{"id":594,"date":"2026-06-20T10:37:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T10:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=594"},"modified":"2026-06-20T10:37:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T10:37:28","slug":"misery-loves-company-if-there-are-snacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"Misery Loves Company\u2014If There Are Snacks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cBring your laptop and all the boring tasks you\u2019ve been avoiding. Cancel subscriptions, book appointments, clear your inbox, sort bills. Way less painful when you\u2019re not doing it alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Growing Up with Juneteenth<\/a><\/p>\n

The invitation, posted on Meetup, was intriguing, though not entirely persuasive\u2014it felt like being invited to a get-together to floss your teeth. The event was held on a chilly Sunday, from 2 to 7 P.M.<\/em>, in Dumbo, Brooklyn. I came with my to-do list (abridged, annotated, and redacted):<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

1. e-mail SS, SP, KK, JD, R<\/p>\n

2. notarize comptroller form<\/p>\n

3. return spray bottle buy other spray bottle<\/p>\n

4. Lithgow tix<\/p>\n

5. unsubscribe \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2019s Substack<\/p>\n

6. memorize S Amer [project to memorize world map, one continent at a time; not yet begun<\/em>]<\/p>\n

7. smell yogurt<\/p>\n

8. tell \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588 not to tell \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588 about \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588<\/p>\n

9. smoke detector!<\/p>\n

10. turn off airplane mode<\/p>\n

11. consolidate to-do lists<\/p>\n

12. I prefer UPS less salty [don\u2019t know what this means<\/em>]<\/p>\n

13. write will [on list for eighteen years; maybe it\u2019s keeping me alive<\/em>]<\/p>\n

14. write to-do piece!<\/p>\n

Each of us has about a hundred and fifty tasks to deal with on any given day. So say the psychologist Roy\u00a0F. Baumeister and the journalist John Tierney, who have co-written a book titled \u201cWillpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.\u201d But not all hundred and fifty make it onto our to-do lists, Tierney\u2014whose to-do list includes a yearly reminder to celebrate Pi Day\u2014told me in an e-mail.<\/p>\n

Lists promise containment. Thank God for Smithsonian<\/em> magazine\u2019s \u201cFive Volcanoes to Watch\u201d list\u2014just when you were overwhelmed from worrying about all the volcanoes you needed to monitor. In a 2008 survey by the market-research company Kelton Global, seventy-three per cent of Americans said that they found keeping a to-do list \u201ccalming.\u201d O.K., but is it an effective way to get things done or merely a storage unit of guilt? Consider these numbers from the productivity company iDoneThis: forty-one per cent of items on to-do lists are never crossed off, and only fifteen per cent of completed tasks were ever on a to-do list.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Yes, you could hire an assistant to assist you, but then you\u2019d have a hundred and fifty-one tasks. You could also leave the unwashed dishes stacked in the sink, let the bank foreclose on your house, and tell the dog to walk itself. Or you could do what a growing number of people are doing these days, especially, it seems, Gen Z-ers and millennials: meet up with other chore-beleaguered types as you each grapple with your respective to-do list. Misery loves company\u2014if there are snacks.<\/p>\n

