The Mythical “Quiet Admin Day”

We have all said it........
“I’m blocking Friday out for admin.”
And every care manager has believed it.
Friday arrives. Laptop charged. Notebook open. Coffee made. Outlook calendar suspiciously empty. This is it.

The day you finally clear the inbox, finish the audits, update the action plan and locate the spreadsheet you definitely saved somewhere sensible.

At 9:03am, someone rings. “Sorry to bother you…” You already know you’re being bothered.
At 9:11am, somebody needs a password reset. At 9:18am, the printer decides it has never met you before. At 9:26am, you receive an email entitled: URGENT. You open it immediately. It’s about ordering more pens.

At 9:43am, you join a Teams meeting where the first five minutes are spent saying: “Can you hear me?” “Yes.” “You’re on mute.” “Oh.”

By 10:15am, you have somehow opened 14 browser tabs, three spreadsheets and a document called: FINAL Governance Tracker NEW v4 FINAL.xlsx. Nobody knows what happened to versions 1–3.

You make another coffee. You forget about the coffee. At some point, somebody asks where a form is. You confidently say: “It’s in SharePoint.” They ask where in SharePoint. You suddenly become much less confident.

Lunchtime arrives and you decide you’ll eat while working. Your lunch is therefore consumed in approximately four bites while reading an incident form. Very glamorous.

At 3:47pm, you look back at the beautiful list you wrote that morning. You have completed precisely one item. But you have also: sorted three staffing problems, helped somebody who was having a wobble, answered approximately 736 questions, fixed something nobody knew was broken, found the missing form, and prevented at least two minor catastrophes. So technically… very productive day. Just not the one you planned.

And that, I think, is one of the things we all have in common within care leadership. Some days, success is a beautifully completed governance dashboard. Other days, success is getting to 5pm with the service still standing and remembering where you left your coffee.

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Both count.