Signs Your Boss Could Use a Personal Assistant at Home

by Kara | Apr 9, 2019 | News

In honor of Administrative Professionals’ Day, we want to acknowledge all the hard work that administrative professionals, executive assistants, and secretaries do. Your efforts can make the difference between poor- and high-quality work, and between a day where everything goes terribly wrong and one where everything falls into place.

However, administrative professionals’ responsibilities should end with the workday, and sometimes the best thing you can do is recognize when calling in additional help is necessary. Here are three signs that your boss could use a personal assistant at home.

They’re Neglecting Obligations at Home

Sometimes, professional success comes at the cost of one’s home life.

If you notice that your boss seems to be neglecting things at home — whether that includes chores and household management, appointments, or even relationships — it may be a sign that they need extra help. A personal assistant can remove these obligations by taking care of them on a weekly basis.

They Aren’t Taking Proper Care of Themselves

Lack of self-care is a sure sign that someone is overtaxed. If you begin to notice that your boss isn’t getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, relaxing, or otherwise taking care of themselves, now is the time to speak up.

A personal assistant can help your boss free up time for self-care activities by eliminating time-consuming responsibilities at home. They can even help your boss eat healthier by meal planning, shopping, and prepping.

They’re Stressed About Nonwork-Related Issues

When everything at work is going well and your boss still seems stressed, the stressors responsible likely lie at home. No matter how much you do to make life at the office easier, your boss can still be stressed by outside issues, and they may eventually begin to affect their work performance.

If any of these signs sound familiar, consider suggesting that your boss get a personal assistant. Pepper’s Personal Assistants can help with household management, errands, and chores, lending the same order to their home life that you lend to their work life. In the end, everyone in your office will benefit from a less stressed, more relaxed boss!

Featured image via Pixabay

Why Self-Care Is Crucial, and How to Make the Time for It

by Kara | Feb 21, 2019 | News

We live in a time when working is possible from anywhere and productivity is valued beyond all else. The result: overworking and burnout.

Self-care is the key to managing our personal needs amidst this frenzy of activity.

Why Is Self-Care Important?

Self-care isn’t just an excuse to pamper yourself: It’s crucial to maintain both your physical and mental health.

Physical Health

When people don’t dedicate any time to taking care of themselves, they often overlook exercise and nutrition. While skipping a workout or opting for takeout to save time is sometimes necessary, making this your norm will take its toll on your physical health. If you fail to take care of your body, you won’t ever feel at your best.

However, your self-care routine doesn’t even have to include a proper diet and exercise in order for it to benefit your physical health (although it should). When you relax, your body triggers the relaxation response, which is essentially the opposite of the fight-or-flight response. This state helps you avoid anxiety and burnout, which is important to prevent chronic stress from damaging your health long-term and decreasing your immunity.

Mental Health

Those who don’t dedicate time to their self-care are more likely to experience low self-esteem, resentment, and unhappiness. And the burnout we mentioned above can have quite an impact on mental health as well.

Practicing self-care has been proven to increase productivity and positive thinking and impart feelings of well-being and calm. Plus, taking care of your body helps you to feel confident and good about yourself.

Ways to Practice Self-Care

Self-care looks different for every individual, but the time you set aside for yourself should include at least some of the following ideas:

• Plan healthy meals
• Eat mindfully, without distractions
• Create an exercise routine
• Practice your hobbies
• Spend time by yourself
• Spend time outside
• Meditate
• Pamper yourself
• Take breaks at work
• Take a vacation
• Get enough sleep
  

[Related: 15-Minute Habits That Add Balance to Your Busy Day]

How to Find the Time for Self-Care

When trying to find time to devote to your self-care, focus on two things.

First, prioritize your own well-being. If your priorities always lie elsewhere, you’ll never find the time (or energy) for yourself. Prioritizing yourself may mean accepting the fact that you can’t do everything — at least not on your own.

And second, you have to let others help you. Trying to perfectly juggle your work, home, relationships, and self-care is a recipe for disaster.

Hiring a personal assistant is a great way to free up time for yourself without neglecting any of your other responsibilities. Pepper’s Personal Assistants is here to help with your household management, errands, and chores, so you can spend that time and energy on something more deserving: yourself.

