Hack your life better - with Dinah Rowe-Roberts of Life Admin Life Hacks

It's not you. Life is truly more complicated these days. Dinah Rowe-Robert is the co-host of the Life Admin Life Hacks Podcast and is now also co-author of the Life Admin Life Hacks Book with her friend and business partner, Mia Northrop. Dinah and Mia started a thriving business by simply trading life admin hack tips on a podcast, to which they fondly refer to as the business of life. 

Can you please share your pitch with us?

“Well, Life Admin Life Hacks provides techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently to save you time, money, and improve your household harmony. So back in 2018, my old friend Mia and I, were having a girls weekend away with some other old high school friends, and after a few drinks, you know how it goes.

We landed on the topic of life admin and universally it was out of control. Mia and I dug deeper. We’re both super organised; we were excelling in our professional lives, but we found ourselves drowning in the mental load, while our partner seemed completely oblivious. We decided then and there to put our professional expertise to work to solve the problem.

I have an accounting and operations background and Mia’s in digital and user experience, so we developed a life admin framework. So you know where you should focus based on what is important to you. We've identified the key tools and processes you need to transform your life admin into managed order and share the mental load.”

What quality do you attribute your success to?

“Firstly, the problem; it's actually a real problem, and it's a problem for lots of people. So I think the first one is when trying to come up with a business idea, make sure you're actually solving a problem or a pain point in people's lives. Secondly, we actually came up with practical solutions. There’s so many people who write and talk about the mental load, but no one really talks about solutions. When we started researching the problem, we found there are loads of books that talk about the mental load, but no one really offers those practical solutions that you can implement to actually improve things for the better.”

How would you describe your relationship to risk as a business partnership?

“One of the things we did very early on was we incorporated ourselves. That really put some structure around the business, including quarterly meeting processes. It obviously has some legal benefits as well, and we put in place a shareholder agreement. 

Once a quarter we get together to talk about what we've worked on, what's worked well, what our plans are for the future, and those sorts of things are really important. What we're both really passionate about is that time has a value and so we really value each other's respective times. 

It's really about protecting our time as well, so we've made the decision at the moment to still keep our paid work. We're not putting all our eggs into the basket. What we are willing to do is pay to outsource some of the things that we don't have time to do, so that our business can continue to have momentum. I think all of those things play into risk from my perspective.”

What do you seek networking for, and what's the most effective way for you to meet that need digitally?

“Networking for us has been mostly about learning. It's been about leveraging experts to help us define our life admin system, and to continue to refine that and to be able to share their expertise with our audience. I think the things that have been most useful for us have been networking groups like Mums & Co and One Roof and our LinkedIn networks.”

Want to know more about how Dinah Rowe-Roberts has ways to save you time and money by streamlining your life admin?

Do you feel like you’re responsible for keeping your entire household running? Are you looking for ways to involve your family more in life admin, but aren’t sure where to start? How often do you feel like there’s so much to do, yet not enough hours in the day?

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