These gatherings, like the one in Dumbo, are commonly called Admin Nights, a term coined, in 2019, by the journalist Chris Colin, who began hosting such events for his friends at his house in San Francisco. \u201cWe were all lonesome and all overwhelmed, and I saw a connection,\u201d Colin told me. \u201cI realized there\u2019s this new category of busyness. Not work busyness, not domestic-life busyness, but this third thing. This busyness is so dumb and banal that we don\u2019t really talk about it. It\u2019s the way you\u2019ve been meaning to reconnect your Bluetooth speakers for two months, but you can\u2019t figure that out till you conquer higher-tier items\u2014bank stuff, doctor stuff, phone stuff, car stuff, school stuff, D.M.V. stuff, other stuff\u2014and those require insane hold times, or eye-stabbing chatbot conversations. I felt that if we could tackle this deranged administrative sprawl together, we would hang out more.\u201d (If you have time to read this, you probably don\u2019t need an Admin Night.) Colin also had a political agenda. \u201cI wanted to shine my light on what\u2019s happening\u2014that life has become unsustainable,\u201d he said, \u201cand have people talk about why this is happening and who profits.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past few years, Admin Nights have been proliferating, sometimes christened with new names that try to jazz up drudgery: Get Shit Done Days, Motivation Madness, and Death, Documents, & Donuts. (Purpose of that one: getting one\u2019s \u201caffairs in order.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Are these Admin Night-like gatherings as productive as attendees claim? (\u201cI answered my aunt\u2019s text I\u2019d been avoiding for weeks!\u201d \u201cI created a list of \u2018Valentine\u2019s Day Gifts Your Boyfriend Would Get You If He Hates You\u2019 for my TikTok feed and wrote a screenplay!\u201d \u201cI filled out Form 86B!\u201d) To find out, I sampled a bunch.<\/p>\n

Ten millennial moms sat around the kitchen island of a town house in Carroll Gardens, eating crudit\u00e9s, nachos, and popcorn. They\u2019d brought their chores: medical bills to be paid, shopping lists (one woman\u2019s son had just told her he was supposed to wear a purple shirt to school), and children\u2019s birthday parties to be planned, including one for a six-year-old girl who\u2019d requested that the theme be a combination of rock climbing and American Girl dolls. One woman intended to use the time to order electrolytes online, another was seeking earring backs, and a third needed to find a male babysitter, as well as a summer swim program, for a four-and-a-half-year-old who is afraid of the water. (What luck! Someone had a lead on a manny.) There was discussion about the price of helium-filled party balloons (four-fifty each). Only one man was present. He\u2019d come with his wife on a fact-checking mission: \u201cThe idea of a party where you\u2019d actually bring health-care forms sounded so absurd. I thought she was joking.\u201d The night was organized by Laura Cunningham, a co-founder of a startup called Ava, a name that focus groups found evoked \u201chappy, useful emotions.\u201d Ava\u2019s mission, Cunningham said, is to \u201ctackle the mental load of motherhood.\u201d Besides sponsoring free \u201ccommunity building\u201d events such as this Family Admin Party, the group was developing an A.I.-enabled app that will fill out forms, schedule medical appointments, and handle other administrivia that we\u2019d rather avoid. For many of the attendees, the ninety minutes in Carroll Gardens was also a rare opportunity to see friends. \u201cIt\u2019s so hard to schedule a social dinner, but this doesn\u2019t seem frivolous,\u201d one woman with perfect teeth said. \u201cI can justify it. While I\u2019m being productive, I can have wine and decompress.\u201d She divided her admin time between finding female-founded ventures to invest in and looking for programs to enroll her kids in \u201cduring the one-day school break that comes annoyingly a week before the long school break.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn evening was raucous compared with the San Francisco Community Nights\u2019 Zoom session I attended next, which was like the quiet car of Admin Nights. For most of the online session, Geo Morjane, a director at the software company Kaseya, and a woman named Natasha sat in companionable silence in their Zoom squares, parallel-playing like an old married couple, as I scribbled notes. Natasha spent the two hours trying to switch her QuickBooks account from annual to monthly billing, while Morjane worked on his taxes and edited a podcast. Toward the end of the evening, they compared tax-filing systems and discussed C.S.V. files\u2014text-based files with comma-separated values. (Do you want to know more? I thought so.) When I asked Natasha if I could schedule an interview with her to talk about why she liked the concept of Admin Nights, she declined, saying, \u201cI came here to get things done, not to add things to my to-do list.\u201d I might as well have brought a boom box to a Quaker meeting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If a study hall had a soundtrack, it would be Focus Lab. At this co-working session, held in the back lounge of FourFiveSix, a groovy Williamsburg restaurant that could be the set of a Brooklyn-based sitcom, Akshay Bhasin blended synthesizers and ambient noise to create live music. Attendees could listen to these \u201csound journeys\u201d (his term) through headphones, available free of charge to anyone who signed up. (Sessions have a sliding-scale cost of around fifteen dollars.) Periodically, Bhasin interrupted the sounds of birds, rain, and jungle life to offer encouraging words to his audience\u2014a small group, nestled on mismatched sofas and chairs, and a couple who\u2019d wandered in for some soup. \u201cMaybe let\u2019s just do a quick little check-in with ourselves,\u201d he murmured after thirty minutes. \u201cAre we still working on what we want to be working on?\u201d Rachel Lee, a twenty-six-year-old community organizer and artist, was working on job applications, a task that was higher up on her to-do list than drawing the family dog for a poster that her mother plans to hang in the family bathroom. (Caption: \u201cWelcome to the bathroom. A dog will be with you shortly.\u201d) Daniel Gomez-Seidel, a thirty-eight-year-old self-described freelance \u201cpost-disciplinary strategist\u201d who keeps bilingual to-do lists, was preparing material for a media aggregator that he is creating aimed at the Latin American diaspora. He has not missed one of the four Focus Labs held to date. \u201cKnowing my friend Julia\u2019s over there gives me the serotonin of belonging without us having to interact,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

