03. What’s an Admin Block and Why You Need One for Productivity
Episode 03
Did you know that unmanaged administration tasks (email, errands, phone calls, etc.) are often the BIGGEST disrupter of productivity and focus?
That’s right — when you don’t have control of all the “little” school and work administration tasks, all the important tasks become so much harder than they need to be.
In this week’s episode, we dive into the world of student and work admin: what it is, how it’s messing with your productivity, and practical strategies to manage it.
Resources:
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
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What if I told you that there is something that you can implement today, right now, that can drastically decrease your overwhelm and increase your productivity? Well, there is. I want to teach you all about it in today's episode.
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Hello. You are listening to the Learn and Work Smarter Podcast, the podcast for students and professionals who want to learn and work smarter. I'm your host executive function coach and founder of SchoolHabits.com, Katie Azevedo. As a reminder, everything I mention in today's episode will be linked in the show notes, including a link to the transcript, which you can also find at LearnandWorkSmarter.com/podcast
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Today, we're going to dive into something that I really wish more people talked about,
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which is managing administration. This is a concept that is so, so important for both students and working professionals.
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We're going to talk about what it is, why you need to care about it. How not caring about it is destroying your productivity
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and your emotional well-being. And, of course, how to manage it.
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So let's start with what it is. What is administration now moving forward? In this episode, I'm probably just going to use the word admin, a sort of that administration, and I like to refer to it as school admin or work admin or life admin.
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So admin is all of these small tasks that accumulate during the day, during a week that you need to do in order for everything else to run smoothly. Now the problem is that these are the types of tasks that we often don't think about that accumulate. That stress us out, that we often forget to do throughout the day.
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Or perhaps we do them, but we do them in a way that's more stressful so that it needs to be the tasks that when we lay in bed at night and we can't fall asleep, we're like, I forgot to do this.
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I forgot to send that. I forgot to call this person back. I forgot to submit that right. Those are all the things that they're not big enough for us to consider them a project or an assignment for school. They don't often make our task management systems. Well, they should, and that's what we're going to talk about today. But when they're done correctly and when we manage our admin correctly, everything else around us runs smoothly and we just operate better.
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Now, on the other hand, if you don't have good control over their admin, whether for school or for work, then you might find yourself frequently asking yourself the following questions Why am I so stressed? Why do I have no time? Why do I feel like I have so much to do? Where am I Things? What time is that thing I'm supposed to be at?
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What am I missing? Why do I feel like I forgetting something? And why can't I sleep? Now admin tasks look different depending on where you are. Are you a student in school? Okay, well, cool. Then your admin task is still going to look different if you are a high school, college or graduate student, are you a working professional?
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Great. Then your admin tasks are going to look different than they do for a student, but they're also going to depend on what industry you're in, what job you have. Okay. But generally speaking, I'm going to run through some examples of what admin tasks look like, so then you can go, okay, I know what you're talking about.
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We love examples. All right. Admin tasks for students might involve writing and sending emails, planning, updating calendars, communicating with people and teachers, following up with teachers, managing your grades, managing your physical papers,
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cleaning up your study spaces, submitting assignments, and even things like doing errands. Examples of admin tasks for professionals. Now, of course, again, this varies by industry, but it could be sending in replying to emails, making phone calls,
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following up with people, typing up your meeting notes, organizing files, managing and filing data, managing your calendars, managing people.
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And then, of course, cleaning up and tidying your workspace. All right, so why am I making an entire episode about admin about these, you know, silly little silly, amusing air quotes if you're not watching this on YouTube, but silly little tasks that accumulate throughout the day, why am I making a whole episode about this? Because when we don't manage these things, the consequences are massive and we can't ignore that.
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When we don't manage our admin in a way that is sensible and efficient. Okay. And I want to talk about lots of strategies for doing that in this episode. Then we miss deadlines, we miss assignments, we become unreliable and we let people down. We increase our stress and anxiety and our overwhelm. If you're a student, your grades will tank.
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If you're working, then your job performance is sacrificed.
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We become unprepared for tests or for meetings or just for our daily regular job. We become disorganized and we can't find things. All of those consequences are huge. Whether you're a student or working right. If you don't manage your admin, you can't do your job. Whether your job is to work, work or to do school.
