JOB'S A GOOD'UN

As the tax return deadline looms, a new trend on TikTok says you can lessen the pain of dull tasks if you tackle them while hanging out with your friends.

- Katie Rosseinsky

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 grownup 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”.