relationships, resentments build up when we don't appreciate and see each other for the work that we're doing. So finding a way to begin talking about it, I actually have admin personality quiz, maybe we'll talk about admin personalities at some point, you've started to gesture towards them in what you just said. But the quiz itself is designed to give people a way, a somewhat entertaining way, to learn something about what admin is and to begin to think about their relationship to it. So that's one lighthearted way to engage with it and begin a conversation about it.
Another way is to start to list some of the items, invite someone to describe what are some things you did today and here are some things I did and let's see, is there anything you want to be appreciated for today? Here's something I would like to be appreciated for today and to begin to talk about how long this or that took. Making sure that if you have people who bill you for things, if you're in a partnership with someone or your roommates, you ask them to put both of your email addresses on the bills or looping in the person who's also involved with you in paying these things. Whether or not they're going to be the one to follow up, are small ways to make things visible.
People sometimes put lists on the fridge, grocery lists. You can put lists of the admin that needs to be done on the fridge as well and cross it off as it gets done. In terms of the question you were gesturing to though, whether it's better to leave it to one person, we can talk more about that. But there are different feelings people have about admin and just one person, a certain kind of work might be admin and to someone else, it might not be unappealing admin, it might be for them and an end in itself. And if you can find those sweet spots and divvy things up along those lines, that can be helpful.

Joeita Gupta:
Yes, whatever personality types avoids their admin, that is me. Fortunately, my husband not only enjoys it but is good at it. So it worked out nicely for us and we've been talking a lot about making lists and using apps and doing all of these things to try and simplify admin and maybe having conversations about admin at home. But don't you feel that there's a bigger conversation about admin that needs to be had? After all, government and doctor's offices and employers are making demands on us for admin. Isn't a time that we have a bigger societal conversation about admin and trying to reduce some of these burdens on people, knowing how much time and effort it takes?

Elizabeth Emens:
Absolutely, and that's one of the reasons why as a law professor I would be writing this book at all. So the last part of the book is focusing on all of the structural solutions that we can try out and some that are more obvious, some that are less obvious. I interviewed a couple who moved overseas to... My interviews are anonymous, so I changed the details. But moved to a western European country where the social welfare system is much more supportive, when they realized after they had two kids it was just impossible for them to make it in New York. And not just financially, they were really blessed with jobs that could support them on the material side, but just the admin of trying to figure out the schools and everything for their kids.
This woman described just being in the hospital after her child was born and not knowing that she had to have arranged for her pediatrician to come to the hospital in order for her child and her to be released from the hospital, that this would just have never happened in the western European country where they eventually moved. The recommendation is not that everyone up and move abroad, but that there's much more we could do overall in our systems, starting with our medical system to reduce the admin demands on individuals and families.

Joeita Gupta:
You mentioned the medical system and I think, not that it's the best way to segue into a conversation about disability admin, but certainly one way to segue into a conversation about disability admin. You wrote an article about it and you wanted to read a short excerpt, so we've got a minute or two left. I want you to set up for us Elizabeth, what it is that you're going to read and maybe we can talk a little bit more about it as well.

Elizabeth Emens:
So Joeita, I'll read for you a portion of my article on disability admin that is quoting a young woman with several disabilities including cerebral palsy, whom I interviewed as part of my interviews on life admin. I named her Sabel as I changed all the names for my interviews. "And Sabel recounted the time-consuming process approving and reproving her disabilities to the entities that pay for her benefits, wheelchair and transportation. She has to present periodic documentation, although her cerebral palsy is a lifelong impairment with which she was born. Her disabilities also affect the process of doing her disability admin. Because she can't write by hand, she needs to find someone else to fill out forms for her, unless the forms are online where she can type them. Getting to the benefits office or doctor's office requires booking and access-a-ride van and then contending with their delays and cancellations. Among her disabled friends, this is known as the stress-a-ride.
A visit to the doctor's office may involve a medical exam that lasts like 15 minutes, she says, but in total, the event can take the whole day. In describing the role of admin in her life, Sabel offered a window into the social model of disability, whereas the medical model disability would attribute Sabel's limitations to her impairments like cerebral palsy. Sabel instead concluded, a lot of it is bureaucracy, not really disability."

Joeita Gupta:
That's really powerful and I think it's an anecdote that would resonate for a number of us because I was nodding along as you were talking saying that makes a lot of sense. What then, just in the minute or so that we have left, what then is the solution specifically for people with disabilities? How do we make this life admin more manageable?

Elizabeth Emens:
Well, the three main types of disability admin, medical admin, benefits admin and discrimination admin all have different solutions at their heart. And fortunately or unfortunately, it's just really not something that individual people with disabilities can solve. It really is something that requires structural change. And in my article I talk about just one area of law in the US where making disability admin visible should change the calculus of which kinds of accommodations are reasonable and which ones are not under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because right now the admin associated with managing a certain accommodation isn't even seen. This is just one example. But what we really need are structural solutions. A lot of the solutions and suggestions I have in my book would apply to anyone and could be potentially useful, but this is really a structural problem. And the discrimination admin is a big part of it.

Joeita Gupta:
Exactly. You go through this whole other rigamarole just trying to prove discrimination and you wait to get a day in court or what have you. So lots to talk about here. Unfortunately we're just out of time now. Elizabeth it was so great to have you in the program. Thank you so much for speaking to me today.

Elizabeth Emens:
It was great talking with you, thank you.

Joeita Gupta:
Elizabeth Emens is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of The Art of Life Admin: How to Do Less, Do It Better, and Live More, and I'd love to talk to her about the live more aspect of it, but I guess the idea there is the less time you spend on paperwork, the more time you have for fun things, as she sort of alluded to with the study hall conversation. I really hope this was a useful entry point into talking about something that we don't really get to talk about as people with disabilities.
If you'd like to explore this issue in more detail, please let me know. Of course you can contact us in a number of different ways and I would love to incorporate your feedback and try to get someone to go in depth about disability admin as well. You can find us on Twitter @AMIAudio, use the hashtag pulseami, write us an email feedback@ami.ca or give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545 and please leave permission to play the audio on the program. Our technical producer is Marc Aflalo, videographer is Robert Cooper. Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for podcast at AMI Audio and Andy Frank is the manager of AMI Audio. I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.