ADHD Life Admin: Why the Small Stuff Feels So Heavy

If you have an ADHD brain like mine, it probably means that somewhere in your house there’s at least one return you’ve been meaning to drop off, alongside those donation items that have been sitting in a box for months, a form or two that needs signing, and an appointment you’ve been meaning to schedule.

Each one would probably take under ten minutes. Yet together, the fact that they’re unfinished and looping in our minds means they add a surprising amount of chatter in an already busy brain.

That’s ADHD life admin. It’s a whole category of work that sits underneath everything else in our lives, and we rarely pause to name it directly. And because we don’t name it, it’s easy to overlook the mental drain it has on our day-to-day experience.

In this post, we’re looking at the category of life admin and recognizing its intensity and impact, because a lot of us are hauling it around without ever recognizing it as a “thing.” Then we’ll talk about a simple yet impactful strategy to help lighten the load.

Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app. Prefer to read? No problem. Keep scrolling for a summary of key takeaways.

In Episode 373 we’re exploring:

• What life admin actually is, and why no single item in the category ever seems worth mentioning
• How one “simple” ten minute phone call stacks eight or nine executive functions on top of each other
• Why shame and isolation show up around admin tasks, and why it isn’t just you
• An actionable way to help lighten the load of life admin overall

What Counts as Life Admin

Let’s start by recognizing that there is a thing called life admin. I think about it as all that extra stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into one time block.

It’s the appointments and the forms. The bills, the renewals, the returns. The school portal, the insurance claim, the thing you have to return that call about. The scheduling, the rescheduling, and the follow up on the thing you already scheduled in order to reschedule.

These life admin tasks show up regardless of what your life looks like. Whether you’re a knowledge worker in a typical 9 to 5, parenting full time, running your own business, caring for aging parents, or living on your own and running a household solo, this category is there, and it’s yours to hold.

When clients describe it to me, the words are usually some version of, “I have all these little ‘things’ I have to do, and I can’t get my head above water,” or “I have so many open loops I can’t keep track of any of them.”

What makes this category so sneaky is that no single item in it ever seems worth mentioning. It’s the cumulative impact of everything stacked on top of one another that really starts weighing us down.

Why ADHD Life Admin Is So Heavy: Stacked Executive Functions

Let’s talk about what actually happens when one of these lands on your list.

Say you need to schedule an appointment. On paper, that’s one line. Call the doctor.

But when I had to do this the other week, I tracked what my brain had to do in order to complete this seemingly “simple” task:

First I had to remember it exists at all, at a moment when I can act on it, which is its own trick. Because if I’m not thoughtful about it, the reminder I set goes off at 7:00 pm when the doctor’s office is already closed, or I’m out running errands on the weekend. Not useful.

But once I finally do remember, AND it’s a good time, then I have to actually convince my brain that today is the day.

Then I had to figure out how to log into my portal, which required resetting my password twice since apparently my password manager didn’t match the Apple password manager and it got all sorts of mixed up.

I finally logged in, found the info I needed, and then I had to find the number and work out what I wanted to say. And I HATE trying to describe my situation over the phone when I can’t see the person’s facial expressions. It’s just a thing.

On top of that, I have to make sure I’m in the right location with my calendar open, and I have to parse through my calendar availability while somebody reads me time slots I wasn’t expecting because the doctor is booking earlier than I anticipated. So I make a decision on the spot, feeling a bit pressured because I don’t want to make the person on the phone wait for me to remember how time works. And then I have to remember the time I agreed to and put it on my calendar so I actually remember the appointment.

Seriously. That’s so many things. Remembering, deciding, initiating, planning, holding information, switching, choosing, following through. And they’re stacked on top of each other, so the whole thing has to hold together to work.

When There’s a Layer Underneath

Sometimes there’s a layer underneath all of it, where the reason we’re calling is something we’d rather not think about. So the reminder comes up on our phone. And we look at it, and something in our chest goes tight, and we move it to tomorrow.

And it comes up tomorrow. And we move it to next week.

Every time we move it, something gets added to it. A little bit of evidence. A little note to ourselves, and not a love note, mind you. A judgment about “what kind of person keeps postponing a ten minute phone call? It’s not that big of a deal!”

So by week three of moving that phone call reminder, that task is now carrying the phone call plus all the judgment we’ve directed toward ourselves for not making it earlier.

That’s one reason these seemingly “simple” tasks get harder to do the longer they sit on the list. Of course, there are many more reasons, too. This was just my most recent experience scheduling ONE appointment.

So I first want to say, look. The dread is real. The resistance is real. Even if we don’t add the judgment piece to the mix, and we just stay with the 8 or 9 steps required to make the one call, that resistance is probably pretty proportionate to what your brain is actually being asked to do, which was never actually just one line on a list.

The Shame and Isolation Underneath ADHD Admin Tasks

I want to say this because I know for a fact that so many of us ADHD brains feel a lot of shame and isolation for struggling with these admin tasks. (I’ve heard it time and again from clients and also the broader I’m Busy Being Awesome audience.) On the surface, it seems like it should be so easy, and when it’s not, our brains often have a lot of opinions like:

• “I should be able to handle this.”
• “It’s a ten minute phone call, what is wrong with me?”
• “Everybody else can do this, why can’t I just grow up?”
• “I’m so far behind, and it’s on this annoying stuff that should be easy.”

