Life Admin Life Hacks

Mia and Dinah talk about switching broadband internet plans to save money and improve their service.

There are more than 35 internet service providers in Australia, with an array of ever-changing offers and promotions. This, combined with advancements in internet technology such as the NBN and improved modems and routers, and the changing use of technology by households, means that most of us should be reviewing our internet service plans to make sure we are getting the best deal.

The key criteria for selecting a plan are:

• Data needs – do you need unlimited or will a smaller plan be enough for your household usage?
• Cost – what savings are worth it for you to switch?
• Provision of equipment – will they provide the latest modem router to maximise your connection speed?
• Network performance – is uptime and speed important for your family?
• Customer service – is help at hand when you need it?
• Contract length – are you willing to lock in for two years, which is the most common contract length?
• Bundles – do you want to bundle with other telephony or streaming services?
• Ease of activation – do you need to make appointments for a technician to visit?

To compare broadband plans:

• Confirm your current monthly costs, plan details and monthly usage history
• Decide what criteria are important to you
• Speak to your current provider to see if they can improve your current deal
• Use comparison sites to shortlist providers based on your criteria
• Compare the providers for your key considerations
• Phone your preferred provider to confirm their offers and then switch.

• Mia talks about how she has moved from Microsoft Outlook to Google Calendar  for her household’s shared calendar, which has fixed synchronization challenges and provided a seamless experience across iOs and PC devices.
• Dinah talks about how she has added her To Do List app (Wunderlist) and shared family Google Calendar to her daughter’s phone, which has allowed some more delegation.

• Mia talks about how her son’s passport has expired and that she procrastinating about renewing it.
• Dinah talks about the fact that the Google Photos app does not work effectively for sharing photos and she needs to research an alternative app.

• WhatsApp – great for group chats and voice messages. Also you can use Siri to send a WhatsApp for you when you need to be hands free, such as in the car.

Choice Magazine – consumer advocacy group that surveys members to publish independent reviews and ratings. Free online access may be available through your local library.

Canstar Blue – broadband comparison site, whose annual survey of providers is supported by referrals to advertisers

Whistleout – broadband comparison site, with paid referrals to advertisers

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

Mia and Dinah talk about principles for efficient comparison shopping and fast decision making, before getting into the process and tools specific to reviewing private health insurance.

To avoid spending days researching better deals and ending up with analysis paralysis, there are several principles to embrace when comparing products or services:

• Keep the end in mind – Make sure you know what you are aiming to achieve – saving money, finding better quality products or services – before you start comparing. Decide how long you are willing to dedicate to the research stage, and for what benefit.
• Satisfice more and maximise less – Establish standards for what is good enough  and accept and embrace them rather than being resigned to it.
• Use rules of thumb to reduce effort –  Decide what criteria you will use to compare providers, and how many providers to compare.

In respect to health insurance, Mia and Dinah give an overview of what Medicare covers versus insurance, explain industry jargon and outline and things to consider when comparing different types of cover, such as:

• Medicare Levy Surcharge
• Health Insurance Rebates
• Lifetime Health Cover Loading
• Difference between Hospital and Extras cover
• Excess
• Waiting periods
• Limits and benefits
• Comparison sites

They each talk about their own process for comparing private health insurance and Mia’s satisfaction when she dedicated an hour and a half to the task to save $100/month with higher annual benefits on the services that are important to her.

How to compare private health insurance:

1. First, look at your current financial situation and cover to understand your premium, what rebate level applies to you, your benefit limits and claims history
2. Decide what type of treatment, customer service and price saving is important to you before you even start to compare and agree how much time you are willing to dedicate to the process
3. Pick how many providers and cover types you are going to compare
4. Jump online to familiarise yourself with each provider’s products, then call up each of them and switch when you find a better deal.

Privatehealth.gov.au – government website that explains private health insurance and provides a comprehensive cover comparison tool

Members Own Health Funds – comparison site with cover from 16 Australian not-for-profit and mutual health funds

PHI Extras Calculator – a Google Drive spreadsheet, built by Life Admin Life Hacks, which helps you compare extras cover

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

Mia and Dinah interview Justin Hiew, a lawyer from McMahon Fearnly Lawyers, to get some expert input into the morbid but important topic of wills and powers of attorney.

The information provided in this podcast constitutes general information only. It is not intended to nor does it constitute legal advice and it is not a substitute for professional legal advice. You should obtain professional advice before taking any action in relation to any matter discussed in the podcast.

