New Year, New Challenge - Tackling (S)ADministrative Process Debt

Happy New Year, Toby. We made it to another lap around the sun and our first New Year as a podcast. That counts as momentum. The question is what we do with it when the inbox is a hydra and every head replies all.

Coming back from the holidays, my email looked like a golden goose with questionable digestion. New treasures every hour. New emergencies too. I’ve also got a talent for sending messages that end mid sentence. Executives love that. It’s the perfect combo of urgency and confusion.

And then there’s the classic reply-all loop. Years ago a “to all” message turned into an Amish virus. Hundreds of well-meaning colleagues wrote “Please remove me from this list” to the list. I watched the scroll like it was the Super Bowl. Nobody meant harm. The process was simply missing guardrails, so the system did what humans do. It filled the time and space available.

Here’s the turn. Administrative work isn’t the villain. The debt comes from administrative work with no outcome. SADmin. Tasks that feel like folding laundry because “that’s how we do it” and then every shirt gets unfolded five minutes later. Motion without meaning.

So how do we turn SADmin into signal?

• First, make every recurring administrative action a ritual with a receipt. Not a calendar invite. A receipt. Prescriptive is the how. Ritual is the how often and what outcome confirms it worked. Repeatable is when the outcome becomes predictable. If your meeting, report, or update doesn’t generate a clear receipt, it’s not a ritual. It’s a vibe.

• Second, shrink the time box. If we give work an hour, it takes an hour. If we give it fifteen minutes with a one-line agenda and a one-line definition of done, it takes fifteen. Try this rule for January: cut default meeting lengths in half and add one sentence to every invite. “At the end we will decide X.” If you can’t write that sentence, cancel the meeting.

• Third, assign the work like a relay, not a group hug. Every task gets two names and only two. The assigner and the owner. The assigner explains the intent. The owner chooses the method and publishes the receipt. This alone erases the “Was that a comment or an action” fog that eats Tuesdays.

• Fourth, draft fast. Perfect later. Admin debt swells inside drafts that never ship. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I’ll polish a deck until it becomes marble and then I resent feedback because someone wants it in steel. This year I’m shipping draft one to the community sooner. Edits beat assumptions. A rough public draft beats a perfect private shrine.

Finally, give work a home people can actually find. If the “home” is SharePoint folder number seventeen or an orphaned Confluence page, you’ve built a museum, not a workflow. Pick one surface for working artifacts. Name it like a human. Link to it from the meeting invite and the task. Make the receipt live there.

Try this one-week challenge:

• Cut three meetings to fifteen minutes and add a one-line definition of done.

• Add “Assigner” and “Owner” fields to your task tool and require both.

• For any recurring report, add a final line that states the decision it informed. If no decision, kill the report.

• Publish one imperfect draft by noon and invite feedback in the same thread.

New Year energy is precious. Spend it where receipts happen.

Process Debt Truth: Admin is only debt when it doesn’t change a decision. Turn it into a ritual with a receipt and you turn cost into clarity.