What those thoughts tend to do is create more shame. And shame makes people hide. It has us turning inward and away from other people.

We stop mentioning it, because mentioning it would mean admitting that a form to renew our license has been sitting on the counter since May. So we carry it alone, which makes it heavier, and the heavier it gets, the less likely we are to say anything about it.

Meanwhile, so many of us are doing the exact same thing in our own houses, with our own forms, our own appointments, our own bills sitting there on our own counters.

So seriously, please know it’s not just you. I promise.

Why This Category Never Lets Up

There’s a reason it’s not just you, beyond the executive function load we just walked through.

Think about most other work in our lives. It has endpoints built into it. The project ships. The report goes out. The school year wraps. The season ends. Even a rough week at work has a Friday.

Life admin doesn’t have any of that. Laundry doesn’t ship. Groceries don’t wrap for the season. The forms and the appointments and the bills and the returns and the school portal and the vet just keep arriving, and there’s no point in the week where the slate gets wiped and we get to start clean.

So we’re carrying a category of work that never once tells us we’re done. And our brains keep tracking all of it, because from their point of view, nothing has closed.

That’s what I want to work with here. Because if life admin won’t give us a stopping point, we can build one in ourselves.

Overwhelm to Action LIVE

Before we get into how, I want to make sure you know about Overwhelm to Action LIVE, because it connects directly to this.

Overwhelm to Action LIVE is a 6 week program for ADHD brains, and it helps you design a regulate and reset process you’ll actually use. We regulate first, because we can’t take sustainable action if we’re working from a dysregulated, overwhelmed state. Then we reset so we can approach the situation with a fresh start.

I want to highlight that word, reset, because it’s exactly what we’ve been talking about. Coming up, we’re going to explore how to build a simple stopping point into your week or month to quell the overwhelm. Inside Overwhelm to Action LIVE, we build the whole process together, shaped around your brain and your actual life.

It includes the full self-paced Overwhelm to Action course, plus live group coaching calls with me every other week, 4 in total, so you can bring your real questions as you’re implementing the strategies in real time. And we have a private community to practice alongside, to connect, to share ideas, create accountability, and celebrate wins together.

We start Thursday, October 8, and we wrap November 19, which is the week before US Thanksgiving. That timing is on purpose, so you’ll have your supports in place and ready to go as you head into the holidays. Enrollment closes Monday, October 5.

You can learn more about Overwhelm to Action LIVE here. I would love to have you there.

Building Your Own Stopping Points for ADHD Life Admin

The idea here is pretty simple. We decide, ahead of time, where certain kinds of life admin live. And then the end of that block becomes the closing point that this category never gives us on its own.

One quick note before we get into the action steps. If you’re deep in the overwhelm right now, I’d invite you to get yourself somewhere near neutral before you sit down to set any of this up. When we’re activated, we tend to make plans for a fantasy perfectionist version of ourselves with unlimited energy, and we force ourselves into action in a totally unsustainable way. A few minutes of grounding first, whatever that looks like for you, tends to make everything that comes after it a lot more realistic.

Then we move into creating two kinds of containers, both of which give us a place to stop.

Start With the Recurring Stuff, Like Laundry

Take laundry. If you know you’re in the office Wednesday and Thursday and work from home the rest of the week, you might decide once that Tuesdays and Fridays are laundry day. You throw a load in before your team meeting, you flip it after, you have lunch, you flip it again. You’re not deciding anything throughout the week. You’re doing your laundry on Tuesday. You already decided. (In fact, that’s literally my approach, even though I work from home every day. Tuesday and Friday are always laundry day. Decision made. No contemplation required.)

Here’s where the stopping point comes in. Once I have the clothes hung on the hangers Friday afternoon, laundry is done. Not done forever, obviously. Done until Tuesday. That’s a closing point where there wasn’t one before. Because before, I was always wondering if I should throw in a load, or if I should wait until this day or the weekend or whatever.

Once I made the decision, it freed up my mind to not even consider the rest of the week, because I’d already completed the cycle on Tuesday or Friday afternoon.

Or groceries. Like laundry, groceries can seemingly expand to the time you allow, or maybe one day you’re convinced you’re well stocked, but then suddenly run out of everything, and it can be this never-ending thing to do.

Similar to laundry, we can create a rhythm. You might have a saved list of your staples in whatever app you use, so most of the thinking is already done for you. Then you decide once: I fill the list on Thursday with any extras, it gets delivered Friday at the end of the workday, or I pick it up on my way home from the office. Now you have a rhythm instead of a weekly negotiation. And once that delivery lands, groceries are closed for the week.

For my all-or-nothing brains out there, please hear me. This rhythm can be as loose as you want it to be. If your brain tensed up a little at the idea of assigning laundry to a specific day, I invite you to find your preferred level of structure here. Things come up. Weeks go off the rails. And we can absolutely adjust. What we’re after is that on a typical week, we’ve already made the decisions, so we’re spending our precious executive function on actually doing the thing instead of on deciding whether or not to do the thing.

