How To Be More Organised And Get On Top Of Your Life Admin
Being an adult can be overwhelming, there’s so much to juggle e.g. self-care, relationships, housework and social events and all of these things have to fit in and around work. Life admin can feel labour intensive at times, but we’ve got some tips and tricks to help you get on top of it.
1. Add special occasions to you calendar
Add all special occasions e.g. birthdays and anniversaries etc. to your phone calendar. Make sure you set these calendar items to repeat yearly. We recommend using the alert option so you are reminded that the occasion is coming up, this will give you time to sort out gifts and make any necessary arrangements.
2. Add contract end dates to your calendar
It’s important that you’re aware of when your contracts are ending so that you can negotiate a good deal or switch provider. Companies love to take advantage of their customers’ inertia, if you don’t record your contract end dates it’s likely you’ll be charged more for exactly the same service.
3. Add your passport renewal date to your calendar
Many countries require your passport to be valid for at least six months before they will allow you to enter. Renewals usually take around 3 weeks but we recommend you allow 6 weeks for your renewal, that way you won’t be stressed out if there is a delay. Add an appointment in your calendar to renew your passport 6 months and 6 weeks before it expires.
4. Add a life admin slot to your calendar
We recommend slotting in at least 30 minutes each week for life admin, this way it’s less likely to pile up. Once you get into the habit of regularly reviewing your life admin it’ll feel like less of a chore.
“Life admin refers to one’s personal day-to-day chores that are of an administrative nature. This includes tasks such as personal banking, making appointments, paying your bills, responding to personal emails.”
5. Use a separate email address for serious correspondence
We advise that you have a separate email address dedicated to adulting issues e.g. gas and electricity, banking, rent etc. Try your best to not use this email for anything else, the less you sign up to with this email the less likely you are to receive spam mail. It’s so easy to miss important emails, because they’re buried in a pile of junk mail, hence why having a separate email for important correspondence makes a world of difference.
6. Download the digital guide to your appliances
We recommend creating a folder on your computer for product manuals. When you purchase a product search for the digital guide online and save it to this folder. For most people it’s much easier to locate digital items than paper items. In addition, this ensures you have a back up version in case anything happens to the physical copy.
7. Clean often and declutter regularly
The second law of entropy is that things naturally go from order to disorder. It takes very little effort for a tidy house to turn into a messy house, but it takes energy to keep a house in order. A good cleaning trick is to clean often so you clean less, it’s a lot easier to keep things clean than to clean things. Clutter tends to be the result of procrastination, get into the habit of putting things away as soon as you’re done using them. Open your letters as soon as they arrive and determine if the letter needs to be recycled, shredded or actioned, this will stop them from piling up. Incorporating these habits into your routine saves you from having to spend hours of your weekend cleaning and organising.
8. Create an adulting folder on your computer
It’s a good idea to have a folder on your computer dedicate to all things adulting. You can create subfolders for different things.
Here are some suggestions of things to save in your adulting folder:
Payslips
Student Loan Statements
P45s
P60s
Bank Statements
Council Tax Statements
Product Manuals
Budgeting Spreadsheets
If you want to keep your physical paperwork to a minimum, you can scan your letters e.g. council tax statements and shred the physical copy. If you have important details you want to write down e.g. login details for websites, you can create a password protected word document.
9. Back up your computer at least once every 4 months
It’s a good idea to back up your computer on a regular basis so that if anything happens to your computer you are still able to access your files. We recommend having a physical backup and a digital backup.
10. Check your credit score every two months
You can check your credit report on the Experian website for free every month. It’s important you check your credit score regularly so you can rebuild and maintain good credit and ensure your credit information is accurate. Reviewing your credit report allows you to identify any unusual activity on your account and check if it’s fraudulent.