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All right. So that's why we're talking about this today. So I'm going to give an example of what unmanaged admin might look like at work. Let's say you have a meeting, okay? And you take notes during the meeting. Now, what we should do after meetings is process our notes. Okay. But let's say that you rushed out of the meeting and you tell yourself, I'm going to process my notes later.
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but then what happens is we procrastinate too much time passes.
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You leave the notes on your desk for, you know, ten days. And eventually when you go to look at them, your notes don't even make sense to you anymore. You forget what you had agreed to do during the meeting.
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So you're looking at your notes going, Wait, shoot, which of these are my tasks? What are people depending on me for now you're stressed out and you're probably going to miss an important deadline or worse, maybe become unreliable to your colleagues. All right. No, no one wants that. If you are a student, this is what poor student admin could look like in a day.
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Now, this is a basic example, but I am using it just to illustrate the impact of having bad admin so that you buy in to the strategies that I'm going to share in this episode. Okay,
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so let's say that your paper organization for your backpack is you just have one big folder or maybe in the beginning of the school year you got multiple folders with good intentions, but you end up just like shoving everything in one folder because you can't be bothered to, you know, take the right folder out of your bag and file things away correctly.
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Okay? So essentially you don't have a system for organizing your papers and you keep saying that you're going to do it later. Every time you shove a math paper in with your history paper, you know, subconsciously there's a better way to do it. But you're like, I'll do that later. And every time a teacher hands your quizzes back, you just shove them into the folder.
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All your classes
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scrambled together. And now, hypothetically, let's say that you have a test coming up. What is the perfect material to study for a test? Your previous quizzes. But now you can't locate those quizzes because you don't remember where you put them or that giant folder that you have with everything all scrambled
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in together,
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you know, the expression out of sight, out of mind.
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So you actually forgot about the five quizzes you had leading up to this test. So you're not even thinking that those are potential study resources. So when you go to study, you don't actually have materials to study. You can't find them or you don't think about them. So now you're stressed out, you don't know what to study. So you don't study properly, you don't say the right things.
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Then you take your test
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and you get a bad
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grade on the test, all because you didn't manage the admin of putting papers where they're supposed to go. Okay, so what's the solution? How do we manage admin and why do you need to? Okay, well, I think I already explained why we need to, but how do we manage admin?
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There are two parts to managing life admin, school admin or work admin. Number one, you have to have a way to track admin tasks as they arise. And number two,
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you need to schedule time to do them. And I'm going to talk about each of these steps. Okay. But this is so important. You need to have a trusted way to track what these admin tasks are.
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We have to stop pretending that they're not a thing. They're a frickin thing, okay? They're a thing. And they add up in these stresses out and they consume so much time over the course of a day or a week that, you know, you have the feeling sometimes when you go to bed and you're like, I feel like I didn't do anything.
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I didn't like complete the things I needed to complete because all I did all day was send emails or do this or do that. Right? You have to manage your admin so that you can get on to the things that you're supposed to be doing. All right, so let's break these down: track them. A couple key points for making sure that you're able to track the admin tasks over the course of a day or week:
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Number one, you've got to write them down in a trusted system. You have to stop telling yourself that you remember to send the email, that you remember the mail, the letter that you'll remember to clean out the whatever at the bottom of the bag that you're going to remember to follow up with. So and so. Then you're going to remember to rewrite your note.
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No, write it down. You can use the notes app on your phone. You can use a traditional planner. If that's something that you already have set up,
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you can use your assignment notebook, you can use Google keep, you could use a sticky note.
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There's so many ways and of course,
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I do have a free admin task template.
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I love templates. You may know this already. If you're watching this podcast on YouTube, then check the description box for a link that's going to take you to these show notes. If you're listening to this on a podcast app, then you're going to want to open this show notes. You just kind of swipe up in whatever app that you are listening, right?
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And there is a link inside the show notes that will take you to the free admin task template. It's awesome. I use it myself. Step two
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You have
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to schedule time to do these admin tasks and this is what I call an admin block. It is a deliberate time in your schedule where you say, I am going to do these things, I am going to do these things that have accumulated on my admin task list and I'm going to do them on Monday at 1:00.
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I'm going to do them on Wednesday from 4 to 430 a day and a time. You're going to want to batch these tasks together instead of doing them ad hoc and randomly throughout the week. Now, depending on your situation, whether you're a student or you're working or what type of job you have or whatever, you could do a daily 15 minute admin block.