They talk about:

• why it is important to make sure you have a will and powers of attorney
• when a will kit is probably good enough
• the difference between a will and a trust
• how financial and medical Power of Attorneys work
• when you should consider updating your will
• the importance of where to store your will
• what to look for when you are choosing a lawyer to prepare a will
• typical costs of preparing wills and powers of attorney.

Mia and Dinah talk about what were the key blockers for them to prepare their wills and powers of attorney. For Dinah, it was finding a lawyer and choosing an Executor and for Mia, it was thinking through her final wishes, the guardianship of her children as well as the distribution of her assets.

State Trustees will kit

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

In this episode Mia and Dinah talk about the challenges of managing digital photos including storing them so you can find them when you need them, backing them up and doing something with them to make you happy.

Mia and Dinah share the current disorganised state of their digital photos. They’ve both failed to implement a consistent system to store, backup and use their photos.

Mia interviews Sally-Ann Lyons, a former travel agent and now clothing designer, who manages a large volume (over 30,000) of photos for both her work and from her travels. Her system includes:

• always travelling with her laptop (MacBook Air)
• downloading and editing her photos every day so as to not create a backlog of activity
• filing as she goes in iPhotos both chronologically and by continent and country
• only showing her photos on her laptop and not printing them out
• backing up her laptop automatically when she is at home
• backing up to a hard drive when she is travelling
• containment by creating a limit on how many photos she can store by limiting her hard drive storage capacity.

Mia and Dinah both discuss how they are going to tackle their digital photos backlog and develop new habits going forward.

• Dinah talks about she has finally sorted out superannuation for herself and her husband.
• Mia talks about sorting out her children’s memorabilia and creating albums for class photos and achievement certificates.

• Dinah talks about sending out the invitation to her son’s birthday party via multiple channels and how this complicated managing the RSVP process.

Apps to make something with your digital photos:

• Social prints studio
• Pocket prints
• Picture postie
• Keepsake

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

Mia and Dinah explore how to find inspiration, get motivated and set goals to change your approach to life admin.

Mia and Dinah talk about the difference between motivation and insinspiration and potential sources of both. They discuss how you might approaches behaviour and habit change, which are required to address your life admin system.

They detail many different ways of setting goals and suggest that first its important to know how you are wired before choosing a method that will work for you. They outline options for goal setting including:

• SMARTER goals
• setting one personal goal
• the Desire Map
• one one word for the year.

Dinah shares how she got motivated to make a change by having Mia and this podcast as her accountability partner. Mia says she is very goal orientated and has embraced the ‘one word’ and Desire Map approaches.

   RESOURCES   

Motivation and Behaviour Change

Fogg Behaviour Change Model

Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg

Know Yourself

Gretchin Rubin’s, Four Tendency Quiz

 The Cycle of Years, Stratejoy

What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite, David Disalvo

Goal Setting

One word for the year

 One personal goal approach, Nicole Avery

The Desire Map, Danielle Laporte

Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg

   SHARE   

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

In this episode Dinah and Mia focus on how to help others declutter, and Mia interviews Jo and Kristen from Springtime Services, professional organisers in Melbourne.

Jo and Kristen describe how they support clients to declutter part or all of their homes. Their service draws on the advice of experts but they stress they avoid being prescriptive. Every client is different and their approach needs to be tailored for what will work for their clients.

Jo and Kristen find the biggest challenges for people to declutter are photos, children’s artwork and toys and gifts. They share the advice of Marie Kondo in respect to gifts: “Don’t keep gifts out of guilt. After the joy of the gift-giving moment is through, you can donate the gift without guilt. It has served its purpose.”

They talk about the particular challenges of decluttering when someone is downizing or moving to residential aged care and provide the following tips:

• Allow people to tell their stories about the items they are letting go of.
• Don’t let people handle their items too much as it can be more difficult to let them go.
• Find the right pace and time limit sessions as decision fatigue can set in after a few hours.

Their advice for listeners decluttering their own home is:

• Take items away immediately after sorting – don’t just move them to another part of the house.
• Getting started is the hardest part – it can feel overwhelming but the reward is worth it.

Dinah talks about the Spriggy pocket money app that she and her children use to make pocket money more convenient, educational and suitable to the way we handle money today.

