When life admin takes over

When is the work supposed to get done?

Jul 22, 2026

In a few days time I go on holiday for a fortnight. As you will all know, when you’re self-employed, getting ready to go away is full of extra stress because you can’t just leave tasks to someone else. Articles need to be filed, loose ends tied up and to add to the fun this time, my first Making Tax Digital summary needs to be done.

I also have some parts of my work that need to continue to tick over while I’m away. Freelancing for Journalists is one, although Lily and I have been tag teaming on that and getting some help from some excellent student journalists. There’s also the Medical Journalists’ Association website that I provide copy for.

So you can imagine it has been a hectic time. Not a good time to have angered the admin gods, which is what I appear to have done inadvertently.

In the past few weeks I have been dealing with the aftermath of a skip lorry running into the back of our car (amazing amount of damage for barely any speed from a standing start), a broken laptop, a giant subscription fee that I DID NOT agree to coming out of my bank account (thanks Telegraph), an airfryer just outside its year warranty that stopped turning on, a parcel that lost half its contents before it even got to the UK, and did I mention the joy that is Making Tax Digital.

As a result of all this I am so far behind my actual work, I could weep.

It is currently 7am and I am at my desk wondering just how much work time I have lost to life admin faff recently. The car alone has been many hours. When I told one of my closest friends who I have known since school about the skip lorry, she replied immediately with ‘noooooo the admin 😱’. If you’re a women in your mid-40s with kids, who works for themselves (as we both do), this is the thing that fills us most with dread.

The long list of life admin problems above, is in addition to all the usual tasks I have to juggle alongside freelance life. With three kids at two schools who between them do five different sports all with different apps and WhatsApp groups, it’s a wonder I have any time to work at all.

We do divide everything pretty evenly in our house. Mr Emma does all the washing, does all holiday booking (thank god) and we both clean and cook as we go. But I have become the default admin person because working at home makes it easier for me to sort. This was the case even before kids came along. Yet I’m now wondering at what cost to my sanity.

I have friends who are doctors and teachers and I have no idea how they keep on top of this stuff. One of the reasons I would never go back to having a staff job is the flexibility I need in my life to manage all the different parts of it.

Buffer

Perhaps the past month has just been a bad run of things. To be fair, in all the examples above, the companies I have dealt with have, for the most part, done what they needed to. The car is being fixed and we have a replacement while we wait, the new airfryer was delivered at the weekend, the Apple store repaired my MacBook for free. Everyone is healthy, we have insurance, really these are all non-problems. If we ignore the fact that the holiday we have booked involves taking our car on a ferry to Spain.

Except in the three days before we leave, I have three news shifts and two features to get through. This isn’t bad planning on my part. I have been derailed. My time eaten up by unexpected forms, emails and phone calls. At least one of those features would have been long-finished by now if I hadn’t spent so long sorting the other things.

What I have realised is that the biggest drain on my time as a freelance often isn't the work, it's everything that happens around the work. Life maintenance is just part of life. However, I do need to experiment with ways to stop it taking over. I want to fit the admin around the work not the other way around.

One potential solution is having an admin hour (or three) once a week to go through everything. This may be fine for things like sorting out accounts and invoices, but when it comes to the other stuff, I don’t think it fits neatly into a box. Some issues (like when the skip lorry doesn’t notice the red light) need to be sorted straightaway.

I have been resisting this because it doesn’t really suit the way I work, but I think I need to get better at blocking out chunks of time to finish a task, like writing a feature, and not do anything else. Turn all other things off for a bit.

If I’m honest with myself, the real solution is to stop trying to run at 100% capacity, and build in some buffer for these inevitable issues that arise.

Maybe I’ll ponder this when I finally get to my holiday no doubt exhausted, with a to do list not quite done. This year, I have tried to keep Fridays fairly free but I am very behind on book writing so that plan is in the bin.

Whatever the solution, right now I’ve got to dash. I have to call the Telegraph and ask them why the hell they thought it was ok to take £239 out of my bank account with no warning, when I do not have an active subscription. Fun times.

Seed Talk: The Science of Women & Sport

On August 11th, Lily and I are giving a Seed Talk at The Blues Kitchen Brixton on The Science of Women & Sport.

Drawing on the two years of research we did for our award-winning book Ultra Women: The Trailblazers Defying Sexism in Sport, alongside interviews with more than 70 athletes, historians and scientists, we will share the science, history and stories behind women in endurance sport, and how we understand human performance.

Women have always been part of endurance sports, but their achievements have often been overlooked, dismissed or excluded from the record. We will discuss how as access and visibility improve, a clearer picture is emerging: not of sudden breakthroughs, but of longstanding strength, resilience and capability.

Find out more and book your spot below!

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