How ‘admin parties’ became the secret to tackling a tedious to-do list

Admin. Not exactly a word to fill you with joy, right? It’s the very tedious and time-consuming spectre that looms over adult life. The logistical equivalent of the most boring person in the room, who makes everyone else more boring by some sort of osmosis. Absolutely no one’s favourite way to spend their time.

And for many of us, it’s not just deeply dull. It’s also strangely... dread-inducing. Tasks that should, in theory, not take more than 15 minutes max have a habit of metamorphosising into something huge and terrifying, the longer that you put them off. They pile up in the back of your mind, taking the form of a sort of bureaucracy bogeyman who seems impossible to vanquish.

A strategy of avoidance, though, just doesn’t work. It simply begets more admin: an unpaid bill results in a late fee, which results in half an hour on the phone. Failing to upgrade the two-factor authentication on your work laptop necessitates endless chats with IT. Leaving your tax return to the last minute, end-of-January scramble just ensures that you spend double the amount of time on hold to HMRC with any queries, as all your fellow procrastinators are calling up, too.

So what’s the solution? How can we mitigate this grinding boredom, while also staying on top of the administrative minutiae that is part and parcel of being a grown-up in the modern world?

Last year, in an article for The Wall Street Journal, the writer Chris Colin put forward a potential answer: hosting an “admin night” for your friends. After becoming disillusioned with the sheer amount of time he was spending tackling a mountain of paperwork, bills, and interminable conversations with customer service chatbots, he decided to invite a group of mates round one evening for “the lamest party ever”.

When the inaugural “admin night” rolled around, Colin and his guests sat down to “deal with the stuff [they’d] been putting off” and “make a fun evening of something onerous”. It was, he said, a “tiny, nerdy” act of resistance against “the growing stream of administrative tasks sapping our time, spirits and social lives”, a way of turning “private drudgery into communal solidarity”.

Clearly, it worked out for Colin and co – he’s been putting on admin nights for six years now. And since his article was published a few months ago, his formula (admin + friends = surprisingly productive party) has been adopted by paperwork-averse social media users, who have been sharing videos, photos and success stories from their very own “admin nights” and “admin parties”.

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I am a prime candidate for an “admin party”. I can stay on top of things in my working life, just, but outside the hours of 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday, I am resolutely type B. Recently, when a friend of mine who lives in the same building attempted to pop a card in my mailbox, she was horrified to be greeted by the gigantic wedge of junk mail festering in there (largely flyers from Domino’s addressed to previous tenants, and other assorted adverts that I’d never got round to sorting out). It felt like a pretty decent representation of my attitude to admin: ignore it, shove it in some kind of drawer/box/dark corner, and hope that it simply dematerialises.

I was duly named and shamed in our WhatsApp group, and later, when I floated the idea of an “admin night”, the same friend was immediately on board. We blocked out a few hours from Sunday afternoon into early evening, and immediately felt smug about how grown-up the two of us (both in our thirties) were being.

The potential advantages of an “admin party” are manifold, as psychotherapist Eloise Skinner tells me. “Assigning the tasks to a single night can help with motivation and determination,” she says, while “doing the tasks alongside others can increase social accountability and commitment”. Essentially, an “admin party” is a jazzed-up form of body doubling, a “productivity strategy based on the presence of others”, as Skinner puts it, where simply having someone close by who is also cracking on with their to-do list can “provide a focus and a reminder to stay on task”. It’s particularly useful for neurodivergent people, she adds.

If I’d allocated some time over the weekend to focus on tedious tasks on my own, there’s a very high chance that I’d have shrugged it off and finished watching Heated Rivalry instead. But letting someone else down somehow feels so much worse than letting yourself down.

And, as Skinner says, “combining the admin with spending time with friends can offer a sense of fulfilment and fun”. In adulthood, it can sometimes seem like we are each too busy tackling our own sisyphean burden of humdrum tasks to actually spend proper time with each other; taking the edge off the tedious stuff with some low-stakes, low-cost socialising feels like a win-win.

Beforehand, we noted down everything that we wanted to get done. For me, that included clearing out my Google drive and iCloud (I’ve been receiving notifications about how low my storage is on both platforms for months, possibly years, and don’t want to simply give in and buy more); transferring a load of plans from my phone calendar to my new paper diary; and setting up some kind of high-interest savings account. My friend, meanwhile, had a few household jobs to get through (we’d set up residence in her living room, along with her cats) as well as wanting to sort out her bookshelves and frame some prints.

The Diet Cokes were in the fridge. The snacks were within reach. One of those “ambient lo-fi beats” videos was playing on YouTube as a sort of focus-enhancing background noise. So we cracked on, taking a few breaks to marvel about just how productive we were being (the secret, I reckon, is choosing tasks that don’t require too much brainpower, so you can chat without losing a vital train of thought).

And if you can’t get together in person, a video call can work just as well, as money coach Georgia Mulliss tells me. Every other Friday, she and a friend log onto a Zoom call to tackle their admin. On this week’s agenda? Phoning up her insurance broker to change the bank account her direct debit is taken from, and continuing in her admin quest to return some faulty chairs. It’s a tradition they started after realising they were both “feeling guilty and a tinge of shame” about the stuff they just couldn’t seem to get done.

“We are both moving at a fast pace and generally well organised,” says Mulliss, “and yet we have these shame-filled doom piles.” The camaraderie, she adds, pushes them along. “Having someone else to laugh with and get the piles clear makes it easier.”

What particularly strikes me is the admin-related afterglow we experience later. My pal ends up ticking off a few extra tasks once I’ve retreated (very type A of her). I also feel more motivated as the next week begins; I’m less prone to procrastinating my writing, and even end up researching ISAs, something I’ve long filed away under “nice to have but not for now”.

The pile of junk mail, though, remains unvanquished. That’s a job for admin night 2.0.