OPINION
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A little while ago, I wrote a piece on ‘to do’ lists. It rang a bell for many readers. It seems we are being overwhelmed by the office work required to run a life and a household. The work is both clerical and managerial: filling out forms, sorting incoming mail, making appointments (and keeping them), making shopping lists, returning faulty or unwanted products bought online, paying bills, applying for any kind of government intervention.
Have you noticed lately how much longer it is taking to get things done? How long you have to wait on the telephone? How business is getting more complicated? For example, until recently you could simply open the ABC news website, and settle down to read about the day’s events. Not any more: now you required to ‘open an account’, and it takes forever. You have been unwittingly enrolled in ‘admin’, the ‘office work of life’. It is the organising and coordinating and managing and texting and emailing and calling in the process of living our humdrum lives. You can spend your whole day doing it and then wonder ‘where did that day go to?’ And still your inbox overflows.
Admin seems as unimportant as it is inevitable, particularly when we are dealing with a government department where some social benefit, financial or service-related, is concerned.
Governments have been so beset by fraud that the processes erected to prevent it are so complex as to defeat many applicants, or are simply not accessible to people with ordinary levels of literacy, digital or otherwise. Yet it seems trivial, inconsequential, even, so that it rarely commands our full intention or invokes protest, in that it is simpler merely to comply. This is what homebuilders do when confronted with the minutiae of local government regulation. And heaven help you if you become involved with the NDIS, or Aged Care Australia.
There is no escape. We have constructed a society which in many ways is functionally inaccessible to many of its members. In any interaction with any entity, government or private, there is a an assumption that the individual attempting to access its services is literate in the medium involved, and has easy access to the level of digital furniture common to the organisation content which is involved. “Jump onto the web!”, “download the PDF!”, “print off the application form!” are routine in the organisational context, but may be an impossible achievement in many households.
Taking out insurance, buying consumer items online, reading the ABC news online, applying for financial aid, planning a wedding or a party, moving house, all everyday activities with high degrees of personal admin. Each task will involve choices about the admin involved: do it personally, delegate, avoid, put off. We must choose. And if you have to interact with Centrelink, Aged Care, or any government agency, then heaven help you. This unseen, unacknowledged labour shapes modern life. Almost any human activity involves admin: a birthday requires that a party be planned, a gift ordered, delivered and wrapped. Personal training requires you to compare and evaluate gyms, checking on timetables, fees, locations and opening hours. Adopting a dog means filling out forms, organising visits to the vet, scheduling vaccinations, registering it.
It is pervasive, endlessly confronting. But we seldom acknowledge this in the sense that we set aside a given time to do this admin, even though it is like a separate, parallel job. The work involved is invisible to those not attempting to do it. In any household, one person will be the do-er, the one who watches bills and pays them. Only one person will write the thank-you notes. This happens almost without anyone noticing. It is as invisible as it is pervasive. Until someone makes a list. Or gets involved in an event like planning a wedding, or a death in the family. Or wants to enrol a child in childcare.
Admin, or the lack of it, can have financial implications. The biggest challenge that most of us face in a period of unstable, usually increasing, interest rates, is our mortgage. A recent study estimated that around 20% of mortgaged household could save money by refinancing, but few of them did so, or were aware of the possibility of doing so. Total savings estimated to be foregone was around $3 billion. Admin is what requires the more important of us to engage a PA, a personal assistant who takes care of everything from your dry cleaning, to your partner’s birthdays, to your airline tickets. I need one.
We all do.
John Fleming II
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