by Kara | Dec 7, 2018 | Residential
No matter what your resolutions are this year, getting organized will give you the peace of mind — and energy! — you need to focus on them. Follow our five tips to make the most of your New Year.
Prepare for a Fresh Start
Don’t let clutter weigh you down this New Year. Prepare for a fresh start by going through everything before January 1st — and we mean everything. Clean out your fridge and freezer, sort through old mail and paperwork, downsize your closet, and then tackle anything that’s leftover. Once you’ve gotten rid of everything that you don’t need or use, give your house a thorough cleaning.
Get Your Finances in Order
Whether your goal is to save money or just to stick to a budget, getting your finances in order prior to 2019 will help you stay on track. Make a detailed list of your fixed monthly expenses, including items such as rent or mortgage payments, utilities, insurance, phone bills, groceries, gas, and so on. Loan payments and transfers to a savings account count, too. After you’ve added all the costs up, you’ll know how much you have leftover for unnecessary expenses, such as eating out or going to the movies. If you use a spreadsheet or app to track everything you spend throughout the month, sticking to your budget and staying on top of your finances will be easy.
Start Scheduling
Now is the time to start scheduling for the New Year, and that includes both the fun and the not so fun activities. Is it time for a dentist appointment, doctor’s appointment, haircut, or oil change? Make appointments for everyone in your family. You can also start planning any vacations for the upcoming year (especially since you’ll have your new budget sorted out). Be sure to note everything in the same calendar, so you have one master source for your entire schedule.
Do Some Meal Prep
We don’t mean for the entire year, but the more you can prepare now, the more you’ll appreciate it later! Make things easy for yourself by creating freezer meals that you can toss in the crockpot or oven for busy weekday evenings. Rather than spending your entire night cooking or relying on takeout, you can enjoy healthy meals that require no additional work.
Hire a Personal Assistant
Hiring a personal assistant is the one thing you can do that will make absolutely everything easier as you enter the New Year. Pepper’s Personal Assistants can help with light housework, making appointments, meal prep and grocery shopping, and more. Contact us today to learn how we can help you get organized for 2019!
For more tips, read about how to reduce your stress in the New Year.
Featured image via Pixabay
by Kara | Nov 20, 2018 | News
A new season means a whole new set of home maintenance tasks. Use this list to ensure that you keep everything in your home working properly this winter.
Clean Your Gutters
If debris are blocking up your gutters, water can accumulate against the roof and damage it, the siding, and any wood trim, potentially causing leaks or ice dams. You’ll also want to repair any damaged gutters or fascia boards.
Service Your Furnace
Have a technician clean and service your furnace or heat pump ahead of time. Otherwise, you could end up freezing and waiting around once the cold spell hits and technicians get busy.
Inspect Your Chimney
Get your chimney inspected and cleaned early on this winter season to make sure it’s in good shape. Heavy creosote buildup or blockage from other debris could cause carbon monoxide to back up into your home, or even start a chimney fire.
Check Your Sump Pump
If your home has a sump pump, you should be testing it every few months; this is especially important after a dry season and before a wet one. To see whether the pump is working, gradually pour a few gallons of water into the pit. More thorough instructions should be included in your owner’s manual.
Turn Off Outdoor Faucets
To prevent undrained water from freezing and bursting your pipes, disconnect your hoses and drain any water remaining in the faucets. Turn off the shut-off valve in your home if your faucets are not frostproof.
Drain Your Irrigation System
You won’t be using them for a while, so have a professional drain all the pipes associated with your sprinkler system to prevent them from freezing or leaking.
Caulk Around Doors and Windows
If any of your doors or windows have gaps greater than the width of a nickel between their frames and the siding, apply exterior caulk to prevent leaks on stormy days. Apply weatherstripping around doors, making sure that it blocks out all signs of daylight from within your home.