Then Build a Container for the One-Offs

You might be thinking, okay, but what about the stuff that only happens once? The phone call. The form to fill out. The bill to pay. Those aren’t on a schedule. They’re totally unpredictable. I can’t possibly build a stopping point around every single thing.

That’s fair. You can’t know on Sunday which form is going to turn up on Wednesday.

With that being said, you can probably be pretty certain there’s something that needs doing.

Most weeks, it’s a safe bet that there’s something to call about, something to fill out, something to return. The specific items may change every week, AND there’s likely a general recurring category of tasks we can count on. This is where my favorite concept of containers comes in.

For example, you might choose one weekly OR monthly OR bi-weekly container that you call the admin block. This block is dedicated to anything you do while sitting down with a phone or computer or paperwork of any kind. The calls, the forms, the bills, the portals, the scheduling, the emails that each need a decision from you. You pick a window, and it doesn’t matter when. It could be Wednesday after work, maybe Friday morning; for my clients, maybe it’s during our body double time, and that’s where this whole category lives.

What I like about creating a container for this type of work, especially if you can create some kind of body double situation either in person or virtually, is that once you get in that block, it’s often easier to get into that admin mode. You have the calendar open, you’ve gathered the forms in a basket and pinned in your inbox throughout the week, you have your card for paying bills. Honestly, you’ve already done the hardest part of getting yourself to sit down and switch your brain into admin gear.

What I’ve found is that once I’m in that mode, the second phone call or appointment I need to make feels much less taxing than the first. I’ve already made the shift, so I don’t have to be in that uncomfortable, constant switching of gears.

Plus, once I reach the end of that admin block, whether it’s for the week, every two weeks, or once a month, that block is complete. I can close the loop and save any new admin tasks that pop up in one place, knowing I will tackle them in the next admin container.

Group Your Errands Into Their Own Block

The other container I like to think about is for running errands. This is for any of the things that happen outside of the house. The returns, the donation boxes, the dry cleaning, the drop-offs, the thing you have to physically hand to somebody. Those get grouped, and they go together.

Similar to our admin block, you can decide ahead of time how often you want these to happen. And if it’s helpful, you might try pairing that errand block with a time when you’re already out, since an object in motion stays in motion, and you don’t have to head out and make an extra trip. (Of course, if you’re navigating decreased capacity for any reason, that comes first, and then stacking activities like this is likely not the way to go.)

Regardless of your approach, the concept remains the same. We’re grouping like activities together into one errand block so we can check the things off the list and close the loop, knowing we don’t have to think about whether we’ll head out to make that return or drop off that box at Goodwill until the next errand block comes around. You already closed that loop, and the next one opens next Wednesday after work, or whatever time you choose.

What I love about working at this scale is how fast it comes back around. If we miss an errand day or an admin day, it’s okay. The next block is days away, so the cost of missing one is pretty small. And the space between those containers belongs to us, to put our energy toward literally anything other than appointments and returns.

Your Invitation This Week

Life admin is its own category of work. It stacks several executive functions into tasks that look like one line on a list, and it never gives us a stopping point, which is why it carries weight far out of proportion to the time it takes.

So here’s what I invite you to try.

Pick one container. Just one. Maybe it’s an errand block on Saturday morning or on your way home from work one night. Maybe it’s deciding which day or days you’ll do laundry each week so you can stop renegotiating with yourself about when it’s a good time. Maybe it’s a 45 minute admin block on the day that tends to have slightly more breathing room in it.

Then once that block of time is up, let it end. You’re done. Let that be complete. And if more forms need a signature, or new returns need to go back, or additional bills come in, you’ve already decided ahead of time when you’ll approach them next.

If this one resonated, I’d love for you to share it with one person in your life who might need to hear it. Maybe you’re thinking of someone who also has a return sitting by their front door.

Work With Me:

• Learn more about private coaching here
• Join We’re Busy Being Awesome (group coaching)
• Enroll in Overwhelm to Action – step by step course for ADHD Brains

Resources From This Episode:

• Overwhelm to Action LIVE – 6 week live program for ADHD brains. Starts Thursday, October 8. Enrollment closes Monday, October 5.

More ADHD Resources:

• Discover Your ADHD Overwhelm Type – Free Quiz!
• Get the I’m Busy Being Awesome Podcast Roadmap
• Free course: ADHD Routine Revamp
• Learn my Top 10 Tips to Work With Your ADHD Brain
• Discover my favorite ADHD resources
• Access the I’m Busy Being Awesome Planning System

Paula’s Favorite Resources

• Stay focused with brain.fm and get a 30-day free trial. Personalized music, backed by science, designed to help you get and stay in the zone.
• Speechify: my go-to text-to-speech app. One-month free trial plus $60 off a premium subscription if you decide to keep it.
• Todoist: my favorite task manager. Simple, easy to use, and incredible integration with other platforms. Get two months of premium free. No credit card required.
• Wispr Flow: The best tool for talk-to-text. Awesome for verbal processing and saving time. Free trial, no credit card required.

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