Elizabeth Emens on the Admin Tasks of Life

Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Erik Fisher

Business, Careers, Education, Self-improvement, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 877 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2020

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elizabeth Emens is a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the author of Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More.

Elizabeth Emens was a working mother with two young children, swamped like so many of us, when she realized that this invisible labor was consuming her. Desperate to survive and to help others along the way, she conducted interviews and focus groups to gather favorite tips and tricks, admin confessions, and the secrets of admin-happy households.

Life Admin tackles the problem of admin in all its forms, from everyday tasks like scheduling doctors appointments and paying bills, to life-cycle events like planning a wedding, a birth, a funeral. Emens explores how this labor is created, how it affects our lives, and how we might avoid, reduce, and redistribute admin whenever possible—as individuals and as a society.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Square, your favorite neighborhood spots run on Square.
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0:56.6	slash go slash beyond to learn more. That's SQ, that's SQU-A-R-E dot com slash geo slash beyond.
1:07.9	Square, meet you there.
1:29.6	Hello and welcome back to another episode of Beyond the To Do List.
1:33.6	I'm your host, Eric Fisher, and this is the show where I talk to the people behind the productivity.
1:40.3	This week, I'm excited to share with you a conversation I had with Elizabeth Emmons on her book, Life Admin,
1:45.8	how I learned to do less, do better, and live more. And if you're like me, you've been potentially struggling with life admin recently. Life admin is that business of life that creeps in
1:54.1	and steals your free time without you realizing it. It puts a strain on your schedule,
1:58.9	your relationships, your focus, and you may not even be
2:02.2	aware to the extent that it's doing that, and yet subconsciously it's dragging you down. In this
2:08.0	conversation with Elizabeth, we talk about identifying it, how it affects us, and how we can
2:13.2	avoid it, reduce it, delegate it as much as possible. And like I said, this is something that
2:18.2	from time to time without a system in place, or even with a system in place, it can creep in.
2:23.5	So I thought this would be a good time to revisit this conversation with Elizabeth Emmons.
2:30.6	Well, this week, it is my privilege to welcome to the show, Elizabeth Emmons.
	...

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