Clean and Inspect Your Roof
Clear off leaves and pine needles, which hold moisture that can damage your roof. Inspect the roof for shingles that are loose, damaged, or missing, as they could allow melting snow to leak into your home.
Winterize Your Pool and Hot Tub
Just covering your pool for the winter isn’t enough — you’ll need to check your pool chemistry every two months, throw out old pool chemicals, and add a special enzyme product to the water. Hot tubs require some work too, whether you plan on using them throughout the winter or not.
Deep Clean Your House
You’ll be spending a lot more time indoors this season, so to create a nice and comfortable environment, a deep cleaning is in order. In addition to your typical cleaning routine, wipe out cupboards and drawers, purge old food from the fridge and freezer, and go through old bills and paperwork. Decluttering and freshening up your space will make cozying up inside that much more enjoyable!
How Pepper’s Personal Assistants Can Help
Don’t know how or where to start? Let Pepper’s Personal Assistants lend a hand. We can take care of some tasks ourselves, and contract outside professionals to do the rest, freeing you up to relax and enjoy the holiday season.
Image via Pixabay
by Kara | Oct 3, 2018 | News
Being a great personal assistant requires more than just completing to-do lists. The very best personal assistants work actively to better themselves and their services, and are aware that there’s always room for improvement. Whether you work in households or offices, the following tips should help you make that happen.
Be Observant
Good personal assistants follow direction well, but great personal assistants pick up on little things and go the extra mile without even having to be asked. Being observant will allow you greater insight into your boss’s preferences, likes, and dislikes, and help you improve your services accordingly. You may even learn from your boss and how they manage their home or business!
Take Notes
Even the best personal assistants struggle to remember everything, which is why taking notes is essential. Never find yourself without a writing utensil. When your boss spontaneously starts explaining something to you, you’ll want to have details to reference later. We’d even recommend jotting down things that may not seem important, as you never know which details will be of use.
Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes
Most bosses will forgive a mistake, but only if you come forward with it and admit that it was your fault. Making excuses or pretending that you don’t know what happened won’t impress anyone. Instead, own your error and clearly explain how you’ll avoid repeating it in the future. If you keep doing the same thing wrong your boss will think that you don’t learn from your mistakes.
Keep Your Boss Informed
Don’t keep your boss guessing about what’s going on in their home or workplace. This is especially true with things that have gone awry, but is also the case with pleasant surprises. Hearing about something from a coworker or neighbor will make your boss feel ill informed and out of the loop. They may even become suspicious about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Don’t Share Your Boss’s Information
This one should go without saying. As a personal assistant, you’ll be exposed to some of your boss’s personal and confidential information — don’t share it. This would be incredibly unprofessional and would jeopardize both your current position and your future employment opportunities.
Become Indispensable
If you do everything else right, our last recommendation should come naturally. The very best personal assistant is one that becomes absolutely necessary to their boss’s everyday life. This means that you’re anticipating their needs, using your observations to manage everything according to their preferences, and generally making their life easier. It may sound like a lot, but for the best personal assistants, it’s just part of the job.
Pepper’s Personal Assistants specializes in residential personal assistant services. If you think you have the skills to make a great personal assistant, apply to join our team!
by Kara | Sep 5, 2018 | Grocery, Laundry, Organizational, Residential
You’ve probably admired successful people who seem to do it all, and wondered just how they do it. A likely answer is that they don’t.
Outsourcing Spurs Success
Working professionals are increasingly turning to outsourcing as a means to lessen their loads, avoid fatigue, and perform higher-quality work. And they don’t just do this for business tasks, but for housework as well.
In fact, a study performed by the American Association of University Professors, which analyzed scientists’ “strategies to lighten the household load in order to maintain highly productive careers,” found a correlation between outsourcing core housework and being a highly productive science faculty member (based on the amount of articles published throughout a scientist’s career).
You can boil this down to economics — and we’re not talking about monetary costs here, but about opportunity costs. Every hour spent on a monotonous chore is an hour that could have gone toward a more productive activity. Professionals who understand the value of their time know that it’s better spent on what they’re really great at than scrubbing dishes.