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Oftentimes that's enough just to run through your list and say, okay, I scanned my email, I cleaned up my space, I followed up with this person. I organized my whatever, I cleaned out my downloads folder. Maybe 15 minutes a day is sufficient. Okay. Or maybe it would work better for you to have one hour or 90 minutes once a week where you just sit down and you say, I am doing all of these things.
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Okay, If you have a lot of errands to do that counts as admin, you're not going to like go to the bank, come home and then go do another errand and then come home and then go do another errand and then come home, know you're going to batch your errand admin together and you going to leave your house once boom, boom, boom, hit the errands that you need to do and then return home.
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Okay. We typically do that, but we need to start using that framework for handling the admin tasks that we have that aren't necessarily errands that are like, you know, computer based or phone calls or mail or things like that. Personally, I have two admin blocks during the week, a 30 minute ish. It kind of depends on Mondays and then a larger one on Fridays that works for me.
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I have toyed with like 15 minute admin blocks throughout the week, but truthfully, if you write me an email, I'm probably not going to respond to you unless it's on Friday. Like because that's not scheduled. Yeah, every minute of my day scheduled and in my admin block I deliberately know that I'm going to have time to respond to emails on Friday.
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I'm not going to respond to emails any single time that they roll into my inbox because that's going to force me to remove my focus from whatever else it is that I'm doing. In what? Respond to an email just because it came in? No, I'm going to respond to emails during my admin block because I have identified that as an admin task and there's some that up.
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There are two reasons why having an admin block is so effective. I kind of just rolled through them, but let me repeat them. Number one, it utilizes a strategy called batching, which I was just explaining with the errands, right? You don't go do all these random errands and return to your house every time you batch or group similar tasks together and do them in one sitting in one chunk and just like laundry, right?
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We don't watch one sock at a time. We grab all our laundry and we throw it on the washing machine and we wash it all together. That's basic batching that we don't even think about, but batching reduces context switching. And that's the second reason why this is such a productivity tip, because every time we remove our focus from something that we should be doing reading, studying, thinking, working, like every time we remove our focus from one of those cognitively demanding tasks to respond to an admin task, to an email, to pick up the phone, to respond to a text, to say, I need to organize my desk now, let me just send that file
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to so-and-so. Every time we do that, we lose the focus on what we were working on, and then we go to the other thing and then when we return to the thing that we were working on, there is a long runway to regain our focus, to get ourselves back to the to the mental state we were at when we got distracted.
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Right. That is not good for productivity. Okay, so a quick little bonus tip here. You can use an admin block for home things as well. So for examples, home projects. Okay, you might say, man, I got like, you know, six things to fix around the house or at these random little house projects or dorm projects or whatever, wherever you live, I don't care.
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Do them all. And what time schedule on Thursday at 3:00 and walk around your house and in one hour you can bang out these things that have been accumulating in the back of your mind and distressing you out. And you don't have to think Thursday at 4:00, what am I going to do? Because you've tracked them throughout the week.
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Every time an admin task comes up, you write down the list, you know you're going to get to it. Let's say that you want to declutter your clothes, make that. That's an admin task. Put it on an admin block, decluttering making doctor's appointments, paying bills, making phone calls again, doing errands. Right. These are all personal admin tasks that also could benefit from being batched together and plopped on the calendar to be completed in one chunk of time.
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Again, getting schoolwork and life admin under control by tracking what these tasks are. The minute they pop into your mind and putting them in a trusted system, your notes app Google. Keep your planner, your assignment notebook, or of course, the free planner that I have in the show notes. Right. Tracking them somehow and then having a dedicated, predictable, repetitive time throughout the week where you know that you can get to those tasks, increases your productivity and decreases the stress.
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But as you also know, the magic is in the action. I think it's amazing. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. That is awesome. But you know what? I want more. I want you to follow the show. It's a lever of you. Well, yes, yes, yes. But I want you to do these things. I want you to try right?
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You're the scientist in the experiment. If you're often stressed out, if you're often disorganized and unprepared and you know you feel like something is off, things are too hard. I'd venture to say that your admin is out of whack. All right? And this is how you get a grip on it. Planet Admin block by tracking your things throughout the week and doing it all at one time.
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All right. So as I just sort of joked about, please, please, I would be so grateful if you follow the show and if you left to review those things, make more of an impact than you can ever know, especially for a new podcast like this. And as always, never stop learning.
