Ain't No Party Like an Administrative Burden Party

You are cordially invited to Admin Night - bring your paperwork

One reason we study administrative burdens is because we are terrible at managing them—and we knew that we weren’t alone. We pay medical bills—which should be covered by our exorbitant health insurance premiums every month—because we just can’t bring ourselves to manage the endless calls and letters that will be required to get them covered. We pay overnight FedEx to send the health forms to camp by the deadline (OK, that’s actually Pam) because it’s just too much.

That’s why we were struck by the brilliance of Chris Colin’s idea of Admin Night: he has turned the dread of administrative task completion into a social event. You can read the full article in the Wall Street Journal here and we quote it liberally below.

Chris is a writer. Last year he interviewed us for an article in The Atlantic on the rise of administrative burdens. So now, we turned the tables and Don interviewed Chris.

From the article:

Six years ago, after watching my circle of friends surrender one too many evenings to insurance wrangling and doctor portals and DMV confusion, I emailed them a proposal: Come over next Tuesday. Grab a six pack. And bring your bills, your credit-card statements, your school forms, the streaming services you need to unsubscribe from, the airline miles you need to manage, the expenses app you need to figure out. I’d be throwing the lamest party ever.

At the heart of this party was a truth that has gone under-acknowledged in recent years: We’re all sinking. We’re sinking into a quicksand of tiny, dumb administrative tasks. It is the most tedious quicksand imaginable.

Don: You talked in your post about reaching out to friends to set up the Admin Party. Could you say more about what motivated you? Did your friends find it weird? Or did it immediately click?

Chris: It started when I noticed a new genre of busyness in my circle of friends. More and more, we were staying home at night instead of hanging out – not because of work, or family obligations, but this new form of time suck: personal admin. Obviously there were always bills to pay, taxes to do, etc – but the load was now so much bigger.

The funny thing is, my friends didn’t find this idea remotely weird. It clicked instantly, with the satisfaction of naming a problem that hadn’t really been remarked upon. They arrived on the appointed evening and we shot the breeze a while, then put our heads down for 30 minutes of TCB, as Elvis would’ve called it – taking care of business. Then more gabbing, then more TCB, and so on.

I like a dancing-on-the-table, lampshade-on-your-head party as much as the next person. But in a weird way, I swear, this nerdy one was equally delightful. At the end of the night we all agreed immediately to do it again soon, and we did. Been doing it ever since, for six years. I’ve got a waitlist, if you can believe that.

Again, from the article:

Tasks once accomplished with a quick phone call now require logging into a new website, which requires remembering yet another password. Disputing a charge means arguing with a chipper chatbot, or submitting to an hour of brain-melting hold music—call volume higher than expected!—only to be disconnected.

These obligations have swollen beyond petty annoyance into their own distinct sphere of activity, neither work nor not-work. Meanwhile, our days still revolve around those two primary modes. In that disconnect has blossomed a growing depletion, with social and civic and familial costs I don’t believe we’ve reckoned with…Looking at the proliferation of do-it-yourself online tasks, the software company Liferay calculated this year that 82% of adults in the U.S. find themselves doing work once handled by an employee.

Don: One strong sense we get from the piece is that technology, and AI in particular, are not actually making our lives easier. We were promised the Jetsons and we are getting a tech administrative dystopia. Can you comment on that and say why you think that is?

Chris: So much “smart” tech makes things easier for companies, not for me and you. AI can land a rocket on a cocktail napkin, but it can’t conduct a simple, rational conversation about went wrong with my insurance claim. Know who can? Humans! But we’re getting edged out of those equations, and in the process those of us with the insurance claims are tacitly accepting a level of defeat. In the end, that might be the wildest thing AI accomplishes.

I don’t think there’s a lack of capability here, by the way. I think there’s a lack of incentive. It was during the pandemic that companies really began experimenting with AI customer service. In survey after survey, we all reported that we hated it. What the companies heard was: We tolerated it.

Don: You emphasize the sense that this is deliberate: that corporations have moved from service to self-service. Why?

Chris: We all have those moments where the call gets disconnected yet again, or the hold time is longer than usual, etc., and we wonder “Are they doing this on purpose?” What I found in my reporting is yes, often times they absolutely are.

Corporate consolidation, shareholder demands, the pivot to the subscription model, the digitization of everything, the hollowing out of regulatory agencies – for these reasons and others, consumers have been left more and more on their own in this landscape with less and less recourse.