Before there were Admin Nights, there was body doubling, a productivity technique that keeps you focussed and motivated by having another person close at hand. The term was coined in 1996 by Linda Anderson, an A.D.H.D. coach, and inspired by the experience of one of her clients. In an article Anderson wrote at the time, she said that the client had told her, \u201cYou know, it seems that, sometimes, if I just have my wife sitting in a chair nearby, I can accomplish more than if I\u2019m alone.\u201d The idea has caught on. One woman on a Reddit forum about A.D.H.D. said that she asks her work-from-home husband to bring his laptop into whatever space she\u2019s organizing. Once, he fell asleep in a closet.<\/p>\n

Why does body doubling work? Anderson offered a few explanations, among them: the body double functions as an \u201cimproved mirror\u201d reflecting a less anxious version of the self; the distracted person may feel obligated not to waste the body double\u2019s time; and, borrowing from Eastern philosophy, the body double \u201ccontains the flux of energy and thought in the A.D.H.D. brain at risk of spilling out into the chaotic universe.\u201d Or take your pick from other theories: dopamine surge, the audience effect, polyvagal calm. Let\u2019s go with \u201cthey don\u2019t know,\u201d shall we?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Before there was body doubling, there were quilting bees, Trappist monasteries, and, presumably, colonoscopy-prep parties.<\/p>\n

And, before there were those things, there was Leonardo da Vinci, who left behind notebooks full of notes to self: \u201cDescribe the tongue of a woodpecker\u201d; \u201cCalculate the measurement of Milan and suburbs\u201d; \u201cGet the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.\u201d Michelangelo\u2019s to-do lists, on the other hand, were really get-the-servant-to-do lists. And, because the servant could not read, the artist illustrated the lists. For instance, a grocery-shopping list consisted of a sketch of stewed fennel, four anchovies, and other must-haves.<\/p>\n

At twenty, Benjamin Franklin set out on a \u201cbold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,\u201d striving to attain one virtue a week for thirteen weeks. He ultimately failed; humility was virtue No. 13 (\u201cImitate Jesus and Socrates\u201d). A list that Thomas Edison made titled \u201cThings Doing and to Be Done\u201d totalled a hundred and eight items, among them \u201cInk for blind\u201d and \u201cButter direct from milk.\u201d One of John Lennon\u2019s to-do lists included a desire to purchase \u201cSwedish bran bread,\u201d a request that his assistant \u201ccheck my hair dryer for cancer,\u201d a reminder about Yoko\u2019s dentist appointment, and \u201cshave your legs for the U.N. \u2018Year of the Child.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Is Vladimir Putin Finally Feeling Pressure?<\/a><\/p>\n