• The Clutter Coach’s podcast Organize Your Life – iTunes or Stitcher

• Springtime Services
• Department of Sustainability – where to dispose of toxic chemicals in Victoria
• Return Unwanted medicines
• Recycling X-rays

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

Mia and Dinah talk about their own decluttering journeys and give listeners their top tips.

Mia and Dinah share their  family backgrounds and reflect how that often links to your approach to holding onto belongings. They talk about the process they have gone through for both:

• Reducing the inflow of stuff: being a better gatekeeper of what enters the house and buying less. 
• Working on the outflow of stuff: a work in progress for both of them.

   Dinah’s top 5 tips for decluttering are:   

• Get some quick wins by starting with an area of the house that is not sentimental and where your decluttering can have an immediate impact.
• Get buy-in from the rest of your family.
• Remember that giving things away gives joy to others and yourself.
• Embrace the 'cost per use' mentality and choose quality and long term use.
• Someday never comes. If you haven't used it recently you probably never will.

   Mia’s top 5 tips for decluttering are:   

• Make handing on items easier by having a dedicated space to put donations and dedicated recipients to pass things on to.
• Embrace the '1 in 1 out' rule not just for clothes but for most things in your house.
• Declutter as you play by going through your kids’ toys, books, stationery, crafts and clothes regularly when playing, reading or hanging out with them.
• Let go of obscure ingredients in your pantry and fridge that are unlikely to be used again.
• Store non-season clothes and shoes away from your wardrobe and take the opportunity to cull when you retrieve them.

   RESOURCES   

• Places to donate items: 
  • Australian charity store listing - Opshop.org
  • Toy Libraries Australia 
  • Reuse centres and trade & exchange programs - Planet Ark Recycling

   

• Places to sell preloved items: 
  • eBay
  • Gumtree
  • Facebook Marketplace
  • Australian auction house listings for luxury, fine design pieces, collectibles and antiques - ABC Auction Room

   

•  Straight and Curly podcast episode on decluttering

   SHARE   

Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.

Mia and Dinah talk about the mindset and philosophies of various decluttering experts.

This episode covers another foundation for establishing a robust Life Admin system: scheduling.

Mia and Dinah discuss how most people have no set time when they do their Life Admin tasks, which often means doing only the ‘urgent’ and not the ‘important’. The important tasks weigh on your mind, yet you never complete them. Mia and her partner refer to these tasks as ‘blockers’:  tasks you spend more time thinking about than they would actually take to do it.

They discuss how many of us have routines for our personal life but usually only schedule tasks and commitments at work. However, scheduling can be very useful for Life Admin. At its essence, scheduling embraces the idea that if it’s on the calendar it gets done.

They discuss three aspects of scheduling:

1. To Do List tasks. Tasks can be divided into three types: 
   • ‘Hour of Power’ - requiring a focused effort. They recommend scheduling in an Hour of Power to tackle challenging tasks.
   • ‘Two Minutes Too Easy’ - can be done as they arise.
   • ‘Ten Minute Time Killers’ - chunky tasks that can be done in idle time.

    

2. Inevitable tasks and activities - Tasks we know that will arise on a regular basis such as car servicing, hairdressing and dentist visits. Proactively schedule them in when it is convenient to you, rather than reacting to them.
3. Inspirational and fun activities - Make time for what you want more of like movie nights, mountain bike riding, trips away with friends, gardening, book club and date nights.

Scheduling is a natural extension of using the shared calendar and To Do lists tackled in previous episodes.

The benefits of scheduling include:

• making time to get the important, distracting tasks done so you no longer have to dwell on them
• forcing you to make choices about how to best spend your time
• helping make new habits stick.

 LIFE ADMIN HIGHS OF THE WEEK 

• Mia talks about having an ‘unsubscribe festival’ - taking the time to unsubscribe from regular e-newsletters to eliminate the noise in her inbox.
• Dinah talks about cleaning the lingering paperwork from the desk in her study which makes it a much more inviting place to work.

 LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK 

• Dinah talks about how she needed to renew her passport but she failed to get to the post office within the month required on the paperwork and so she now needs to redo it. Scheduling would’ve helped!
• Mia planned to start working on her digital photo backlog over the weekend but found the activity pairing strategy she employed didn’t work.

 BOOK REVIEW 

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown - book about evaluating  what is essential in your life to regain control of your choices and focus on things that really matter.

 RESOURCES 

The Fly Lady - free daily, weekly and monthly routines and coaching for house cleaning and organisation.