Ah the joy of the clocks rolling back! A whole extra delicious, dreamy hour in bed without any guilt or pressure to get up and get on! Right? Ha - if only!
These days, the end of British Summer Time is usually announced by the kids bouncing on the bed shouting at you to get up while you peer with horror at the 5 something on the clock… and the dawning realisation hits you that it’s simply an extra 60 minutes of daytime and the normal juggling of a busy home life. An extra hour until the kids are in bed and you can relax (and when we say relax, we mean get on with your admin, dig out your paperwork, cook, iron and prepare yourself for tomorrow uninterrupted and possibly with a glass of wine in hand!)
Sure, we wouldn’t want to be a teenager again for a moment, even with all that sleep… but goodness wouldn’t it feel good to really enjoy the freedom of 60 precious, ‘me-time’ minutes where you were free to do exactly as you wished?
Well – you can! And you can have that every single week not just once a year. The secret is sitting right under your nose.
Did you know, that more than half of us spend up to 5 hours a week on life admin*?
Regaining just an hour of that is easy: Here’s our top 5 tips on how to reduce your life admin burden and get back to doing what you love.
1) Make an achievable to do list that’s structured according to priorities and dates.
Work to the real deadlines, set reminders and schedule time for the task in hand. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of a rolling to do list with a never-ending inventory of tasks to be pushed back week on week. Using an online, to-do list manager will help you to structure your tasks and prioritise according to your life admin cycle. That way you’ll only look at what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. Just the process of structuring your tasks in this way will allow you to relax at the end of each day, knowing that you are on top of what needs to be done right now.
2) Get help from the experts where you can.
Think smart. Where you can save time by outsourcing some of the research, decision making and form-filling that goes hand in hand with life admin, do it! We do it across other areas of our life (for example, more and more of us are employing cleaners for our homes to save time) and yet we don’t really extrapolate that thinking into other life admin areas. Using sites such as lookaftermybills.com, comparethemarket.com and moneysavingexpert.com etc will support you in solving issues faster. In the long run you’ll save not just time, but money too.
3) Share the load.
Don’t take it all on your own shoulders. Like we used to roster the home chores, apply that to your life admin. Share and allocate tasks amongst the family. With Lifefyle’s family option, you’ll all have a single point of reference where you can share, assign and review tasks as a team. Help each other by working together and you’ll save precious hours that will be transferred across to quality, meaningful time spent enjoying life!
4) Sort out important documents.
Most of us spend hours hunting out important paperwork, dates or information. Categorise, file and store all your vital papers and expiration dates in one place. Using a secure, online storage platform to help you do this will mean that you’ll never spend time rummaging through stacks of paperwork again. This one’s a double win, as you declutter your house and mind at the same time!
5) Do it online!
Our new technological world is booming for a reason – because it saves time, and it saves money. Shop for food and clothes online, use comparison apps to help you quickly get to the best partner and use safe, secure applications to manage your tasks and documents. For example, Lifefyle’s intelligent software will read your document, work out what it is, and highlight key dates for you to link to a task. It's quicker to snap a picture and upload your post to Lifefyle than it is to read it yourself! Boom! Another beautiful way of using technology for good – freeing up more time to live the life you want.
With Lifefyle, you don't need time to get started. Set-up takes just a couple of minutes, and then you can start getting tasks out of your head and on to your To-Do List straight away. No more "admin days", no more stockpiles of papers, and no more worrying about remembering what needs to be done. With Lifefyle on your side, you'll feel the load lighten immediately, and before you know it, you'll be on your way to a more organised life!
If you’re ready to gift yourself an extra hour each week, then try Lifefyle for free now.
Click here to start your free trial today.
*research commissioned by Admiral Multicover; published August 2017