You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Chris Arnold in from Marielle Seguera.
And I'm sorry to bring this up, but it's true.
It's tax season.
Have you done your taxes yet?
And I know this is, like, the last thing that you want to do right now.
And besides, we've already got a lot of stuff on our plates.
There's.
There's paying bills.
There's dealing with, like, your health insurance company.
Why are they asking me to pay this thing that I think they should be paying?
It almost feels like adult homework, but homework that nobody really talks about.
It really is striking how it's invisible.
We don't generally see it as labor.
That's Elizabeth Emmons.
She's a Columbia law professor, and she wrote a whole book on this concept, which she calls life Admin.
Here's her definition.
Life admin is all the invisible office work that steals our time.
It's the kind of work that managers and secretaries get paid in an office to do, but that we all do invisibly and for free in our own lives.