Make your personal admin tasks slightly more delightful by renaming them

by renaming them things that secretly please you. One a lot of people do is making their passwords something fun to type, and that's the right approach: something that makes you happy but is kept secret, so you can be unashamedly dorky.

- Most banks let you give custom names to your accounts. The intention is probably something like 'main', 'bills', 'savings' etc. Mine are Crystal Cavern, Prismatic Rays and The Vault. If you like any fandoms, this is pretty easy (Gringotts is an obvious one, Smaug's Hoard, etc - please do not let shame be an obstacle).

- Bookmark folders (I haven't done this! I'm looking and mine are just: books, ramen, edit, cat). Group chats, obviously.

- Rename your personal admin day. There are a LOT of words to refer to someone who manages a house and runs useful errands, and they're all more interesting than 'admin'. I like 'seneschal', so I have Seneschal Days, but there's also chamberlain, steward, butler, dapifer. A manciple organises the grocery shopping. Quartermaster? These are all old-timey Europe because that's what I like, but there'd be other cultural and scifi terms as well because it's such a universally necessary job.

- Any errand you do a lot and don't need to communicate to people (grocery run, Bunnings, processing invoices, cleaning) can be given a nickname without much cognitive load. Part of this is changing drudgery into LARPing, even though it's just for yourself.

- My partner gives all his appointments ridiculous names in gcalendar (most recently, helping me put an Ikea chair together was in his calendar as 'putting McKinley's arms on', mother's day is 'mothra's day' and rent due day is 'the landlord taketh away' - I'm not sure I could do this so much because I would forget what it was meant to refer to, which is why I'm only suggesting it for regular errands. But maybe you wouldn't forget and you can do this too.

I'm sure there are a million other places and examples you could do this - you get the general principle now anyway. If there's a thing that you have to interact with regularly and you can inject some delight into it, do it.

This piece was originally published in The Whippet #44 – subscribe to get the next one in your inbox!