Happy Monday 🌞

Next week, like many in the US, we’ll be doing lots of driving. We’re driving ~12 hours from Tennessee to Maryland to be with my husband’s family for Thanksgiving. If this sounds like a lot of time in the car, it’s because it is. We’re road-trip people, though; we’ve been road-tripping with our two dogs and now our daughter for years. In the summer, we drove from Tennessee to New York, which was another 12-hour trip that we did on a Friday and then all over again on Monday.

I love these drives. I’m not the driver, but I’m in charge of packing, snacks, pets, and entertainment for our 2.5-year-old. Lucky for me, she’s great in the car. This leaves me with plenty of time to myself. I can’t really read or watch anything as I get too car sick, but I love to use the time to sneak in a little bit of life admin and feel a smidge more on top of things by the time we arrive.

Life admin is a timely topic for me, I recently read a whole book on the subject: Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More by Elizabeth Emens. If this topic is of interest, I definitely recommend the book. Elizabeth Emens makes Life Admin feel less daunting and provides tons of advice. You can also listen to the podcast episode where I chat about this book with my MakeWorkWork co-host, Habbi:

→ MWW 45: Tiny Little Frustrations​

I have a long list of life admin tasks I do in the car, on flights, or in airports. Here’s my own list plus suggestions from folks who replied with their own life admin tasks when I shared mine:

Optimize your phone

• Reorganize your phone screen to keep it timely
• Check the settings on your phone and see if you want to adjust any of them
• If you’re an iOS tinkerer: Build a few Shortcuts to save you time later, and/or clean up Shortcuts you’re not using - Brandon Green​
• Create a reminders list for recurring chores (eg things that need to happen annually or every six months). @ZachSB​

Do a digital declutter

• Delete unused apps
• Go through notes to organize and purge them
• Delete old contacts you don’t need anymore! - Alyssa Towns​
• organizing apps into folders and deleting old chats on whatsapp - Gabriela Zedan​
• Clean up your Spotify/Apple Music library / refresh any playlists that might be stale with some new songs - Brandon Green​
• Tagging notes (insert cloud-based note tool here; I swear by Evernote) instead of creating folders. Searching tags + content at the same time > trying to remember the folder and date. - Anthony Coppedge​

Delete and organize photos

• Create specific photo albums for easy reference later
• Delete duplicate photos
• Add photos of your close friends and family to their contact photos
• “On iPhone: Settings > General > iPhone storage > Messages > Review Large Attachments. Re-enjoy (and sometimes delete) the largest videos that got shared via text through the years!” - @CaroKopp​
• Highly recommend the app GetSorted to clean up your photos album. - Hannah Tangi Elliott​
• My goal for this year was, at the end of every month, delete photos on my phone that I don’t need (say, screenshots, memes, duplicate photos) from that month each year. For example, at the end of July, I will search ‘July’ in my iPhone photos and go through all the photos from Julys past to do cleanup. With nearly 40,000 photos on my phone currently (😅) this has helped make the cleanup task a bit less daunting! - Bethany Seong​

What else would you add to this list? Let me know + send a link to your social profile or website and I might include you if I do another roundup.

I hope you have a lovely week ahead. As always, feel free to reply if this sparks any thoughts or questions.

See you next week,

Hailley

• I recently did an interview about how we work at Buffer, where I covered the four-day workweek, remote work, and lots more. Watch or listen to the interview here.
• We’re hiring a Design Engineer on the Marketing team at Buffer — please check it out or spread the word!
• I wrote about the enneagram for the first (but certainly not last) time. It's a personality framework that has been very powerful for me when it comes to expressing myself with clear language and better collaboration.

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