Concepts That Make Administrative Work Simpler

In your job, you are either delivering your core work product or you are doing administrative meta-work that makes the final delivery easier. If you are an event photographer, your core work is being there; taking the photos. Your meta-work includes scheduling with clients and tracking shoots you still need to post-process. If an event needs multiple photographers, your meta-work can include interfacing with your partners and organizing file drop-boxes. Most meta-work falls under one of four categories: writing a memo, populating a table, polling for info, and creating new processes.

Writing a Memo

A memo should have a target audience and a call to action. A memo should be high level enough that no one needs to do math to figure out what their call to action is. A memo should be detailed enough that no two people should need to look up the same thing after reading the memo. Emails, Powerpoints, and Google Docs are all examples of memos. If your memo contains data, ensure that the data requires no further analysis to understand it.

To decide if you need to write a memo, ask yourself:

• Is there work I have done that someone else will need to do, unless I send them the memo?
• Is someone doing something when they really should be doing something else?
• Is someone doing nothing when they really could be doing something?

Simply put, a memo should use information to reduce wasted work in the workplace.

Populating a Table

Tabular data is useful because it is regular, easy to subdivide, and (ideally) each row represents a concrete concept. The act of populating a table is useful because it forces you to make your data regular. This regularization (putting things into columns) reveals where you are missing data you thought you had and reveals where you need to do more post-processing on the data that you do have. In one conception, a table means that you can take the top row off of the table and—using only the information in that row—produce something real. For example, the row contains the date, location, and equipment required for your next photoshoot. In another conception, a table means that you can combine all of the rows and learn something important. For example, an invoices table where you can sum up all the numbers to measure your revenue.

Simply put, a table forces you to be explicit about what you know and what you don’t know.

Polling for Info

If you can neither write a memo, populate a table, nor do your core work, you might be blocked. This is an opportunity to poll your upstream sources for information. There might be an email thread where someone commits to doing work. Have they completed this work? Do they have an updated time estimate? There might be someone who regularly needs you to perform a task for them. Do they need this task done? Polling for info should make communication loops tighter. They are not opportunities to uselessly harass someone. Also, be wary about being stuck in a “polling” state; e.g., continually checking your email. Focus on things that have good odds of yielding something new for you to do.

Creating Process

Organizational processes have a bad reputation for adding administrative overhead. While there is some merit to this claim, there also is a reason that process emerges. Writing a “playbook” for yourself or your coworkers can simplify work. Coding is useful because it is an automated process with an added layer of rigor. However, you do not need code to write out the set of instructions necessary to accomplish a task.

A new process should:

• Remove common administrative work that needs to be done before/after a task
• Remove ambiguity from a set of requirements

A document template is a form of process. An on-call playbook is a form of process. A utility program for your team is a form of process.

Creating and managing processes is difficult. These things are the most “meta” of meta-work. They can optimize your work and they can optimize your other meta-work. In many ways, a business unit is defined by the processes that it owns. I list process creation last because it probably is done less than the other meta-work listed here, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

In conclusion, there are multiple pathways to do productive work that is not the core work of your job. I covered some of the most important ways that you can do useful meta-work in this writeup, but it is difficult to be confident that this is exhaustive. I believe I’ve captured what is most important, though. Consider these four options to be a sort of mental checklist that you can run through when you don’t know what to do: “write a memo”, “populate a table”, “poll for info”, “create process”. I hope that this process I’ve created is useful for you ;)