Of the Admin Nights that I sat in on, here in 2026, the ones that felt least like excuses to hang out were the three at which most of the attendees were neurodivergent. All three were over Zoom, and all were tightly structured. Meredith Schultz has been captaining virtual \u201cBody Doubling Sessions\u201d every weekday morning, from eight to nine, for the past four years. \u201cI do it because I need it,\u201d Schultz told me, from Denver, explaining that although she\u2019d been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. only a few years ago, her mother had figured it out early on. \u201cIf she sent me to my room to clean it, I\u2019d make it worse,\u201d Schultz recalled. \u201cBut, if she lay on my bed reading her trashy romance novels, I\u2019d dutifully clean everything up.\u201d Of her own Zoom sessions, she said, \u201cI would never be in my chair at 8 A.M.<\/em> if I didn\u2019t have twenty-five people waiting for me.\u201d (The Weight Watchers effect?)<\/p>\n

One morning several weeks ago, I shared the gallery view with, among others, Janine, who wanted to use the session to request death certificates for her grandparents; Jeremy, who needed to research out-of-body experiences and eat lunch; and Charon, whose first task was to put on her socks so that she\u2019d remember to put on her shoes so that her back wouldn\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to stay onscreen, on mute, in focussed attention together,\u201d Schultz said, with a smile that seemed permanent. \u201cI will stop us midway through for that mandatory two-minute break, and we will meet up at the end.\u201d Schultz set a timer for twenty-five minutes. This kind of interval training for accomplishing whatever you\u2019re avoiding derives from the Pomodoro Technique, from the late nineteen-eighties, which was developed by Francesco Cirillo, a university student who named it after the red tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used. During the session, I set about doing my taxes, which required me to sit on the floor and sort my big jumble of papers into smaller jumbles of papers. When I returned to my computer, there was a stern note to me in the chat from Schultz: \u201cHi Patty! Staying on screen is part of the social contract! Message me when you\u2019re back :)\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Cameras were optional at the next two sessions I attended, the Procrastinatables Productivity Party, led by Tracey Young in Essex Junction, Vermont, and the Get Stuff Done Party, run by Christie Flora in Melbourne, Australia. But most participants chose to keep their cameras on. At both meetups, there was a preponderance of tidying\u2014children\u2019s rooms, offices, spare rooms, digital photo libraries, inboxes. \u201cPeople do tend to suddenly feel the urge to clean up their cat boxes when someone else is around,\u201d Young told me. But one man at Get Stuff Done devoted two hours to painting a miniature Warhammer action figure, not even stopping during the break. \u201cKyle\u2019s still got his head down working on his Warhammer piece. Looking good!\u201d Flora said, as if she were an announcer at a sporting event.<\/p>\n

Flora noted that, during a previous session, one woman had painted a room in her house. \u201cThings aren\u2019t as scary as we think they will be,\u201d Flora told her group, reassuringly.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes they are,\u201d an attendee named Terri replied. She\u2019d been going through a backlog of e-mails.<\/p>\n

