Tonight I sat down with my daughters at the dining room table preparing my heart to paint with my new watercolor set. I finally made the upgrade to watercolors in tube form instead of pre-made palette cubes. I got out two used palettes from the art table and realized that they had old paint in it from my daughter’s school and one new, completely blank palette that my husband planned to use. This posed an obstacle to my painting desires.
With the old palettes, they needed to be cleaned out to put new colors down. With my husband’s I had to choose which 20 colors I wanted to fill in the slots when I had 36 colors to choose from (including metallics!). In other words, I had to do the leg work of making decisions and preparing the palettes before I ever set down to do anything on the page.
Long story short, I never got around to doing anything other than adding some bronze highlights to something I had already painted because I was so tired from all the prep.
I saw this painting situation as a metaphor for administrative work. I had already spent hours earlier this morning working on contracts for tutors and getting dates lined up for events that aren’t even happening until close to the school year starting, but it involved salaries and per hour math, stipends, and the like so I had to make sure all the right names and amounts were listed on the documents. After the hours I spent glued to my computer, it felt like my summer with my girls was already dwindling away and it just started, though I knew logically there was still much free time to be had.
When you own your own business, administration is a part of the job even when you’d rather play or rest more. Intentionality is so much of what Maple Key does in every corner of the program and it shows through. A business doesn’t work if you show up and enable great things, but manage it poorly (Trust me, I have several doctor office stories to share on that front). So every year we try in small ways to work smarter, not harder. This year I am incorporating a task management component to doing work to keep me doing bite size chunks instead of being overwhelmed and communicate even better to others about what is expected in terms of deadlines.
Administration is hard to monetize. Most people don’t factor that in when considering the value of something. When my husband got his first job in the home office of an international missions organization, he said they never had enough donors willing to give to administration. Many sent gifts for a specific program they heard about overseas and demanded that 100% of it go to that country — the humdrum, behind-the-scenes work in an office building wasn’t compelling; however, the organization tried year after year to make people understand that the home office was vital to the organization’s health and existence.
This is the pep talk I must give myself –administration has a high, often unseen value — when I want to “have administered” instead of actually doing the “administrating”.
Maple Key Tutoring 