Ready to invest more time in yourself? Get started with a personal assistant today!

Featured image via Pixabay

How a Personal Assistant Can Help With Vacation Planning

by Kara | Jan 8, 2019 | News

A new year means new vacations, and vacations start with making the necessary arrangements. Whether you’re fleeing to a warmer city to break up the remaining winter months, thinking ahead to spring break, or just dreaming up some weekend trips, a personal assistant can help reduce the stress of vacation planning.

Booking Flights and Hotels

Looking for flights and hotels, especially if you’re trying to get a good deal or are tied to specific dates, can be extremely time consuming. Let your personal assistant know when and where you’d like to take your vacation, what accomodations you expect from your flight and hotel, and anything else that’s pertinent. They can present you with several options and make all the arrangements after you’ve chosen which you like best.

Creating an Itinerary

If you’re visiting a new place for the first time, you’ll want to make the most of your stay there and see as much as possible; and even if your trip is a stay-at-the-beach-all-day kind of vacation, having some plans made ahead of time is smart. Your personal assistant can find and book any must-do activities; purchase and print tickets to shows, museums, and the like so you can avoid long lines; and make dinner reservations for you and your fellow travelers.

Creating Packing Lists

Your personal assistant will be aware of where you’re going and what you’re doing, making them the perfect person to create a detailed packing list for your trip. You may prefer to decide which specific items to include to fulfill the list, but they’ll know best if any scheduled activities require specific footwear, for example, or if the weather will be fluctuating during your stay. When you’re frantically packing at the last minute, you’ll appreciate not having to worry about forgetting anything important.

Vacations don’t have to require stressful preparations. Start your vacation a little early by letting Pepper’s Personal Assistants handle the arrangements, so you can focus on what vacations are really all about — having a good time. Pepper’s Personal Assistants can also help hold down the fort while you’re gone, so you can return to an organized and welcoming home.

Featured image via Pixabay

Winter Home Maintenance Checklist

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

How to Be the Best Personal Assistant

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!

The Downsides of Multitasking

by Kara | Jun 20, 2018 | News

We all love the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a task, but juggling too many items at a time can have some unwanted consequences. Read on to learn about the downsides of multitasking and how you can rid yourself of the bad habit.

Why You Shouldn’t Multitask

Your Brain Wasn’t Made for Multitasking

According to Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and multitasking expert, our brains are “not wired to multitask well.” Rather than focus on multiple things at a time, our minds are quickly switching from one task to another. And the more you try to multitask, the more you lose focus on each task you’re juggling.

Multitasking Lowers Your IQ

Believe it or not, multitasking actually decreases your intelligence: A study found that distractions caused by phone calls or emails lowered participants’ IQs by as much as 10 points. The cognitive impact of such a decrease is the same as losing an entire night of sleep.

Considering this, it’s no surprise that multitasking reduces efficiency, quality of work, and overall productivity.

Multitasking May Cause Long-Term Damage

The damage might not end when the multitasking does.

A study from the University of Sussex performed MRI scans on people who used multiple devices — such as a cell phone and TV — at once. The study found that those who multitasked more frequently tended to have less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex (the area of the brain tasked with emotional control and empathy).

Researchers still haven’t determined if multitasking is responsible for this, or if brain damage causes people to multitask. Either way, avoiding multitasking is for the best.

How to Stop Multitasking

Multitasking is so instilled in our daily lives that it may take some conscious effort to stop. Start by trying these methods.

Get Rid of Distractions

As obvious as it may sound, if you don’t expose yourself to distractions, you don’t run the risk of trying to multitask. Turn off your phone, close out of your email, and surround yourself only with whatever is necessary for the task at hand.

Give Yourself Less Time

The more time you have to dedicate to a task, the more likely you are to get distracted and start multitasking. The opposite is also true: When you’re on a tight deadline, you tend to block everything else out to focus on getting your work done as quickly as possible. To make this your norm, limit the time you allot for each task so that multitasking isn’t a possibility.

Reduce Your Tasks

When you have an inordinate amount of things to do, multitasking is always going to be a temptation. The simplest way of solving this problem is to reduce the amount on your plate. Whether you’re a young professional, CEO, or stay-at-home parent, letting a personal assistant handle some of your tasks can help you avoid multitasking — and its negative effects.