Dealing with Administrative Stress

Great list! Here is another one from my experience:

If your procedure with a government agency or another bureaucratic organization is being delayed (e.g., you sent some forms, they are supposed to send some important document back or contact you, and they haven't in the expected timeframe), call, don't email.

There is a good chance that your email will get no reply. If it is replied, there is an excellent chance that the reply will be a useless "we are working on it, just wait". The chances that it will actually help are tiny, especially if the organization you are dealing with is Vast and Impersonal.

You may have an ugh field about calling, because you will go through a Kafkaesque automated menu, or placed on hold and made to wait ages. But if you can get to a human, there is an excellent chance that they will be helpful and tell you exactly what is going on, or put you in contact with someone who does.

A significant number of nerve-wracking administrative processes are actually not if you find a human being inside the system to help you. Once you get your hands on such an advocate, you find that hard deadlines are no longer hard, required supervisory signatures are not really required, and in some cases that the form you're worried about can be skipped, or doesn't apply to you.

The public-facing rules set forth by bureaucracies are often designed to be massively conservative. (They really need fourteen weeks to process this form before I can submit the second form?) Find a person inside the system. My preferred method is to go to their office in person, at which point you become a person in their mind and no longer a number.

As an attorney, I deal with "administrative stress" quite a bit.

FWIW here are my suggestions:

First: If possible, have a work space which is organized to let you deal with administrative tasks comfortably and conveniently. For example, if you have a nice desk with a comfortable chair, a computer with an internet connection, a speakerphone, a fax machine, a scanner, etc. all within easy reach, it will subtract a bit from the mental exertion required to get each task done. Over time, this can make you a lot more efficient.

Note that it's common for bureaucracies to erect mental exertion barriers, for example by requiring things to be in writing or by making you wait on hold for a while. If you are set up to send out letters with minimal effort or to wait on hold with a speakerphone while you surf the internet, then you will be able to overcome these barriers more easily.

Second: Invest in a good scanner and scan every piece of paper you send or receive. Organize them on your computer. It requires a fair amount of mental exertion to get going with this, but in the long run its a good investment of mental energy since you will end up spending far less time rummaging through files to find stuff.

Third: Take notes of each conversation. The easiest way to do this is to just send yourself an e-mail which you type up during or after the conversation. The e-mail system itself will save the date and time and you will easily be able to retrieve it later. You just make a note of the name of the person you spoke to and what they said. When you are dealing with bureaucracies, it's often very effective to be able to say something like "When I spoke to John Jones on March 15 at 9:45 am, he told me X . . . . why are you telling me something different now?"

Venkatesh Rao has tips on this exact topic:

http://www.tempobook.com/2013/04/29/sensitive-dependence-on-paperwork-conditions/

1. If you can afford to pay someone else to do the work for you and someone else can indeed do it, then do so.

Alternatively, if you find that you are better than average at points 2-10, consider advertising your paid services to do this for others.

Much of the fear comes from imagining situations where you missed one little detail and therefore lost a huge opportunity or lost a lot of money or got into trouble and so on. This is textbook catastrophizing.

I had no idea there was a word for this. I just take it for granted that such grossly out of proportion consequences for error are a fact of life.

Maybe I shouldn't.

Flag it as, "I'm talking to NPCs again" and head for your broomstick. :-)

I work in a call centre, which is a slightly different form of bureaucracy but no less aggravating for a lot of people. All of the above apply, but a few additional tips:

• If you think the person you're dealing with is an idiot, they probably are. We're paid minimum wage and have high turnover, so there's invariably a high percentage of low-skilled newbies. If you're calling about something complex, and you don't think the person is up to doing the job properly, do not be afraid to call back a couple hours afterwards and confirm that they did it properly. It's a lot less of a hassle than waiting a month to see that they screwed up your bill again, and we genuinely don't mind a friendly call to double-check.

• If you can't navigate the phone tree, pick any option that gets you to a human. We can transfer you. (This may take some hold time). Speaking of hold time, speakerphone and doing something else is by far the best solution to a long hold. Just make sure you're close enough to pick up within 15 seconds or so when you do get through, or you'll have to hold again.

• Phone lines aren't always clear. If there's any information you need transmitted at a character-perfect level - postal code is a common one for us - use a phonetic alphabet. Do not, under any circumstances, use "Larry", "Mary", and "Harry" as letters in the same sentence(I once had two people do this in the same day). If I am repeating something back to you and spelling it out, that means I need it to be correct - don't just blindly agree, actually listen to what I'm saying. Our computers tend to care very much whether it's an M or an N, and our phones tend to be very unhelpful at distinguishing them.

• Calling up and asking for a discount will usually get you nowhere. Calling up and threatening to cancel will usually get you a discount.

I recently had to deal with a number of grant applications, which were definitely stressful. I was sure that I would mess up in some way, and actually I did: I included a recommendation letter for one grant in the application for another. Oops!

Most of your tips are things I realised myself during the application process, but I probably would have been better off had I read these tips beforehand, so thank you for sharing them.

My personal strategy is to double-check everything (though I've seemed to have failed at doing that in this case).