The idea that people work better when other people are around is called social facilitation. As early as 1898, the American psychologist Norman Triplett observed that children working in pairs wound fishing reels faster than children working alone. If you\u2019d rather ignore and be ignored by just one person, instead of by a group, the video-based platform Focusmate will match you with someone somewhere in the world so that the two of you can work together online on mute. (Three free sessions a week; after that, it\u2019s eight to twelve dollars a month.) Could it be that George Orwell was too gloomy about Big Brother?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know how people get that groove between their eyebrows when they\u2019re stressed out?\u201d Young asked. \u201cWhen the hour is over, you can see the relief on their faces. I call that the Botox of completion.\u201d The converse\u2014that we remember and are tormented by unfinished tasks more than finished ones\u2014is also true. It\u2019s called the Zeigarnik effect, first studied by the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik in 1927, after her professor observed that waiters remembered the details of unpaid orders but forgot orders whose bills had been settled. One recent theory posits that uncompleted tasks live on in our short-term memory, where they linger and kvetch.<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t make a dent in your to-do list, it\u2019s not you, it\u2019s the list\u2014or so say time-management experts. To-do lists, they argue, are too long and not prioritized, so you knock off the trivial tasks and leave behind the more important but complicated projects. What\u2019s the fix? (1) Break down formidable tasks into smaller, concrete steps. (Example: rather than putting \u201cInvade Iran\u201d on your to-do list, begin with the more feasible \u201cNotify allies.\u201d) (2) Set a fixed time in your calendar to do a particular task (\u201c1:00\u20131:10 P.M.<\/em>: Learn Mandarin\u201d). (3) Accomplish one big task, three medium tasks, and five little tasks each day (\u201cThe 1-3-5 Rule\u201d). (4) Narrate your efforts as if you were on a cooking show. (\u201cO.K., let\u2019s rinse the mug\u2014excellent technique!\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cA lot of what\u2019s getting covered in the press are these large Admin Nights where adults pay bills, call credit-card companies, and sort out insurance,\u201d said Carolyn Lanford, then a senior at Columbia University who has since graduated and who, with a handful of her classmates, has been meeting monthly at bars or in dorm rooms for the past year, in order to \u201cwrestle with the minutiae of being an almost adult.\u201d She typically uses the time to fill out job applications, though something else always comes up. \u201cStudents nowadays are inundated with e-mails ranging from somebody offering you a five-per-cent student discount to contracts relating to your scholarship that ask you to promise you won\u2019t get expelled,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

On a Friday afternoon a few months ago, I audited one of Lanford\u2019s meetups, at the Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor, near campus (plant-based comfort food, exposed brick, Wi-Fi password: tipthebartender). Also in attendance were two students, Liam Downey and Rocky Rub. This would not be an ordinary meetup because, besides sundry individual tasks, the three had important business to accomplish together\u2014namely, chartering a day-boat cruise in Puerto Rico for spring break.<\/p>\n

From my notes:<\/p>\n

1. boat booked, helmed by Christian<\/p>\n

2. reviews of Christian read aloud (Rub: \u201c\u00a0\u2018Christian is a local water enthusiast.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Lanford: \u201cOh, my God, me, too!\u201d)<\/p>\n

3. debate: are sand dollars alive? (yes). does drinking while afloat increase drunkenness by 50%? (unclear)<\/p>\n

4. individual projects: Lanford, paralegal job applications; Rub, edit piece he\u2019s writing for the Blue and White Magazine; Downey, jury-duty summons.<\/p>\n

5. someone calls credit-card company<\/p>\n

My research taught me that there are two kinds of Admin Nights. One is rule-bound and monastic: timers, silence, being alone together. The other is convivial: music, snacks, an excuse to get out of the house. I attended another one in Brooklyn that was the convivial kind. It was arranged by Women in Games N.Y.C., a group of \u201cfemale-identifying and femme\u201d gaming-industry workers, and organized by Yiyi Zhang, a game developer and human-rights lawyer. Ten or so attendees in their twenties and thirties settled across sofas, while a lo-fi YouTube music video was projected on a large screen, which mostly seemed to display a kitten wearing headphones. A few worked solo; most mingled as they plugged away\u2014the Montessori approach to busywork. Why had they come? Hamna Faisal, the director of business management at Women in Games, told me, \u201cI crave human connection, especially post-COVID<\/em>, but I also need to get things done.\u201d Alexandra Palocz, an adjunct professor of media technology at City Tech, said, \u201cI think people feel a greater sense of existential dread now. It feels futile to order a phone case or make a big grocery list when Iran is being bombed and there\u2019s an ICE<\/em> presence in American cities. In a group like this, even if you don\u2019t know anyone, you feel like you can keep moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Zhang\u2019s seven-year-old daughter, Kainen, was at the meetup. She told me, \u201cI found out that grownups have homework, too, which is kind of funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more \u201cWidow\u2019s Bay\u201d Sets a High Bar for Horror Comedy<\/a><\/p>\n

Progress Report:
Write to-do piece!<\/del>
Previous items: pending\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Yiyi Zhang\u2019s daughter.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do \u201cAdmin Nights\u201d make people more productive or less lonely? 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