One of the more interesting explanations, to my mind: As average CEO tenure gets shorter these days, those CEOs grow more focused on satisfying their boards and their shareholders than their customer base. Growth, in other words, becomes more of a priority than taking care of existing customers; that’s where the quick money lives. We all experience that daily. You can sign up for a new service or product with a single click. Getting help once you’ve already done so? You need to clear your entire schedule and get a PhD in Chatbot Relations.

Don: I am especially interested in why you think being in a group environment makes completing these tasks easier.

Chris: We’re social beings. We’re meant to update our password apps together!

At a basic level, tedious tasks suck less when friends and snacks and drinks are present. At a more interesting level, I think those tasks are depressing. Sure, we can handle a few now and then. But the preponderance of them starts to take a psychic toll, starts to chip away at our souls. We’re not on this planet all that long! Watching ourselves spend hour after hour just dealing with this basic, mundane crud – all so we can log back into our bill pay portal, or whatever – depletes us at an existential level. I do believe that.

The group environment doesn’t fix the problem. But it daylights it. That alone feels healthy and refreshing: It’s not just me! This shit is driving other people nuts, too! That recognition seems to light a fire under us, and it pushes back against that psychic toll.

But soon it became clear something larger was happening—a kind of awakening. Between sessions, conversation inevitably turns to how things got this way: the fracturing of the consumer landscape, the rise of the subscription model, the corporate pivot from “service” to “self-service.”

Admin Night is refreshingly bipartisan in this polarized era—turns out nobody likes that chipper chatbot. And we all agree that the institutions—unions, regulators, community groups—that once shielded us from bureaucratic load and consumer abuse have lost the ability to do so. So, within our patch of common ground, all kinds of civic muscles start twitching again.

What would a society look like if it valued our time as much as our data? If we can organize our inboxes together, what else might we organize—a food drive, a boycott, a march? And how can the work of Admin Night be more evenly distributed? (Maria’s endless effort to secure care for her mother is galling in its own right; it is unconscionable in what it implies for those without the time or resources to fight like this for their mothers.)

Don: You also hint that being in this group environment makes people more aware of the hassles they face, and that it is not just their own inability to solve problems. Has Admin night radicalized you and your friends against administrative burdens?

Chris: Admin Night isn’t just a fun productivity hack. The deeper appeal, I think, is the feeling that we’re finally taking aim, albeit in a teeny tiny way, at the modern state of overwhelm. In the process of doing that, I believe we’re starting to look more closely at the forces responsible for that overwhelm.

Not only do we look more closely at what’s causing these administrative burdens, we look at their impact and distribution. For example: As galling as it is to spend all these hours on these hassles, it’s also a privilege. So many people don’t have the free time or the resources or the cultural training or the sheer language skills to fight these ridiculous battles. They often just have to accept defeat, accept that bogus charge, accept that they’re not going to get the benefit they’re entitled to, accept that the refund is too onerous to get. I call that the state of Fuck It. Fuck it, I’ll just pay the fee. Fuck it, I’ll just eat the penalty.

Anyway, if you eat enough hummus on enough Tuesday nights while entering enough CAPTCHA text, you can’t help but wake up a bit to what these ordeals are doing to us. Wake up and get agitated and, I hope. My fantasy is that people start throwing Admin Nights on every block, regardless of political orientation. Not only will we be less lonely and isolated as a society, but we’ll be having more conversations about what else we can tackle after our administrative burdens – a food bank, a boycott, a campaign, etc.

When we finally solve everything, we’ll have more time for good old-fashioned non-admin parties -- dancing on tables and lampshades on our heads, that kind of thing.

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So that is the interview. Some additional thoughts.

Individual burdens feel easier in a collective setting

When we started writing about administrative burdens we purposely emphasized it as individual’s experience. But a collective context changes the nature of that experience, making it less daunting, and allowing the individual to tap into a broader social network. That social network we turn to for help is often existing family and friends who have more expertise or connection with administrative tasks. With Admin Night, a single-purpose social network is created to solve the problems in our lives. As Chris wrote:

Right away we marveled at how productive we were. Having friends hammer away beside you, faces lighted by the same bureaucratic glow, somehow makes dreaded tasks manageable. Little projects postponed for years—closing a checking account, updating a will—become approachable when you’ve got a squad. We even start sharing wisdom: how to roll over a 401(k), how to get that refund. (Guessing a CEO’s email address, we’ve found, can be surprisingly effective.)

Lets think about the intersection of isolation and technology. As you enjoy Thanksgiving with family this week you will at some point look around and see people’s attention is passively engaged on their devices and away from the people they have traveled to see. If there is an epidemic of loneliness, it is not just about the absence of people but some need for collective purpose and engagement to pull them away from their phones.