What to Outsource
If you’re now wondering whether you’ve spent too much time doing tedious tasks yourself, you’re probably also wondering what to start outsourcing. The following tasks are a good place to begin, as they’re time-consuming and unrewarding for many people.
Grocery Shopping
Have someone else shop for you, have your groceries delivered, or even have someone else set up your home delivery. Either way, you’ll save yourself tons of time: The average person spends around 60 hours grocery shopping every year, and that’s not even counting travel time.
Cooking
People who are crunched for time often end up eating frozen meals or takeout more often than not. Outsourcing cooking can not only save you time, but also enable you to eat much healthier than before.
Those who really enjoy cooking also have the option of outsourcing meal prep, leaving everything ready for them to get started when they get home from work.
Laundry
For women, laundry consumes even more time than grocery shopping, at over 103 hours a year (men spend around 30 hours annually). Although you can always do the folding while half-watching TV, why not put all of your attention toward something more worthwhile?
Pet Care
Pet care can encompass at-home grooming, grooming and veterinary appointments, walks, cage or tank cleaning, and other chores and errands. These tasks often make having a pet feel like more of a burden than anything else, and leave you too worn out to spend any quality time with the animal.
Pave Your Own Way to Success
At some point, just finding the right people to take over these tasks for you becomes a task in itself. The easy solution to this problem is to hire a personal assistant. We’ll handle any household management, errands, and chores ourselves, and find, contract, and schedule the rest of the services for you — so you can put that time toward whatever you see fit.
by Kara | Aug 3, 2018 | Organizational, Residential
We’ve talked about meal prepping, scheduling, and balancing your career and home life before, but let’s face it — you can never be too prepared for back-to-school season. Be sure to set aside some time to help you get organized before the rush of household, homework, and school activities replace the mellow pace of summer.
Get to the Stores Before Everyone Else
We’ve all been there: The first day of school is right around the corner, and we’ve left back-to-school shopping for the last minute. The stores are full of like-minded parents, and school supply options are dwindling. You wish you had taken care of this sooner.
According to a RetailMeNot survey, back-to-school shopping causes anxiety for nine out of 10 parents, and for 63 percent of those parents, in-store dilemmas — such as crowds and not finding the right supplies — are a source of that anxiety. For a stress-free shopping experience, consider hitting the stores — and finding your kids’ favorite supplies — at least four weeks before school starts. You’ll be happy you did!
Out With the Old, In With the New
Don’t let clutter hold you or your kids back this school year. Kids quickly outgrow clothing, shoes, toys, and just about everything else before you may even notice. If they can’t or don’t use it, donate or recycle these used items and make space for new memories.
Check out these other tips designed to bring some peace into your life during this active season.
Clean Out the Cupboards
Spring cleaning has become a ritual for many households, but back-to-school season warrants a deep cleaning just as much. Once you’re finished decluttering, keep your motor running and give the whole house a thorough scrubbing. You’ll be glad you did come September.
Compile Your Documentation
Schools often require certain documentation at the beginning of the year, especially if you’re enrolling your child at the school for the first time. To avoid scrambling for these documents later on, get everything in order ahead of time. This may require making appointments for immunizations or physical exams, if your child plays sports.
Create a Filing System
Once school starts, you can expect to see a steady flow of paper making its way home in your children’s backpacks: homework, art projects, parent handouts, progress reports, and more. Rather than let these cherished mementos pile up or get scattered throughout your home, create a filing system for everything you want or need to keep. This will help you keep things organized and hold onto only what’s really necessary.
Call in a Personal Assistant
Does accomplishing all of this before school starts seem like an impossible task? You don’t have to do it alone. Hire a personal assistant to take on some of your errands, chores, and other household management tasks and help give you a stress-free back-to-school transition. Plus, this will free you up to spend more time with your kids before they start class!