One reason that the Zohran Mamdani campaign worked in New York is because it offered people a chance to engage with one another. At one point, Mamdani told supporters to stop sending him money to but to lend them their time instead. He organized scavenger hunts so they could hang out and have fun. We are so used to being treated as the target of fundraising or persuasion appeals that being asked to be a participant in a social event that feels meaningful is empowering.

Admin Night offers something similar. We know the administrative tasks in our lives have to be completed: there is the purpose. But it is so much easier to do it with others: there is the fun. Task achievement is intrinsically satisfying, especially when it is something you have been dreading. It is even more satisfying in the context of friends facing the same demands.

Burdens are for the middle class too

A lot of our research has emphasized the unequal distribution of burdens. People with less resources often face more burdens because they have to endure more demanding means-tested safety net programs. While that is true, it’s also the case that the middle and upper middle class are awash in paperwork. If America is a country full of comparatively rich people, it is also a country that treats the time of those people as having little value.

Health care is a huge source of this burden: we spend not just more money on health care than people in other countries, but more time because we are our own health care administrators in a devilishly complex system. See, for example, Miranda Yaver’s work on coverage denials, which illustrates that even people with “good” insurance are one pitched paperwork battle away from a ruinous bill.

Administrative burdens are a feature of our experiences with private companies

We study public policy and so our interest is in administrative burdens people encounter with public services. Of course, many public services are delivered via private sector organizations (see, e.g. much of our health care system). Purely private services have their own fair share of hassles, often because it is profitable to make it hard for you to leave a service (e.g. magazine subscriptions), or to make it difficult to find the lowest cost option (e.g. tax reporting services). In this context, burdens feel extractive: they demand either your time, your money, or both.

In Admin Night, public and private frictions intermingle. There is no sense that burdens are just limited to public services. Plenty of burdens come from private sector tasks. That does not mean the government cannot do anything about them. At the end of the Biden administration, Biden and Kamala Harris laid out a vision of private sector burden reduction through regulation. We wrote about it here:

As we noted, the White House at the time laid out a logic for regulating burdens, noting the ways they could be weaponized:

These hassles don’t just happen by accident. Companies often deliberately design their business processes to be time-consuming or otherwise burdensome for consumers, in order to deter them from getting a rebate or refund they are due or canceling a subscription or membership they no longer want—all with the goal of maximizing profits.

That regulatory agenda is largely dead. The nominally populist Trump regime has allowed private companies to raise the time tax imposed on the public. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would have been a key player in private sector burden reduction. It has been told to stop work while the Trump administration plans it’s demise. Specific initiatives like compensating travelers for delays have been reversed.

A politics of burden reduction?

The paradox of the politics of burden reduction is that everyone has a story about the misery of a burdensome encounter, but we don’t treat this as a problem to be solved via collective action. We do not give credit to politicians who commit to making things work better. As long there is little political return in solving people’s problems, and it is costly to do so, we can’t expect politicians to make this a priority.

Part of what is profound about the idea of Admin Night is that it taps into the idea of what an organic and bottom-up politics of burden reduction might look like. People get together to talk through their hassles in a way that makes plain those burdens are constructed and could be reduced. As Colin wrote:

…Admin Night won’t restore all our stolen hours. (When I first christened it, I told myself I’d come up with a cleverer name once I had free time. I’m still waiting.) It also won’t solve things at a structural level. But it wakes us up to the need for those solutions, and it turns our private drudgery into communal solidarity and gives us back the only commodity that ever really mattered: our time.

Colin notes that Admin Night is bipartisan: surely we can all agree our time has value, and that we should resist it being taken from us. He quotes Lina Khan: “People increasingly feel like they have to gear up for battle just to go about the most mundane day-to-day transactions.” Who could disagree? Khan was the head of the Federal Trade Commission under Biden, and the perceived enemy of the tech community. She is now advising Mamdani on his transition to becoming New York Mayor.

We have more tech in our lives, but has it made our lives simpler or easier? The fact that human beings are organizing in-person parties to solve basic administrative tasks surely tells us that tech has failed us. It often feels like tech is weaponized against us, serving as a means of extraction rather than giving us real autonomy in choice and freeing our time from mundane crap. Maybe AI will change all of this, or worsen the existing pattern. We might ask why tech leaders need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to curry political influence, but someone like Khan strikes a chord simply by reminding us that we should not be spending our lives fighting administrative battles, increasingly in either poorly designed or deliberately booby-trapped digital spaces.

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Lets see the trend of Admin Night go viral! Please report back if you organize your own parties. And yes, we are available to make personal appearances!